Doors: A Jazz Novel, my last published novel, hosts a co-writer – el Mago, Julio Cortazar – who died 20 years earlier but finds his way through the walls between the worlds, even the wall between the dead and the living. This is an examination of realities, of the possibilities of alliance on behalf of the future that is herein represented by thewomaninthecellar, one of too many people across the globe tortured in solitary confinement. [Who have we become?] She is the silenced woman that calls us to speak what must be said so that she may live. In this book, as in all my work, I try to render as best as I can the very nature of the complex and multi-dimensional reality in which we live. At its best, my work is a weaving of many themes and concerns and has, I hope, as an accompaniment, an appropriate music that conveys its own meaning.
Two other books since – Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing and From Grief Into Vision: A Council – recognize that we may call spirit, the ancestors, even or especially the animals into real relationships with the living on behalf of transformation, restoration, sanctuary for all beings, on behalf of the future. But to do so, we must look unwaveringly at who we have become, what we have done, and return.
And now, the mysterious novel, La Negra y Blanca, which will probably, like the other novels I have written take me 10 years to complete, and that involves me, once again, in the real puzzle of reality as we quiver on the edge between horror and T'shuvah, (return). But not return alone – nothing so easy – return through facing the unbearable grief of what we, as a species, culture, individual are ruining, and so – that it is not ruin beyond repair – deep reflection, self-scrutiny, making amends, returning through vision to the source from which we can step out again in new directions that honor creation.