Thursday, August 3, 2017

Falling Awake: Interview with Claire M. Perkins


Illustration from Chapter 4 of Fallen, "Catch a Fallen Dream" by Claire M. Perkins
 
Utilizing strong components of fable, Fallen: The Adventures of a Deep Water Leaf, written and illustrated by Claire Perkins, synchronistically echoes a number of the messages in the current empowerment-themed issue of WPWT. A light yet spiritually satiating dose of elemental life/soul essentials, it speaks to now, right from the dedication: "It is time to awaken. It is time to remember." The present calls for actionable awareness and conscious choice while also imploring us to recall our relationships to ourselves, to one another, to our environment, to our collective history, and to our spiritual roots as we journey forward through this earthly experience. Perkins proves an able guide as she takes us along on this fictive yet symbolically veridical journey through life, loss, love, transformation, healing, and self-realization.

As the author writes in the Acknowledgments "for those who dreamed the first dream and we who dream it forward," it is intended as a story for the dream-makers and dream-realizers.

Take the plunge with us as we explore the beauty of falling awake and rising to our dreams. (*Note that due to challenges with blogger.com, the spacing is not uniform. This does not, however, take from the wealth of content generated by our wonderful interview subject. For more info on the author and links, check below the interview.)


Interview with Claire M. Perkins by Nicole M. Bouchard


1) The genesis of Fallen consisted of words in a dream. The concept of "a deep water leaf" was further nurtured by interpretations of your personal experience with grief over the loss of a child chronicled in your non-fiction title, The Deep Water Leaf Society: Harnessing the Transformative Power of Grief. Fallen's next stage of gestation stemmed from a workshop with Robert Moss—Writing as a State of Active Dreaming—where your protagonist, began to communicate with you and a brief, lively three act performance brought to life your initial chapters. One of Fallen's final stages, was a weekend Tom Bird Method retreat where the focus would seem to be part connecting with the “Divine Author” and part healing the writer as an individual.

Talk to us about the importance of consulting our dreams for inspiration, integrating the emotional truths of our experiences, acting out our work to see it come to life in another medium, and going within to heal our outer lives so we can clear our creative channels.


CP: Inspiration. The word has roots related to both the breath and spirit. To be inspired is to be animated by divine spirit, to breathe spirit in and through oneself. The Middle English meaning of the word inspiration was "divine guidance." I love thinking of the word in that way, that inspired writing is a channeling of spirit or divine guidance as much as it is one's own creativity. It is a divine partnership, a co-creative activity.

I have always felt that dreams are portals to the higher dimensions in which we exist, beyond the three dimensional world of our conscious, waking lives. Dreams connect us to our own higher selves. They create an opening through which inspiration, or divine guidance, may flow.

From Albert Einstein to Paul McCartney, I could cite endless stories of scientists, inventors, artists and other world-changers whose works were significantly influenced by dreams.

It is no surprise that dreams have been an integral part of my own writing process, because they have been a rich and integral part of my life experience. For me, dreams have always been a powerful source of healing, guidance and inspiration. I believe this can be true for everyone, yet it seems to be almost a lost art to engage with dreams and dreaming as a relevant and powerfully life-shaping resource.

Robert Moss, one of my most influential dream mentors, teaches that the re-creation of a dreaming culture, the sharing of dreams on a regular basis, the re-integration of dreaming into the fabric of everyday life in a reverent and honoring way, may hold the key to healing what ails human culture.

Dreaming, in a paradoxical way, may be the key to awakening.

This is one of the major themes within the story of Fallen. The characters are living within a dream and yet they are also the dreamers of the dream. When we understand and own our power to shape the collective dream in which we are living, we can quite literally change the world.

While writing is partly divine inspiration, it cannot help but be influenced by our own human experience and our meaning-making around what we experience. We write what we know, even if we don't set out to do so. And, sometimes, it is only as we write that we discover what we know. Our plots and characters reflect back to us, as much as to our readers, the stories of our own lives.

The phrase "deep water leaf" was given to me in a dream that would prove crucial to my healing journey after the death of my son, even though the dream came to me many years prior to his passing. I rediscovered the dream as I read through years of old journals in an attempt to make sense of his life and his death and the challenging relationship we'd had. The dream offered the phrase "deep water leaf" as the key to healing grief.

As I wrote my first book, The Deep Water Leaf Society, which chronicles the two years following my son's death, I felt the phrase "deep water leaf" represented the deep dive into an ocean of heartrending emotions. The miracle of becoming a deep water leaf was that, rather than being drowned in those emotions, [see also question 5] I found myself emerging into an altered state of being that I may not have reached in any other way.

Just as dreams can be a portal to spiritual connection, so can the most difficult and challenging of our life experiences. These experiences literally alter our reality. They cause us to ask the deep questions, to re-evaluate what's important and what we hold dear, to question and create meaning, and to anchor ourselves within new truths.

The new truths that emerge from our experiences inform our writing and other creative endeavors, imbuing them with our own unique perspectives and authentic voice.

Writing The Deep Water Leaf Society helped me to shed the last of my grief and to externalize the details of my experience, holding them at arm's length and seeing them from the witness perspective. Paradoxically, this helped me to better internalize and integrate my experience. Although the writing was cathartic, I was still left wondering just exactly what a "deep water leaf" really is. That question stayed with me for a number of years, and became the muse for Fallen.

At Robert Moss's Writing as a State of Active Dreaming retreat, we were encouraged to write daily, to incubate dreams to support our writing, and to invite our characters to speak to us. At the end of the retreat week, each of us was expected to present a final project, sharing either some portion of what we had written or some aspect of our experience during the workshop. We could do this through any medium we liked.

I elected to use Dream Theater for my final project, a method Robert often uses in his dreaming workshops, in which the dreamer chooses other workshop participants to act out various roles and scenes from their dream.

During the course of the week, I had compiled an ongoing dialogue with a leaf that falls from a tree onto the surface of a lake. She spoke to me from her place of origin, in the tree. She spoke to me as the falling leaf, and she spoke to me after her landing. The dialogues were quite dramatic, ethereal, and poetic. My little deep water leaf had quite a personality and I think she found me to be rather dull or dim-witted.

I chose a narrator to read the dialogues and others to play the roles of tree, leaves, wind, water, birds, and trampling moose. As the narrator read, I directed the three acts of the play, giving general cues while allowing the actors to put their own spin on things. At the end of the play, I interviewed the actors about their own feelings and responses to the roles they had played.

Just as writing my first book put me into witness state for my grief, watching the tale of my deep water leaf play out on the stage of Dream Theater brought the story to life for me. Suddenly I could see it and feel it in a way that had been escaping me. Instead of struggling to create it, I could see that it had a life of its own and a story it wanted to tell me. That shifted my approach to writing Fallen from struggling to answer a question (What is a deep water leaf?), to allowing the story and its characters to show me the answer.

Over time, through dreams and journaling and random thinking, the general outline of the story arc took shape in my mind. Still, I struggled with writer's block and made many abortive attempts at getting the story down on paper. Until I found Tom Bird.

Tom Bird's writing method emphasizes super fast, full-steam-ahead writing without thinking. Encouraging a writing speed of around 2000 words per hour, this writing method bypasses both the inner perfectionist and the inner critic and opens a channel for the “Divine Author Within” and the book itself to pour through. It helped me to get out of my “own way” and let the story tell itself.

An unbreakable rule in Tom's method is not to reread or edit anything until the entire book feels finished. Not polished, but finished. The result is a complete, if bare bones, story that can then be edited by rearranging the flow, filling in missing gaps, adding supportive research, fleshing out characters and polishing language.

Because this editing process opens the door back up to the perfectionist and critic that live inside, the second phase of Tom's process involves exercises geared toward self-healing, self-acceptance and visualizing success as an author.

It's one thing to get the words down on paper and quite another to launch them out into the world. I think we all have inner stories that block our creative channels and make us feel we have nothing to say that anyone would want to read. Doing the deep dive inner work is required not only to clear our creative channels but to empower us to share what emerges with the world.


2) Another interesting phase that led to the birth of the book entailed the evolution of your artistic abilities. This was another journey in and of itself which you shared on social media. Learning various techniques, you were able to communicate your vision through images as well as words, expressing different aspects of story, soul, and self.

Share what it was like on a personal level to begin to align your imaginings with your actual renderings, and how you discovered what style, method, tools, etc. worked/felt best to you as an artist in general and as guardian of what this story in particular would portray.


CP: Oh my goodness! I had no idea what I was committing to when I decided to illustrate this story myself. I am so glad that I did, but had I known at the outset how much time it would take to complete the illustration project, I would probably never have begun.

Thankfully, I was already taking classes with an amazing teacher at the Mesa Arts Center, Helen Rowles. I had grown particularly fond of colored pencil drawings. Prior to Helen's classes, I had dabbled in acrylic painting, mixed media, collage and digital compositing. I felt more comfortable with collage and compositing because I could rely on existing images to create art, which was much less intimidating that creating something from scratch. When I painted, the painting always fell short of the vision in my mind. It was frustrating.

Under Helen's guidance, I learned the skills of drawing well enough to capture my inner visions. The downside is that drawing and blending the many layers of colored pencil in a piece of any size can take a very long time to complete. Some of the 11"x14" and 16"x20" pieces I'd done in class had taken up to 35 hours each.

When I first envisioned the illustrations for the book, I thought there would be a scattering of them throughout—perhaps as many as three per chapter. There was no way I could spend that much time on them. It felt overwhelming.

Ultimately, I decided to use one illustration per chapter to highlight the primary action or feeling of that chapter. Even so, working in an 11"x14" format, full-blown colored pencil drawings would have been out of the question. I compromised by creating watercolor pencil backgrounds and using colored pencil only for the primary figures in each drawing.

It still took me a full year to complete the illustrations. Each of the drawings took about 10 hours to complete, and I really only worked on them during class, where I could count on Helen's guidance. The writing and editing were completed long before the drawings were!

I struggled with trying to decide how to illustrate some of the chapters. The ones that were the most fun were the chapters with the animal guides in them. My method was to find images online of the animals and settings I wanted to portray and to use those as general inspiration for drawing.

Because the theme of love runs strongly through the story, I incorporated heart shapes into each of the animals. And, of course, Alora herself and the other fallen leaves are all heart-shaped as well.

The most challenging aspects were trying to keep Alora's facial features consistent from drawing to drawing, and capturing her emotions. Skill-wise, a professional illustrator may have been able to do a better job in a much shorter time, but the illustrating experience deepened my connection to the story and its characters. I didn't really want to trust the handling of them to someone else. They felt too much like family to me. Drawing also provided a much needed respite from the work of editing and revision. I hope the reader will find that the drawings add character and charm to the story.


3) Using the elements, Fallen conveys what it can feel like to be at the "mercy of life's circumstances." In an interview last year, we discussed how in nature, seemingly destructive or chaotic forces like lightning, fire, and lava can be catalysts for growth and vital change, just as certain kinds of adversity can trigger similar results for people. There is a chapter of the book, Chapter 6, where the central characters learn to "harness the power of the wind," as a means of escape and survival, where once the wind had been a natural adversary or threat. In Chapter 9, Alora, the fallen deep water leaf, reflects on how the "wind itself hadn’t changed. But now she could steer by it."

A sub-theme of the WPWT empowerment issue revolves around how we begin to change our experience of the external by changing internally. On the Home page of the magazine, we feature a quote by George Bernard Shaw that reads: "Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." The page from the editorial staff states that in "a time when many around the world, coming from different viewpoints, feel little is in their control, it is an opportune season to look within at what we can control." Toward the top, we say how this issue of WPWT "is an issue that aspires to conscript change as an amiable accomplice in life's adventure." That is what Alora and her companion, Blaze, do when they learn to employ the strength of the wind to deliver them from harm and further their travels.

Just as it took great practice and effort for Alora and Blaze to be able to channel the dynamic power of the wind, how would you personally say one can start viewing outer chaotic forces as vital inner change catalysts, and go about practicing ways of steering/controlling/channeling the extent of their impact?


CP: Ah, chaos. The cyclone that is the precursor to change, to creation, to evolution. It is the breakdown of the old that must take place before the breakthrough of the new. It is a beautiful thing, and it totally sucks when you're in the midst of it.
 
According to Barbara Marx Hubbard, futurist and conscious evolution advocate, if we study the 13.7 billion year history of the Universe, we will see that major crises preceded every quantum leap in the evolution of life. Crises stimulate innovation and transformation. They “are evolutionary drivers.”

It's true on the collective level and for each of us as individuals. But just like the deteriorating caterpillar, when we are in the midst of the chaos that precedes transformation, it's pretty difficult to imagine the wings we are about to grow.

How can we become more resilient in the face of chaos? Like a tree in a strong wind, we can learn to dance with it.

One powerful aspect of my training in expressive arts was learning to dance with Gabrielle Roth's 5Rhythms®. Roth’s rhythms, which mirror the rhythms of life itself, are “Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness.”
 
One begins the ecstatic dance in graceful flowing movement, moves into the choppier energizing beat of staccato, and from there tumbles into the auditory and physical cacophony of full-blown chaos. In the rhythm of chaos, the body lets go of controlled, orchestrated motion. Feet stomp, limbs flail, hair flies as heads swing. Beauty and order begin to re-emerge as the dancer slows into the joyful lilt of lyrical and then, finally, rests in stillness, filled with the energy of all the rhythms that came before.
 
What I discovered in my explorations of dancing the 5Rhythms is that once you have rested in stillness, you can carry some of it with you through the next cycle of chaos.
 
The dance has something to teach us about how we can face unexpected challenges, tragedies and external chaos.
 
First, when we are in the thick of it, we must surrender to it. When I lost my son, I had to enter into the chaos of all the feelings that loss awakened in me. I had to allow myself to grieve. I had to live in the uncertainty, not knowing if I would ever feel whole again. I didn't have to let go of control—it had been stripped from me. I could only surrender.
 
We must feel what we're feeling and not stuff it down. No stiff upper lip. If a tree remains stiff in the onslaught of wind, it will snap. Expressive arts and journaling provide safe space to explore, express and eventually release emotions. There is no way past but through.
 
Second, if we take time to create a place of stillness within us prior to the inevitable arrival of chaos in our lives, we can tap into that stillness even in the midst of chaos. We can develop stillness through meditation, prayer, spiritual practice, yoga, dance, deep breathing, energy clearing and centering practices.
 
Developing a daily practice that includes stillness is essential. Find what works for you and make it a priority. Once a practice has been established, it can provide respite during times of chaos and challenge.
 
Third, engage proactively in whatever the chaos is. When I lost my son, I was six months into a year-long training in expressive arts. It was a godsend. I used those tools to harness the transformative power of my grief. I knew my experience was going to change me. I could either be steamrolled by grief and left broken by it, or I could use its energy to steer the course of my transformation.
 
Now, I'm not going to lie. It wasn't easy. And there were days—many of them—when I was steamrolled by the loss. I did a lot of numbing with alcohol and mindless TV watching. But I kept coming back to the tools of expressive arts in order to actively engage with what I was feeling, to explore not only the wounds of this loss, but the wounds of my own childhood and the wounds of the world. I explored the deep questions about life and death, about meaning, about why we are here on this planet at all.
 
So, look at what your current chaos is trying to tell you. Search for the questions it wants you to explore. Engage with it on your own terms. Don't let it steamroll you, harness it.
 
Like the characters in Fallen, you'll have to experiment to find the best way to position yourself in relation to the wind of chaos. Blaze got knocked into the mud a few times before he figured it out, but he didn't give up. It takes practice to build enough strength and balance to remain upright and steer your own course. So, keep trying and don't give up.

4) Also in Chapter 9, Alora meets Lizard who explains to her how he shed his tail when it no longer served him, and grew a new one. This is easily parlayed into the deeper wisdom of shedding one's "tale" when it no longer serves them, and reframing self-story to gain insight, confidence, or empowerment. After listening to what Alora tells him, Lizard recounts her story from a different perspective, finishing by saying, "That’s a sight more pleasant and powerful story than what you started out with, wouldn’t you say?”

After grasping the necessity for her new tale, she then asks what the following step is. Lizard responds with advice involving a mix of taking stock of what works and envisioning what is desired: "Why, write your next chapter, that’s what! Dream your way forward. Change your focus from what isn’t working to what is. Fix one eye on everythin’ good and let the other scout ahead into the possibilities of what could be."

The same way that one event can be witnessed by five people and there can be five different versions of what happened, we have the capability to hold within us multiple versions of our life events, personal qualities, actions, and traits. We're often better, kinder reframers for others than we are for ourselves. What do you feel are some of the most effective ways of awakening to our more empowering truths and shedding the outmoded, restrictive tales we've either grown or been given?

CP: Synchronistically, I am currently writing a blog series called "Twenty Ways to Change Your Story." As for most things, it begins with awareness. What stories are we holding about ourselves, our lives, and the world?
 
Is life something to be afraid of, or an adventure to enjoy? Am I stuck with things as they are or can I change them? Am I a victim or am I a hero? Am I in this all alone or are we all in it together? Where can I find help? Where can I be of service? Can I face my fears and dive into them? And if I do, what treasures might I find? Can I take on the strengths and powers of those I meet? Can I become whatever I choose to be? Can I use my gifts to change the world?


The way you answer these questions becomes your story.


We grow deaf to our own stories. They go underground, into the subconscious, where they quietly but powerfully go about the work of proving themselves to be true. Our stories shape us. Yet we have the power to reshape our stories to better serve us and those around us.

We can start by tuning into and really hearing what we say and think. We can catch ourselves in the act of self-sabotage. At a linguistic level, we can eliminate words like "but" and "should" in favor of words like "and" and "choose." We can replace "I can't" with "Anything is possible, so how can I?" We can become more selective and deliberate with the words we put after "I am." We can sleuth our way into discovering the limiting stories we've been fed by our parents, teachers, and culture at large, and begin to question them. We can ask, Is this true? Who says so? What would it be like if it wasn't true?
Ultimately, it is not as important whether a story is true as it is how that story serves us. Bill Harris, founder of Centerpointe Research Institute and inventor of Holosync technology, teaches that we can choose our beliefs. He says, “Evaluating beliefs based on whether they’re ‘true’ or ‘false’ isn’t helpful . . . conscious, happy people evaluate beliefs based on whether or not they’re resourceful.”

The first thing to grasp about this is that we can choose what to believe. And the second is, that we can choose the beliefs that work for us, regardless of whether they are "true." Because, once we have chosen new stories and begun to act on them, our minds (and the Universe, if you choose to believe in the Law of Attraction) will work to make them true.

A major theme in Fallen is the idea that we are more than earthly beings—that we remain connected to the spiritual source that dreamed us into being. We are one with that source and empowered by it to move the dream forward as we choose. Adopting this belief, whether it is "true" or not, can be empowering in at least a couple of ways.

One, it would mean that anything that happens here is simply experience, as opposed to being good or bad. Even death is not the end, because in death we return to that higher state of being. This belief can make us brave in the face of frightening experiences.


Two, it would mean that we have a higher power to call upon in times of trouble. We don't have to feel alone or helpless. We have a powerful ally in our court at all times. We have never truly been separated from this aspect of ourselves. It has imbued itself so completely into our life, our dream, that we can find it wherever we look, as Alora does when she finds her wise animal guides.


This belief can override any of the other stories we've been telling ourselves. It awakens us to our larger selves. We can awaken within the dream and reclaim our power to shape it. Nothing is impossible. We can become "lucid dreamers" in the dream of life, shapeshifters and world-changers.


One basic choice we can make is whether to believe we are victims, at the mercy of the elements, or the heroes of our own story, empowered to choose how we will respond to the elements and interact with them. Even when we feel as though the wind has taken us off course, we may find it has actually taken us to where we most need to be. Alora discovers this when she drifts off course and encounters Lizard, the first of her wise guides, in Chapter 9.


The very elements that have been tossing us about may well be leading us home. Yes, we can learn to harness them. Yes, we can choose our course. And, we can learn to see how the elements may have been serving us all along, even when we were feeling tossed and tumbled by them [as explored in the previous question]. What if everything in our life experience was here to serve us? To help us grow? To help us awaken and remember?


Albert Einstein said, “The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.” How we answer that question is the biggest story, the most important tale, we'll ever choose.
 

Will we approach life from a place of fear or embrace it as an adventure? For me, the hero's journey begins by choosing to see the world, with all of its drama, uncertainties, and challenges, as friend rather than foe.


5) In Chapters 12 and 13, Alora undergoes some of her most transformative growth as she encounters Turtle and Dragonfly, and enters the Deep—needing to find a way to adapt and shift to survive the watery depths. In different ways, each of her guides has need for the surface and the Deep. Turtle navigates both. Dragonfly explains how dragonflies spend more than half their lives growing beneath the water before developing wings that allow them to soar. To me, the deep has always represented emotional depths, the subconscious, dreams, the mysterious and pregnant potential of the unknown. The story emphasizes the need to navigate both the Deep and the surface.

The question is this: how do we swim gracefully in the "Deep" without getting drowned solely in the dreaming stage (vs. surfacing to action), without getting weighed down by the heavier, deepest emotions (subjective vs. objective), or without forgetting to breathe and flailing in the face of the unknown?


CP: I love your perception and description of the Deep. It is all that you describe and more that I cannot completely put into words. The Deep is where we connect to the truth of our being, to our larger selves, to our source, to our oneness with all that is. It is the portal to our awakening.


From the surface, the Deep appears frightening. It is often our losses, our struggles, our fears that draw us down into the Deep where grace can then transform us. The key to swimming gracefully is to let go of the fear of drowning and allow grace to move us.
 
I am reminded of the Marianne Williamson quote, "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us." [Editor’s Note: In synchronistic fashion, an expanded version of this quote is also referenced in an essay in the Writers’ Craft Box in the current empowerment-themed issue of WPWT.]


We have to brave up in order to claim our own light, our own power. We have to risk the drowning and trust in the unfolding of that "mysterious and pregnant potential of the unknown."


The paradox is that once we dive into the Deep, rather than becoming stuck there and drowning, our own light will naturally draw us back up to the surface to breathe, to take action, to shine. Where once we merely skimmed the surface, drifting along untethered and at the mercy of the elements, we return to the surface transformed by our journey through the Deep.


We bring our rediscovered light and power with us, which completely changes our perception of and interaction with the surface world. We deepen our surface experience. We see through the dark places into the light we now know shines, not only beyond them, but within them.




6) There is a point when Alora returns to the rest of the fallen. Able to shapeshift, she knows she must come in their form, her original form, for them to relate to her, despite the fact that she carries other facets within. I believe this symbolizes shared humanity and the passage conveys the universal fears and love we all feel. Having learned about fear and love chapters earlier from Deer, Alora sees the principles in action as a number of the fallen overcome personal fear to lovingly help one another under her guidance.

In the current WPWT empowerment issue interview, Zen teacher, author, and professional consultant, Marc Lesser, discusses how "there is really only one career—it is the work of seeing more clearly and helping others." He goes on to say that "[h]elping others means being in 'relationship' in a way that helps others live with more safety, more ease, and more meaning." He also advocates the aspiration "to live a life of consciousness and love, instead of a life of habit and protection." The leaves in Fallen, have limited their lives out of fear, sticking to habit, and stay on the defensive for protection, yet as Deer points out earlier, they are inadvertently helping to bring their fears to pass by doing such. It is love and conscious awareness that liberates those who would be liberated.

Of the many "Aha!" moments in Fallen, I found this one where Alora fully realizes her purpose, to be the most rewarding. It was her intention to help others from the beginning, but her journey of self-discovery makes it truly possible. When writing this empowering segment, how did you feel about the character who first spoke to you at Writing as a State of Active Dreaming? What had she taught you about life, about yourself by that point, and do you feel that there might be more to tell of her story in the future?


CP: It may be interesting to point out that in my first pass at this portion of the story I had Alora return to the fallen in her shapeshifted form. It was my editor who gently suggested that this didn't work. I resisted changing it at first. I couldn't see how Alora could help the fallen otherwise. I couldn't see what the point of her transformation in the Deep might be if she didn't use her shapeshifting powers to rescue the fallen.

Perhaps this is why the character who spoke to me at that long ago writing workshop found me so dull and dim-witted! I am grateful that she didn't give up on me, though.

For of course, this was my own weakness and fear showing up in the writing, not Alora's. We can only help others by being fully who we are. Shapeshifting is an inside job, not the donning of a superhero costume or a facade of borrowed strength and presence. I think we often feel like we aren't enough, that we're too small, that we don't have what it takes to make a difference. Why would anyone listen to little ol’ me?

We are afraid of our own light.

Alora, too, feels this before recognizing that she must go to the fallen as one of them. She must meet them as herself, carrying all of her history, discoveries and transformation inside of her and trusting that it will shine through.

The fallen don't need to be rescued. They don't need a savior. They simply need to be shown that new possibilities await them. They need to be shown the power they already have inside of them—the power of love for each other and the power to choose their own paths. Alora could only show them these things as one who had experienced them herself and as one in whom they could see themselves.

Like Alora, I have experienced fear and grief, the dive into the Deep, and the transformation that comes with that journey. By writing Alora's story, I better understand my own. And perhaps by sharing my story, in The Deep Water Leaf Society, and Alora's story, in Fallen, I am stepping up, as she did, to help others find their own way.

Writing Fallen has helped to answer the question I began with: What exactly is a deep water leaf? She is one who has braved the Deep. She is one who has awakened within this dream we call life. She is one who has become fully aware of who she really is. She is one who returns from the Deep to spark the awakening of those still asleep on the surface.

Until the whole world awakens, there will always be more to this story.
 
 
Further Links:
 
 
Special offer from the author: "For a short time only, you can purchase the Kindle version of Fallen at the special price of just 99 cents! Offer expires 8/9 at midnight PDT."
 

 

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