<p class="ql-align-center"><strong style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)"><em>The coin lost in the river is found in the river</em>.</strong></p><p class="ql-align-center"><strong style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">-Zen kōan</strong></p><p><strong style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">&nbsp;</strong></p><p><strong style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">In <em>The Lost Coin</em>, Stephen Rowley shares his lifelong journey-searching for his birth parents, seeking his true identity, and discovering his soul's calling. We join him when, as a boy growing up in Iowa, he visits Chicago for the first time and is shocked by blatant racial segregation and sprawling urban poverty. We see Stephen as a young athlete sustaining a life-changing injury, then becoming radicalized at the University of Wisconsin, entering the field of education at Stanford, and becoming a visionary school administrator before being fired by a vindictive Silicon Valley school board. </strong></p><p><span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">&nbsp;</span></p><p><span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">He plays golf with a Tibetan lama, and experiences transcendence in a vivid dream, ultimately becoming a psychotherapist in his sixties. We witness the heart-rending scene when he and his wife adopt their own son, and we join him for a poignant reunion with his birth mother, who, it turns out, had desperately hoped he might appear in her life after she'd given him up for adoption. </span></p><p><span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">&nbsp;</span></p><p><span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">As we accompany Stephen Rowley on this adventurous and reflective journey, we come to understand more deeply the trauma engendered when separating mother from child, and the unspoken restlessness and yearning for connection many adoptees feel. </span></p><p><span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">&nbsp;</span></p><p><span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">"It is my hope," he writes, that we all "may discover the unique capacity within us to heal and even thrive, not in spite of the wounds we carry, but </span><em style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">because</em><span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)"> of them."</span></p>