Emma, a 70-year-old minister's wife, is led on a quest to uncover long-lost strands of her identity. This story is about resolution of the age-old conflict (particularly for women) between living a life for oneself and living a life for others. The story begins just after Emma's surprise 70th birthday party, when she suddenly confronts a childhood self she has spent decades repressing. Her cousin Diana, the last living relative in Emma's generation from her biological family (Emma was adopted at age 6) comes to the U.S. from Ireland to attend. On Diana's invitation, Emma suddenly leaves behind her husband of 47 years, her home and her carefully manicured sense of who she is to attend a one-month weaving course in Ireland. The course, unforeseen visits by the spirits of her biological mother and grandmother, and her daughter Lucy's visit, all give Emma a chance to untangle layers of conflict and misunderstanding and re-weave these strands into a wholly different material that transforms her life and by extension, the world. Readers witness what happens when the heroine does not impose her will on the world, but is open enough to allow the stories of women ancestors to change and reveal her. This heroine's journey ends not in polarization, conquering, and establishing superiority but in collaboration, connectedness and peaceful coexistence of differences. This multi-layered story is at once the story of a particular woman and her family, their conflicts and secrets, and a story of Women in patriarchal society. And lastly, Strands is a story about the absolute necessity of women's wisdom to the possibility of weaving a peaceful world. If we can answer the questions that women ask, we will revolutionize the world.

Strands

Literature & Fiction

Peeples, S. Elise

Women's Fiction

Eshu House Publishing

This book documents my personal journey before, during, and after I had a mastectomy on September 4, 2009. This account is not meant to be a “How-to-Turn-Negative-into-Positive-in-Nine-Easy-Steps” kind of book. Rather, it is a “how-to” book only in that it demonstrates how to, while on a difficult journey and in life in general, cultivate an attitude of receptivity and openness to guidance from both the seen and unseen and to involve community. I can only speak to the first steps, that of receptivity and community. The next steps must be discovered/unveiled by each person on such a journey, only after the first are taken, not just once but before every step. I began the book so that I could publish a series of e-mails that I sent out to my community and the responses I received back from them. A strong theme in the book is how crucial community was to me all along the way. The community brought with it a larger lens, changing the focus of my attention from what was “me” and “mine” to a wider awareness of peace-making and healing, not just in my life, but in my communities and beyond. I compare this change of focus to a film I once saw called Cosmic Voyage where the lens of the camera looked at reality from different distances. First, it zoomed in to the microscopic level, and then it zoomed out in stages all the way to outer space. At the microscopic level, atoms looked chaotic until the camera zoomed out a little, and the pattern became clear. Then it zoomed a little further out and everything looked chaotic for a while until it zoomed far enough out to allow one to once again recognize patterns. You will see that at one point in the story I was asked if I could be the vehicle for a miracle for the community, and I answered, yes. To me, a miracle occurs when we can let go of judgment, cause and effect, reward and punishment—in fact, all dualisms—and keep the focus spacious, allowing for a glimpse into a different level of reality where miracles happen. With this different focus, events and what seem like isolated incidents and individuals show themselves to be deeply connected, forming a new sort of pattern. Seeing or sensing that other level of reality required that I disengage from the details of my daily life long enough to experience chaos, “not knowing,” and non-judging. Events happened on this journey that are unexplainable in this day-to-day reality but which made intuitive sense when I zoomed out. These glimpses into a larger reality came in the form of synchronicities, dreams, messages from ancestors or animals, lessons from unlikely sources, and intuitions that I could not attribute to any likely source. Neither good nor bad, this journey, but a reminder to us all of the possibilities of climbing beyond a one-dimensional life, to dwell more fully in the healing field, alive in its myriad dimensions, seen and unseen, still and full of vibration, always and forever connected to each other and to all creation.

When Things Happen to People: The Field Beyond Good and Bad

Self-Help

Spiritual

A. D. Miller’s first installment of his autobiography was Ticket to Exile which recounts Miller’s coming-of-age in Depression-era Orangeburg, South Carolina. In it Miller reconstructs the sights, sounds, and social complexities of the pre-civil rights South, and his youth as a closet rebel who successfully evaded the worst strictures of a racially segregated small town. When Fall Rising begins, A. D. is nineteen and has just been exiled from Orangeburg, South Carolina for the “crime” of writing a white girl a seven word note: I would like to know you better. For this, he was arrested by two armed policemen, interrogated, charged with “attempted rape,” jailed, and released only on condition that he leave town. We pick him up as he leaves the train at Rockville Centre Station, Long Island, N.Y. where he has come to re-start his life. This book is both a personal story of sorrow, confusion and ultimate triumph and of a people’s ongoing saga from slavery and segregation to civil rights and the hope for a future in which they can equally share. Fall Rising follows A. D. through his life as he gets his first job, joins the Navy, heads off to Officer’s training and then to various colleges in Washington State, Nebraska , Colorado and UC Berkeley. He settles in Berkeley, California, marries a white woman (though they have to travel to Washington State where interracial marriage is legal to be married), has three children and tries to navigate the racist culture in which he finds himself. Even in the San Francisco Bay Area, jobs for which an African American man with a Master’s degree are trained are nearly impossible to get. He ends up doing menial labor once again. As he finds his way through his life, he refuses to stay within the boxes that the culture pushes him to stay inside. He forges a way, often fraught with hardship, to simply live as a free person in this country. All the while he carries with him the secret of his exile which he can speak about to no one but which colors everything he does. Finally, after much travail and many years lived finding ways around road blocks, he becomes a college teacher and after that, a much-acclaimed poet and writer, editor/publisher, theater producer and director, production coordinator, a director Near the end of Fall Rising, A. D writes: “I see now the terrible thing it was to live my life constantly in a defensive mode, or a mode of attack, never for a single moment to be able to breathe easy.” And that is, too, the terrible realization of his reader. Having lived fully and richly to the age of 92, Miller is an inspiration to generations of black folk as he shows how, with the help of community, he made a way out of no way.

Fall Rising: Exile to Odyssey

Biographies & Memoirs

Miller, A.D.

Community & Culture

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