The Wisdom Tree and the Red Swing

Where has compassion gone? In an increasingly polarized world, we no longer teach our children how to look beyond the immediate and see the story behind the problems and people they encounter. Using a wise old talking tree and its magical red swing, the author teaches kids and adults how to bring compassion back into their daily life. Understanding others is not excusing them from their responsibility, but it is the key to making real changes for the better. Here MacAllister offers a unique perspective on such issues as: bullying, loss of a parent through death or divorce, race, obesity, cheating and more. This book teaches the value of taking time to think, compassion, good manners and civility toward others; offers coping skills for feeling different, isolated and ostracized; and it teaches about being open minded and how adversaries can become allies. Carol L. MacAllister, M.S.W., was born and raised in the Finger Lake Region of upstate New York. She spent her career as a psychiatric social worker in New York and New Mexico specializing in traumatic events of childhood. Now retired and living in western North Carolina, Ms. MacAllister offers a unique lens through which to view the challenges of growing up.

The Wisdom Tree and The Red Swing offers preteens and those who love them a unique way to work their way through the challenges they often encounter. Encouraging young people to think their way through their problems, the Wisdom Tree offers unique insights and guides them to some not-so-obvious revelations on issues like racial diversity, bullying, divorce, death of a parent, moral decision making, being the new kid in school, overweight, body image and more. Carol MacAllister engages a cast of compelling characters to weave a delightful tale and to spur ‘tweens to find unexpected answers to their problems. The Wisdom Tree and the Red Swing may be geared toward kids between the ages of 9 and 12, but its lessons are universal. The charm of these stories belies the power of the concepts being taught. This book is quantum physics in action: Change how you think and you change your reality. The idea that our thoughts, feelings and attitudes have the power to change our lives has been around for decades, if not centuries. Norman Vincent Peale made The Power of Positive Thinking popular in the 1950s and an entire industry of workshops and lecturers sprung up as a result. In the 1960s psychology, psychotherapy and working on one’s self-development became acceptable and even popular. Though the science of quantum physics was discovered a century ago, it is only in recent years that the general public has become aware of its theories and experimental findings. The movie, What the Bleep Do We Know!? did much to open people’s minds to the power of our thoughts and feelings. More recently, The Secret, (book and DVD) brought into mainstream consciousness the concept that energy follows thoughts, so what you focus on is what you get. But exactly how we learn to think positively, much less teach our children to do so? In the intensity of anger, hurt or fear, it is nearly impossible to rationally make ourselves think positively. But there are ideas and questions we can ask that will, step by step—like turning a sock inside out—turn those negative feelings and thoughts into positive ones and offer actual solutions that will change our realities. Being told to think positively or differently does no good whatsoever, but being shown how to do it through solution-based story telling is helpful. That’s exactly that you’ll find in The Wisdom Tree and the Red Swing. Carol MacAllister brings to her writing classical training in psychiatric social work and the wisdom she has gained through a life-long effort to understand and grow her own mind, heart and soul. She is a storyteller on canvas, a folk artist and a writer with two prior books: Thinking Out Loud and Windows to My Soul.

Carol MacAllister was born and raised in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. She attended the University of Colorado, the University of Vienna, Austria, and earned her ­Masters in Social Work degree at the University of Utah. She was the Chief Psychiatric Social Worker at the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Clinic in what was formerly known as the Upstate Medical Center (now University Hospital, SUNY Upstate Medical University), in Syracuse, New York. After moving to New Mexico in the late 70s, she worked for the State Mental Health Bureau in the state capital, Santa Fe, and was the first state Director of the Sexual Crimes Prosecution and Treatment program. She moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico to teach Social Work at New Mexico State University (NMSU) later serving in student services in the College of Health and Social Services (social work, nursing and public health). She retired from NMSU in 2005 and moved to Brevard, North Carolina in the spring of 2006 where she presently resides. She is an avid student of Quantum Physics and what it is telling us about new ways of living more intentional, thought-filled lives.