Books

Spiritually Awakened

Something changed, and you can't explain it to anyone.

Music you loved sounds wrong. Your friends have gone flat. You're crying at things that never used to touch you, sleeping strangely, losing hours, walking into doorframes. Something in you knows this isn't a breakdown — but you have no idea what it is, and no one to ask.

I've been there. I started in 1989, at sixteen, with a set of postcards, and I spent twenty-five years thinking he was the only one.

Spiritually Awakened is a short, plain-spoken field guide to the early months. It names the symptoms one at a time — hypersensitivity, sleep changes, the collapse of old friendships, the sudden unbearable awareness of suffering — explains what's happening, and shows what it looked like when it happened to me, including the parts I'm not proud of.

It closes with the meditation that broke through my own wall, written out in full, with my journal from the weeks it took to work.

No doctrine. No fee. No one telling you you've lost your mind.

This second edition includes a new chapter on when to seek medical help, expanded notes from eight years further along, and resources for readers in crisis.

Memoirs of a Unicorn

Before I was human, I was a Unicorn.

Five books, written across twenty-five years, spanning about a thousand of them. It starts as a survival story — a scattered people, a lost home, a valley that may or may not exist — and ends somewhere I did not plan when I began, on a version of Earth six centuries from now, with the story being told back to the people who found it.

I started book one at sixteen, after a vision I had no framework for. I finished book five in 2017. Book six, Petals in the Light, is in progress and closes the series.

1. Sanctuary — A soul divided. A race forgotten. A journey home. Also available as an audiobook. 

2. Return — He comes back to a people who have learned to live without him, and to a mate he could not save. 

3. Destinies — Nine centuries later, on an Earth that has forgotten there was ever anything else. 

4. Love — The 25th century. Humans find the unicorns because they find a book. 

5. Eternity — Told at last by the one who was lost first.

The Ballet Is in Our Hands

Joseph is sixty-three years old, a Black man from New York who marched at Selma in 1965 and came home with the certainty that there is a way to fight that doesn't require becoming what you're fighting. Then a music-box ballerina steps down off her pedestal and asks him to come with her.

She takes him to a world ruled by a tyrant, where nonviolence is not a philosophy anyone has heard of and where an old man's convictions are about to be tested by people who have never had the luxury of restraint.

The first draft took ten days and felt, the entire time, like taking dictation. It's the book I'm proudest of and the one almost nobody has read.