Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
It's a Timing Thing
Do you feel confused, uprooted, at a loss — almost depressed, but not quite? Instead of turning with the world naturally and effortlessly as it rotates, is the world spinning around you? Do you feel like it sometimes turns on you? Is everything you depended on backing off, fading away? Then, about the time you get your bearings, the world starts turning around and on you again?
Are you a little uncertain about what you believe and know to be true, about what life means, how life works, and where your place is in it? I's that fine line between illusion and truth, fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and reality fading-getting fainter and finer each day?
At the risk of using a cliché, join the crowd. On second thought, let's regroup. Join the masses.
"I don't know what's been going on in the world and my world for the past few years," says a forty-three-year-old woman, a successful Midwestern therapist who has worked intensely on her own life and has helped many others. "But most of the time it feels like I'm being pulled through a knothole-backwards."
"For several years now, it feels like I've been plodding through a long, dark tunnel;' says a fifty-two-year-old West Coast man, a police officer turned screenplay writer. This man has worked on his spiritual and emotional growth for years. "Sometimes it feels like I'm depressed, but I'm not really depressed. I don't understand what's going on."
I can't see ahead clearly anymore' " says one woman. "Things have been in such awhirl I can barely trust what's going on now. I don't get it. It looks like things are going, in one direction, then my course twists and I get slammed into a wall. Remember the old song 'Twist and Shout'? Well, that's my theme song lately. Life takes an ugly twist, and I stand thereshouting about it. "
The twists and turns life takes lately are enormous, unfathomable, and unpredictable. The only predictable element is the twist of unpredictability lurking right around the bend.
A young East Coast woman, a New Yorker, agrees. "You can get whiplash without ever getting into a car. I don't fall asleep at the end of each day," she adds. "I pass out. From stress and obsession, "
"I'm going to start making St. John's Wort cookies," chimes in another friend, a man in his thirties. (St. John's Wort is a natural herbal supplement some people claim acts as an antidepressant, the holistic communitys response to Prozac.) "No, I'm serious" he says. "I'm going to do it. I've heard that people used to make hashish brownies. There's no reason it can't be done with St. John's Wort."
Someone beat him to the punch. The health food stores are now selling St. John's Wort Tortilla Chips.
The words people use to describe their reactions vary from one locale to another, but the stories I've heard and collected around the globe are similar in content. When I tell people what others are saying, they listen intently, nod their heads in agreement, and respond with one word: exactly. Regardless of the language spoken, when I ask what on earth is going on, what sense they make of it, or where it's all leading, they shake their heads, shrug their shoulders, and say, I don't know.
In late 1997 1 took -a research trip through the remnants of the terrorist massacres in Algiers and into the heart of the protest demonstrations in Istanbul, Turkey. While I was sitting in a Swiss airport trying to decide whether to proceed to Bosnia, a television newscast caught my attention. The reporter was standing on the shores of the Pacific along the Malibu coast in California, dose to the place I've come to call home in the past few years. He was presenting a report on El Nino, the climactic condition named some two hundred years ago for the Christ child. (El Nino usually arrives around Christmas and is a period of unusual global weather patterns resulting from exceptionally warm temperatures in the deep Pacific waters.)
The reporter was interviewing a weather expert, asking what people could expect from this El Nino — more hurricanes, rainstorms, flooding, and consequent mud slides? He tried to nail down an exact prediction of what the future held.
The forecaster listened to the interviewer's frantic and insistent request, then calmly replied that he thought we'd get about the same weather we usually got, only El Nino would make everything that already existed more intense.
I'm not a weather expert, but that would be an accurate prophecy for the emotional and spiritual climate around our globe.
Things are becoming intense.
In an unpredictable time of twists and turns, when Kodak moments have turned into Prozac moments and the two favorite catch phrases are exactly and I don't know, another phrase has worked its way into the consciousness.
Going home.
"I'm tired of all the...junk," says one woman. "I'm tired of the hustle, not fitting in, not finding my place, and being slightly miserable all the time. I know there's a place on this planet where I can be happy, raise my baby, live by the ocean, and do my art. I just want to find it and move there. I want to go home."
"I've been lying, manipulating, forcing myself into a corporate mold that I don't belong in, and drinking to mask all my motions for a year now," another woman comments. "I've moved from house to house and city to city, but what I've really been doing is running from myself. Enough is enough. It's time to stop running. I miss myself. I want to get comfortable in my own skin. I want my soul back. I want to go home."
