Book 1: Among us, "Dear reader"
Dear Reader:
Kai is you. We might as well get that tidbit out of the way now. Kai is you. Knowing this doesn’t take anything from the story. It actually adds to it. It’s all about self- discovery. From the very first page, see this story as your own biography, but through fresh eyes. Don’t get caught up in gender or different languages. Just feel your way through it as Kai does. The life metaphors are all there.
I will say, this book has been a journey of self- discovery for me as well. It all started with a few paragraphs scribbled in one of my red journals yeeeeears ago. Then one random day in 2008, I read those paragraphs to a dear friend who told me, with every amount of emphasis, this book MUST be written. I laughed at him. At first. But then I kind of played with the idea of writing it, until finally, I sat down to write it.
Over the course of many months, I wrote chapters. After I finished one or two I would call him and read them to him. Before I knew it, it was finished. My very first book. But at the time, I was really new in my own personal journey of self-discovery and most of the metaphors and themes in this book didn’t make much sense to me. It’s fair to say, at the time, they scared the living crap out of me. I didn’t feel like these ideas were mine, so I didn’t have a lot of confidence that this book was any more than something to do because a dear friend suggested it.
I will say, I circulated the first draft around to a few friends and publishers, but after about a dozen rejections and “WTF”s, I had the good sense to tuck it away on my hard drive, until I was good and ready to revisit it again with a clearer understanding and passion for it. That didn’t happen until 2010.
Another dear friend and I were talking and I told him I wrote a book. He asked me to read it to him and I did, editing the chapters as we went. Some things were added, some others were removed. By the time we got through it, I was like okay. This is pretty good. I can put this thing out. But no. I couldn’t. The story was rounded out, but it still wasn’t mine. I was still afraid of it. It still felt disingenuous in a lot of ways. So I tucked it away on my hard drive again until I was ready to fight the good fight. Until I was ready to own my own work and put my own name on it.
The thing is, this is book one of three. I promised myself that I wouldn’t start writing ‘Book 2’, until I published ‘Book 1’. I had to make this promise to myself because I know me. I often have 9 projects going at once, and if I don’t set specific “finisher” boundaries, I’d be overwhelmed with piles of all sorts of things sitting somewhere half done.
So then, ‘Book 2’ started marinating in my spirit. All these pictures were popping up in my head, but I refused to work through them, because the original story hadn’t been “made square” to my satisfaction. So. Several months ago, without much warning, but armed with five years of personal adventure and life exploration from my ‘Eat, Pray, L.O.V.E, LIVE!’ journey, I sat down with ‘Book 1’ for a solid squaring session. My goal was just to read through it and make the story “feel” finished, so I could transcend out of my self-imposed writing purgatory and get to working on some other writing projects I have in my mental pipeline. It all began with an affirmative prayer. “My business is God’s business. All of my affairs are adjusted in the right way, immediately.” It continued with a question.”What will you have me do?” The rest, as they say (cliché and all), is history.
That’s the back story of ‘Book 1’. This brings us back to the “real” story of The Stellar Trilogy. Kai is you. You know how I know? Because Kai is me and WE are all connected. ALL of our lives and work and life’s work are connected. There is one theme in particular that comes up a lot in ‘Book 1’. “Fear Lights a Man’s Way to Darkness.” It’s something that Kai is reminded of throughout the story, but she doesn’t quite grasp until the end. A lot of times we let our fear of something or someone determine how we live. We let our background or upbringings determine if we’ll be successful or worthy and/or confirm for us that there is no way we can be successful or worthy.
Meanwhile, just as Kai discovers, L.O.V.E. really is the only thing we live for, because it’s what we are. Fear only exists because we’ve forgotten who and what we truly are, back of our very human experiences. L.O.V.E. (Living Our Vision Everyday) is why we’re here and what we came to re-discover about ourselves. The trickiest part of our collective journey of self-discovery is learning that if we don’t do what we came here to do, someone else in the universe will miss something vital they need to do what they came to do. After a while, we discover, this is the whole point of self-discovery. If one of us drops the ball to fear, the ball drops for us ALL.
Osho Lovian Osho,
-e-
May 25, 2013, Aphroditia
