Oh, happy day!
Thanks to ThinkPiece Publishing, my new Kindle Single* is here!
It’s titled I Was a Stranger to Beauty: A Story of Special Needs, Simplicity, My Brother Willie, My Friend Miguel and A New Way of Seeing the World. (I’m fortunate to have a fantastic publisher who shares my affinity for ridiculously lengthy subtitles.)
*If you don’t have a Kindle, don’t worry! You can read Kindle books with Amazon’s (free) Kindle Cloud Reader. If you have Amazon Prime, you can also borrow the book through Amazon’s Lending Library.
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This book is the story of a family moving through a terribly difficult time, and (eventually) arriving at a place of acceptance and love.
In a way, it’s all of our stories.
It’s the time you got back up … even though you didn’t think you had the strength to stand.
It’s the time you trusted … even though you’d been hurt in the past.
It’s the time you opened your heart … even though you were tired and wanted to go home.
We’ve all been strangers to the beauty in our own lives.
The question is, will we stay that way, or will we learn to open our eyes?
Curious? Watch the video to learn more.
Thank you in advance for taking a moment to …
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Read the excerpt below. If you like what you read …
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Buy the book and support a great cause too. As mentioned in the video, 5% of proceeds from the first month’s sales go to L’Arche Washington DC, an amazing caregiving organization that provides homes for life for adults with special needs. Also, please …
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Share the news with those in your network. (Friends, family, nosy neighbor.)
The excerpt is below; thank you again for your support!
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“At root, a pearl is a ‘disturbance’, a beauty caused by something that isn’t supposed to be there, about which something needs to be done. It is the interruption of equilibrium that creates beauty. Beauty is a response to provocation, to intrusion.”
~ Julia Cameron, The Sound of Paper: Starting from Scratch
I’ve always felt a special connection to pearls. They’re my birthstone, true, but it goes deeper than that. Here’s what I love: the idea that an object of immense value can arise from an annoyance. A grain of sand slips into an oyster’s shell, and the oyster’s defense mechanism swirls around it, gradually taking the shape of a pearl. The unsuspecting oyster is provoked by a minuscule intruder, and, over time, that intrusion becomes a thing of beauty. Likewise, my story starts with provocation and intrusion … but in my case, the irritant was much more significant than a grain of sand. It was my younger brother, Willie.
Willie is my only sibling, and he was diagnosed with autism as a toddler. Like most brothers and sisters, we have obvious similarities—a tendency toward obsessive-compulsiveness, a penchant for politeness, highly sensitive natures—as well as some differences. Willie is a gifted musician, someone who can hear a new song a few times and then walk over to a piano and play the melody. He has a photographic memory; he can watch a set of film credits once or twice and then type out the entire list of names on the computer. He’s got a great sense of humor, too, one grounded in purposeful mistakes. He loves to take quotidian phrases such as “A wish come true” and alter them on purpose. “I’ve been dreaming of a wish come … clear!” he’ll say, and burst out laughing. “What about a wish come … blue?” I’ll counter, and he’ll crack up again. When we were growing up, it was always easy for me to make him laugh.
Willie also has a gift for mischief. When he was two, he walked out of the house early one winter morning. My parents panicked at his disappearance, but they soon discovered why he’d vanished: to prance about in the freshly fallen snow. When they opened the front door, he was stomping cheerfully around the yard wearing nothing but a T-shirt and snow boots. When he got older, he’d run away on a regular basis; he was fast, and he had a knack for slipping out of sight. He’d be swimming in the duck pond at the park with policemen trying to coax him out before anyone knew that he was missing. My childhood is peppered with memories of riding in our Volvo with my mom both of us scanning the sidewalks for Willie. The car’s leather seats would stick to my legs as a combination of fear, excitement, and annoyance swirled through my veins. When we’d find Willie at last, his blue eyes would be half-sheepish and half-triumphant.