On the Road: Coming Home to Teaching & Website Launch

Last night, pre-summer heat, there were bare arms, sundresses and Bermuda shorts. People lounged at sidewalk cafes, before them were glasses of wine and plates of food.

And still others were packed, shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, knee to knee at The Press Club for the monthly reading at The Mountain Writer's Series. Smiling, shining faces. Lover's of poetry and prose.

I stood at the podium, after the lovely Cindy Stewart-Rinier and read from Found. Again. Since the release on March 1 of this year, I have been reading and reading and reading a little more, from that story of stories, that summation of my long Hero's Quest to the home I lost at my birth.

Oh Lord my journey home to my mother and her original love has been a bumpy one indeed. And this is how it is. Some days, I am too often like Dresden after being bombed at the end of the war. My first experience is of brutal separation and emotional stifling. My mind has been nursed on fear. The Buddha called it Maya. Where there is mind, there is Maya. Suffering and more so when the body and brain are ravaged from the moment of birth.

And I am like a brilliant lotus flower emerged from that mud. I am bright, impossible colors and beauty--not because another tells me so but because it is true. We are all this and more--not the mud, not the bloom, not not the mud, not not the bloom. We are gorgeous and perfect and Buddha and, as sweet as all that sounds, our brief life is also a party on death row. I read that phrase in a book on Buddhist teachings last week and it's true. Death is coming and with that in mind--what matters? What really matters?

Well, of course, healing the soul is what matters...healing the self and becoming whole! That is what matters above all else.

And so, as I come home for the summer and look at my schedule for what is ahead, I am thrilled to announce our new Teaching Site has launched. A Free Teleseminar on Memoir writer's is coming May 26th and you are invited to listen in. Come sign up and make your reservation. Learn how to tell yourself the story of your own great suffering and transcendence, learn to set your priorities and love yourself as you find your way back to that original wholeness and love that is there--just past all the mess of Maya.