Painted Oxen

Publisher: Homebound Publications

Two men, three realms, one goal: to find the heart of the world. 

Painted Oxen is a novel of transcendence, one that not only invites its readers into its story, but somehow enmeshes them in its alchemy, leaving them changed in unexpected ways at its journeys end. Bridging the worlds of ancient Tibet and modern-day India, Painted Oxen weaves a tale of two men—one young, one old—on parallel journeys. Their separate-but-connected pilgrimages are equal parts internal and external.

The old man, a Tibetan monk, is searching for a sacred hidden valley known to bring enlightenment to those who enter it. The young man is backpacking through India, searching for a guru or the love of his life; he doesn’t care which. A mysterious red-haired woman who resembles an ancient goddess appears in a series of dream chapters that tie the two journeys together.

The underlying theme of the novel is the transformation of the human heart, which is required to arrive at any true change in our lives. With its authentic voices, unforgettable characters, and well-crafted story, Painted Oxen successfully bridges the worlds of literary and spiritual fiction, adding something new and authentic to the literary landscape.

About Thomas Lloyd Qualls of Reno, NV

Thomas Lloyd Qualls is a writer, a condition that is apparently incurable. He lives and writes in the high desert beauty of Northern Nevada, along with the children’s author, Lynell Garfield, and their son August. He is a former copywriter, a licensed attorney who has overturned two death sentences, and a one-time vagabond who regularly wandered the globe with a backpack and three changes of clothes.

Thomas is also the co-creator of several video storytelling projects and the former owner of a music festival, as well as a sometimes painter and a contributor of words to Rebelle Society, Wild Heart Writers, and Reno Tahoe Tonight Magazine.

With all these projects, he seeks to build bridges between people and to foster positive curiosity about each other and this beautiful crazy world.

 You can follow his trail of words and his other misadventures at www.tlqonline.com.

detail

Binding EAN ISBN-10 Pub Date PAGES Language Size Price
Paperback 9781947003361 1947003364 2019-04-02 256 0.00 x 5.50 x 8.50 in $17.95

Publicity

Connect

Multimedia

Contributor Platforms

Recent Press

Promo Quotes

Events

Book Signings and Tour Cities

Cold Spring Hallelujah

Cold Spring Hallelujah

by Barr, Heidi

Cold Spring Hallelujah explores the experience of being human in a world that often seems broken...

read more
Seeds Under the Tongue

Seeds Under the Tongue

by McLaughlin, Timothy P.

In this second collection, McLaughlin wields a boldly ecstatic voice to explore a confluence of themes: wanderings on the wild earth, relations with more-than-human presences, engagement with indigenous ceremony, reckoning with catholicism, the swirl of young family life. These heart scores are delivered in a euphonic, incantatory brand of storytelling that delights and provokes at the depths...

read more
River of Love

River of Love

by Medina Carr, Aimée

RIVER OF LOVE is a supernatural Love story about a fierce Indigenous Mexican American girl growing up in a white Colorado town during a youth-led cultural revolution of the 1970s. It’s a Love letter to the Southern Rocky Mountains, to the Spirits, to a close-knit family, and even to youth itself. The Arkansas River is a vital character, as is the environment, and wisdom of the ancestors...

read more
The Temple of Warm Harmony

The Temple of Warm Harmony

by Owen, Frank LaRue

The Temple of Warm Harmony is a book of poems, but it is also something of a map. Some of the poems are about the author, some are about the reader, while other poems are about the times we’re all living through...

read more
What Comes Next

What Comes Next

by Barr, Heidi

Job loss.  It’s not something that most people want to think about, whether it happens to them or not--but in modern society, it’s all too common for the words “lay off” and “company downsize” to grace a conversation about how life is going...

read more
Great Pan is Dead

Great Pan is Dead

by Lehman, Eric D.

From the small-world accidents of finding lost toys and meeting old friends in strange places, to apparent twists of fate that lead to historical events, people continue to find meaning in coincidence. In Great Pan is Dead, author Eric D. Lehman investigates this phenomenon through the lens of his own mysterious stories and ponders how the puzzles of our lives fit together...

read more
Painted Oxen

Painted Oxen

by Qualls, Thomas Lloyd

Two men, three realms, one goal: to find the heart of the world. Painted Oxen is a novel of transcendence, one that not only invites its readers into its story, but somehow enmeshes them in its alchemy, leaving them changed in unexpected ways at its journeys end...

read more
Naming the Unnameable

Naming the Unnameable

by Fox, Matthew

“Matthew Fox elegantly offers a contemplative practice that transforms the names of God to the experience of God...

read more
Original Syn

Original Syn

by Kander, Beth

Fifty years after the Singularity, the world is divided into two populations locked in a cold war: Synthetic Citizens, or Syns, human-computer hybrids with extraordinary enhancements and potentially infinite lifespans; and Originals, the individuals who did not merge their bodies with the machines...

read more
The School of Soft-Attention

The School of Soft-Attention

by Owen, Frank LaRue

It has been said that poetry can be a marker of where a poet has been, or a way for a poet to point to places where we, the reader, can go. Both types of poems appear in The School of Soft-Attention...

read more
A Fistful of Stars

A Fistful of Stars

by Collins-Ranadive, Gail

We are made up of star stuff! This elegant idea became tangibly real when the liberal clergy author was handed a cottonwood twig with a tiny star hiding inside.  Gathering up fists full of these star sticks, and in collaboration with her ‘rocket scientist’ partner, she set out to reframe the human experience within its cosmic context...

read more
The Seas of Distant Stars

The Seas of Distant Stars

by Varela, Francesca G.

Agapanthus was kidnapped when she was only two years old, but she doesn’t remember it. In fact, she doesn’t remember her home planet at all. All she knows is Deeyae, the land of two suns; the land of great, red waters. Her foster-family cares for her, and at first that’s enough. But, as she grows older, Agapanthus is bothered by the differences between them...

read more
The Comet's Tail

The Comet's Tail

by Nawrocki, Amy

I do not remember the tubes, the tests, or the icy cold of space. I do not remember losing six months of my life.At age nineteen, Amy Nawrocki returned from her first year of college, scribbled a few notes in her journal, and took a terrifying summer trip. She remembers one night of disorientation, then nothing until Christmas, when awareness slowly restarts...

read more
River's Child

River's Child

by Seiler, Mark Daniel

Trapped underground in the Svalbard Seed Vault, Mavin Cedarstrom is rescued by a band of strange women dressed in furs. The Peregrine scout Simone Kita was sent to recover seeds from the top of the world and bring them south to the floating gardens of Kashphera. Conjuring myth and magic, this fun, action-packed novel is a delight. River’s Child is a wild ride into an ancient...

read more
To Lose the Madness

To Lose the Madness

by Browning, L.M.

In this career-defining work, Browning explores the breaking point every mind has after finding her own limit during a gauntlet of traumatic events...

read more
Seasons of Contemplation

Seasons of Contemplation

by Browning, L.M.

In Seasons of Contemplation, Browning offers the reader humble yet impacting meditations on the topics of religion, connection, mindfulness, ecology, the spiritual journey, and the perils of modern culture. The ruminations gathered within these pages provide simple insights that help bring sense to the chaos and hustle of our daily life...

read more
Stories Dreamed from Dust and Distant Light

Stories Dreamed from Dust and Distant Light

by Abel, Walker

In his second collection, Walker Abel continues to voice the archetypal and contemplative presences awaiting us within the natural world. These are poems of surprise, poems of revelation. Not quite fairy tale, not quite magical realism, the poems are stories out of the unconscious, which is to say, out of the wild. For Abel, the poem is a threshold...

read more
Chewing Sand

Chewing Sand

by Collins-Ranadive, Gail

What happens when an Easterner who needs trees, hates heat, and doesn't gamble spends a year living in Las Vegas? Follow the author's reflections as she comes to appreciate the surrounding desert so deeply that she returns seven years later to hear more of the Mojave's message...

read more
The Crucifixion

The Crucifixion

by Richards, Theodore

The Crucifixion is a modern American myth reframing the Old Testament in terms of the flight of African Americans from the Deep South during the Great Migration and the New Testament as the struggle for meaning in the modern, urban America. It is the story of a young man who is lost and alone, and must return to the city of his birth to find his place in the world...

read more
Kodah and Me

Kodah and Me

by Slayton, Elizabeth

Kodah and Me is the winner of the 2017 Nautilis Silver Medal for Children's Picture Book.Elizabeth Slayton has written a touching and uplifting story in Kodah and me. Her illustrations are exquisite and the relationship between the characters are sure to touch your heart. Brilliant work.—Sandra Ingerman, author of Walking in Light: The Everyday Empowerment of Shamanic Life

read more
Wildness

Wildness

by

"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in." ? John Muir Celebrating Homebound Publications' 5th Anniversary, the press gathers a circle of 19 of its most beloved authors to create this anthology celebrating the confluence of the internal and natural landscape.

read more
Sheltered in the Heart

Sheltered in the Heart

by Norris, Gunilla

To have the deep love of a friend is to have the shelter in which to embody more and more of the essence that we each are. In her book Gunilla Norris shows how in holding each other with trust and compassion our shells fall away and we emerge into the world as freer beings. Participating in a true friendship is profound and holy work. This book is a gift for the journey.

read more
The Uncallused Hand

The Uncallused Hand

by Abel, Walker

This is poetry kindled by weeks in wilderness. Its muse is nature, which encompasses both the wild beauty of earth and the mystery of self and its sometimes erotic, sometimes mystical, relationship with the other. The poems are lyrical, tonal, evocative-enamored in a sensual way of being, but also drawn at times toward the counterpart of non-being...

read more
Match

Match

by Norris, Gunilla

"Looking for a spiritual practice simple enough to fit a busy life, yet deep enough to help you grow? 'For ninety consecutive days', writes Gunilla Norris, 'light a match with a purpose, a feeling or a desire in mind', and if you miss a day, start the count again. That daily moment of persistent attentiveness to whatever is calling you from within will kindle new warmth, new light, new life...

read more
Logos

Logos

by Neeleman, John

Logos is a bildungsroman about the anonymous author of the original Gospel, set amid the kaleidoscopic mingling of ancient cultures. In A.D. 66, Jacob is one of Jerusalem's privileged Greco-Roman Jews. When Roman soldiers murder his parents and his beloved sister disappears in a pogrom led by the Roman procurator, he joins Israel's rebellion against Rome...

read more
Oak Wise

Oak Wise

by Browning, L.M.

Oak Wise is a collection of Celtic-themed narrative poetry exploring the old wisdom of the Druidic and shamanic traditions. This collection is approachable to the curious seeker just beginning their exploration of ecological spirituality; while at the same time remains insightful to long-time path-walkers...

read more
Ruminations at Twilight

Ruminations at Twilight

by Browning, L.M.

The cure for our modern maladies is dirt under the fingernails and the feel of thick grass between the toes. The cure for our listlessness is to be out within the invigorating wind. The cure for our uselessness is to take back up our stewardship; for it is not that there has been no work to be done, we simply have not been attending to it...

read more
Fleeting Moments of Fierce Clarity

Fleeting Moments of Fierce Clarity

by Browning, L.M.

Fleeting moments of fierce clarity are had when the confusion clears and the gray numbness that hangs about our senses draws back, allowing us to see the world and ourselves with sharp relief. Follow author and New England native L.M...

read more
Listen

Listen

by Varela, Francesca G.

In Listen Francesca tells us the story of May. May is a piano-genius college freshman who dreams of becoming a brilliant composer. In her school's practice rooms she meets Conner, an undeniably unattractive junior, and she is immediately captivated by his raw musicality on the piano...

read more
The Conversions

The Conversions

by Richards, Theodore

In his novel, The Conversions, Richardsdeals with some of the most pressing questions at this moment in history: What kind of world can be created with the end of industrial civilization? What is truly at the root of the so-called clash of civilizations? What is the place for religion in the post-modern world? Is American identity only about defining and excluding the other? What does a...

read more
Joy is the Thinnest Layer

Joy is the Thinnest Layer

by Norris, Gunilla

When the heart is touched it wants to sing songs of recognized experience. Call it poetry for then image, cadence and word melt together as one. This book of poems is about such experiences. That depth of feeling encompasses both desolation and consolation and so brings the reader close to the pulse of life, to joy, the thinnest layer.

read more
Water, Rocks and Trees

Water, Rocks and Trees

by Smith, James Scott

Intimate and elemental, rooted in earth, sky and a mystic wisdom, the poems in James Scott Smith’s Water, Rocks and Trees are “hymns of / becoming.” Each is the “old soul” of the book’s first poem, the work of a gracious and trusty guide, observant, nimble, never didactic, ever an acolyte of the infinite. –Catherine Abbey Hodges, author of Instead of Sadness

read more

Similar Titles

  • Seeds Under the Tongue
  • River of Love
  • The Temple of Warm Harmony
  • What Comes Next
  • Great Pan is Dead
  • Painted Oxen
  • Naming the Unnameable
  • Original Syn
  • The School of Soft-Attention
  • A Fistful of Stars
  • The Seas of Distant Stars
  • The Comet's Tail
  • River's Child
  • To Lose the Madness
  • Seasons of Contemplation
  • Stories Dreamed from Dust and Distant Light
  • Chewing Sand
  • The Crucifixion
  • Kodah and Me
  • Wildness
  • Sheltered in the Heart
  • The Uncallused Hand
  • Match
  • Logos
  • Oak Wise
  • Ruminations at Twilight
  • Fleeting Moments of Fierce Clarity
  • Listen
  • The Conversions
  • Joy is the Thinnest Layer
  • Water, Rocks and Trees
  • Cold Spring Hallelujah