A man who has lost his family and his reason for living visits a shaman as his last hope to discover the purpose of life. Instead of offering him answers or platitudes, the shaman begins to tell him strange stories, of ghosts who play drinking games, the suffering of grass, and the ways that many beings discover a reason to move forward despite breathtaking loss. It's Good To Be On Earth is a tender story that sits down in the middle of suffering and offers no more than understanding and compassion, and no less than a dry humor, ambitious hope and a glimpse at many lives that were more than what they seemed. Told in a layered shamanic storytelling style, It's Good To Be On Earth is a unique story of one man's search for a shred of hope. Shane wakes up in a Spanish villa, and the gardener tells her she is in a room of heaven. She is more inclined to believe she has been the victim of a stalking and kidnapping. She can only remember snippets of her life, and the gardener is taking his time in telling her why. But when she dreams her way through an ocean and wakes up drowning in the fountain, and the flowers dust off a place for her to sit down--when the gardener reveals an inexplicable collection of her fondest childhood possessions, which her mother threw away--Shane knows she needs to find answers. The answers she looks for, in the rooms of the great house and down the paths of the garden, are the ones every wandering, wounded heart is not sure it can find, in Visions In Love & Rest. Suffering & Rest is a collection of two novelettes that explore the depths and heights of loss and healing, in the tender, imaginative style Dreaming Novelist Laura K. Cowan has become known for. You will find no cheap answers here. Only stories of people so wounded by their lives that the only answer can be death or something so soaringly optimistic that it heals the heart.