Believe It
Part of Between takes place at Omega Institute during a songwriting workshop called, “No Wrong Notes.” The beautiful setting in Rhinebeck, New York–the inspiring workshop run by David Roth–the fresh air, the lake and the campfire made me think: hmm, this is just the perfect spot for a new romance. The love story that ensues is pure fiction.
However, during that workshop, the real-life Barbara did record two songs. I’m including my favorite one here, called Aftermath. I found the cassette tape buried in my files and, after sitting for so long, the tape got distorted. I took it to an audio wizard who managed to get the waa-waa out of it, but the last words she sings, “Believe it” somehow got clipped.
Once you click on the “Aftermath” hyperlink, you can hear the song in your media player.
She has a lovely voice, and you’ll enjoy the minute and a half of her singing.
Play Aftermath
Science, Spirituality and Shameless Self-Promotion
Eben Alexander is the neurosurgeon who wrote “Proof of Heaven,” an account of his voyage into the afterlife during a near-death experience.
He seems more credible than your average run-of-the-mill former dead person, and I found his book intriguing. So when I heard that he was speaking in Seattle at East-West Bookshop, I felt compelled to attend.
I have to tell you that, when I walked into the large auditorium, I was surprised to see a few hundred people in the audience—both men and women—and they were all my age or older.
Proof that the older we get, the more we get it.
He started the lecture by telling the story of how he woke up one morning with a bad headache and within three hours was in a coma. He had contracted e coli bacterial meningitis—which is usually fatal—and it completely shut down the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion.
While he was in the coma he had a fantastic excursion into heaven. No while-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel for this guy. After seven days, as his doctors were about to stop treatment, his eyes popped open. He had come back. Read the book. It’s pretty compelling.
His lecture then became a combination of spirituality and science, and the science part sailed right over my head. As I listened to his theories about consciousness and quantum physics, I kept hoping that either I would suddenly get smarter or he would dumb it down, but neither happened.
So I started to daydream. Of course! There’s nothing quite like a bewildering lecture to launch me into my own parallel universe.
But while I was out there in my happy place I was thunder-struck by the thought, “I have to give him a copy of Between!” I don’t know why I thought he’d be at all interested, except for the death/near-death connection. At the break I dashed out to my car and got a book, inscribed it and stuck a business card inside, and then held onto it while we did the half-hour meditation.
Ah, the meditation. Karen Newell of Sacred Acoustics guided us using sounds vibrating at specific hertz to generate different meditation experiences—like sounds of a spaceship to transport you into outer space.
When I heard the sound of a slow heartbeat, I immediately got a vision of my mother, which was really nice. But my most intense reaction was an ache in the small of my back, which happens when I lie down flat on a hard floor.
At any rate, it provided a new path to an old place and it was well worth the backache. When it was all over I sprinted to the front of the room and gave Dr. Alexander his personal copy of Between, telling him it converged with his experience. He smiled at me kindly and said, “There are many things converging now,” took it and thanked me.
Perhaps nothing will come of it. Perhaps my purpose in being there was to never, ever lie down on a hard floor again.
It seems to me, however, that the convergence of that auditorium, the daydream, the backache, and my mother’s pretty face simply must result in something. Watch this space. I’ll tell you as soon as I find out just what it is.
The Pearl
“This lovely novel smoothly pierces the heart . . .”
This is the opening line of a review posted on Amazon by Scott Meredith, the person who convinced me to publish Between thirteen years after writing it.
Scott is a Renaissance man. He earned his PhD in language recognition at MIT, where Noam Chomsky was his adviser and mentor. He is fluent in Mandarin and Japanese; a yogi who just spent two months at an ashram in India; he’s also a well-known tai-chi master and author. I must confess that I don’t know all of the different interests he has, but what I do know impresses me.
Right before Christmas, Scott came to dinner with his wife and my dear friend Shao-Ti. Scott is as low-key as Shao-Ti is ebullient. She’s a superb nurse-practitioner who is an insightful healthcare provider. Over the years we’ve become friends and love to talk each other’s ears off while walking our dogs. And we laugh a lot.
Scott told me over dinner that he’d self-published a book on tai-chi called Juice: Radical Taiji Energetics and it was available through Amazon. Since my computer was nearby, I jumped up from the dinner table, went onto Amazon.com and downloaded a copy to my Kindle with a ta-da!
I asked him how difficult it was to publish the book. Easy, he said.
I said I had written a book and was thinking about self-publishing it.
He told me I needed an ISBN. I told him I had one.
He told me I needed a cover. I had one, I said, and showed it to him.
He told me that after I uploaded it to CreateSpace and then to Amazon.com, I needed some reviews to get me rolling.
I told him I had one from Publishers Weekly. His eyebrows went up. “Can I see it?” he asked.
Scott read the review and then quietly looked up at me and said, “I am holding a pearl of great value. Why haven’t you done anything with this?”
When somebody like Scott says that to somebody like me, I take notice. And that’s what got me to publish my book.
Now you must be asking: why did it take thirteen years?
Watch this space: that’s the subject of my next post.