PROLOGUE — The Invitation to the Living Myth

The Beginning of a Series

Keeper of the Night Journey

I want to tell you the story of my mythopoetic life. Or more accurately the pressure to write is upon me and I cannot not follow the impulse.

Mine has been a life shaped not by plans or goals, academics and social circles but by searing dreams, sudden directives, voices that arrive in the night, and visitations that rearrange the architecture of my days. A life trained by forces I did not choose, in landscapes I did not seek, through practices that rose and fell like tides.

I want to chart the terrain of the Other for you — the place beneath your ordinary life where the real shaping happens. The pulse under the pulse. The hand beneath the events. The intelligence that molds you whether you believe in it or not.

I want you to see how you are being guided too.

Not toward one path, but through many.

Because there is no single system that carries a soul from beginning to end. There is no lineage that holds all your seasons. There is no practice that remains forever.

Mantra comes. Rosary comes. Sufi breathwork comes. Asana comes. Writing comes. Dreaming comes.

And then — they go.

Not because you failed. But because their work in you is complete.

For some, the training ground is a football field or a hockey rink. For others, it is a monastery or a yoga studio. For others still, it is a marriage, a child, a grief, a diagnosis, a loss.

Every soul is trained differently.

But the one thing that stops most people from growing is this:

They cling.

They cling to the practice that once saved them. They cling to the identity that once gave them meaning. They cling to the role that once made them feel needed. They cling to the version of themselves that is already dying.

And in that clinging, they atrophy.

I have never had that luxury.

My life has been a series of deaths and rebirths — jobs walked out of, identities shed, lineages dissolved, roles abandoned, practices dropped the moment they stopped working.

Not because I am brave. But because I am too sensitive to continue once the soul has withdrawn its energy.

I have died and been reborn more times than I can count.

And that is why, approaching sixty — in my fifty‑ninth year — I am on fire.

This next chapter is not a decline. It is not a winding down. It is not a soft landing.

It is the most creative, most potent, most spiritually charged period of my life.

The last third is the brightest third.

And I am relishing it.

I want you to relish yours too.

But to do that, you must be willing to let the old self die. You must be willing to let the old practices fall away. You must be willing to let the old identity dissolve. You must be willing to be remade.

This series is the map of that process.

Not the theory — the lived terrain.

The descent. The breaking. The silence. The omens. The dreams. The directives. The rewiring. The return of force. The ignition of destiny.

This is the story of how a soul is shaped.

And now, I will tell you mine.

CHAPTER ONE — The Rabbi at the Bedside

Every mythic life begins with a moment that does not belong to childhood.

A moment that arrives with too much clarity, too much presence, too much weight to be dismissed as imagination. A moment that marks you — quietly, irrevocably — as someone who will never be allowed to live only in the visible world.

For me, that moment came when I was around ten.

I was lying in bed, the house dark, the air still. And then — without warning — a man appeared beside me. Not a dream figure. Not a shadow. Not a blur. A man. Solid. Present. Real.

He looked like a rabbi.

Not because I had ever met one. Not because I had any cultural reference for him. But because his presence carried the unmistakable gravity of an elder from a lineage I somehow recognized without knowing why.

He leaned toward me with a gentleness that felt ancient.

“You’re going to be okay,” he said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

His voice was calm, steady, warm — the voice of someone who had been watching me for a long time. Someone who knew the terrain ahead. Someone who had come to reassure a child who had no earthly reason to feel safe.

I told him he was scaring me.

He didn’t disappear. He didn’t correct me. He didn’t explain.

He simply leaned in and hugged me.

And then he was gone.

Not faded. Not dissolved. Gone — as if he had stepped back through a doorway I could not see.

That was the first visitation.

It was the moment the Other entered my life openly, without disguise. It was the moment that sent me — a child — into Jewish mysticism, searching for the shape of the presence that had visited me.

I began reading voraciously. Not children’s books — Shakespeare. I read him aloud in my room, as if the cadence itself were a key. I devoured Shakespeare and literature. I read anything that hinted at hidden meaning, coded messages, secret architectures.

It was not curiosity. It was pressure. A force inside me insisting: Understand.

At the same time, I was going to Catholic Mass — sitting in pews, watching priests and nuns perform rituals that should have been gateways to the sacred but felt hollow, disconnected from the mysteries they claimed to represent.

I could feel the gap between the symbol and the truth. Between the ritual and the reality. Between the words and the world beneath the words.

And at home, the dissonance was even sharper.

Parents who said one thing and lived another. Adults who performed the role of “parent” but did not embody it. A household where nothing matched, where the spoken and the lived were always out of sync.

And we moved constantly.

Always uprooted. Always in transition. Always liminal.

Never fully belonging anywhere, never settling into a single identity, never allowed to grow roots in the visible world.

This is the perfect soil for a mystic.

A child who sees the incoherence of the surface world. A child who feels the falseness of adult performances. A child who senses the gap between ritual and reality. A child who reads Shakespeare aloud as if decoding a message. A child who is visited by a rabbi who does not belong to her life but belongs to her destiny.

This is where my mythopoetic life began.

Not with a practice. Not with a lineage. Not with a belief.

With a visitation.

With a presence that crossed the threshold of the visible world and placed its hand on my life.

With a single message:

You are not alone. You are being guided. Remember.

This chapter is the beginning of that remembering.

CHAPTER TWO — The Day I Dissolved Into OM

The first visitation opened the door. The second one blew it off its hinges.

It happened the next summer when I received my first astrology chart — a chart I didn’t understand, but which felt like a map someone else had drawn of a life I had not yet lived. My mother had left the Church by then. She was seeking, restless, hungry for something real. She had stepped out of the sanctioned rituals and into the wild terrain of the paranormal, dragging me with her into rooms where the air felt charged and the adults spoke in hushed, reverent tones.

One afternoon she took me to a meditation group.

It was summer — hot, bright, the kind of day where the world feels wide open. We walked into a backyard where a circle of adults sat cross‑legged in the grass, eyes closed, chanting OM. The sound rose and fell like a tide. I sat down with them, a child among strangers, and began to chant too.

OM.

OM.

OM.

And then — without warning — the boundary between my body and the world shattered.

Every blade of grass was OM. Every tree was OM. The air itself was OM. The sound wasn’t coming from my mouth anymore — it was coming from everything.

I dissolved.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally.

There was no “me” chanting OM. There was only OM.

The world was made of sound. The sound was made of light. The light was made of consciousness. And consciousness was everywhere.

It terrified me.

I jumped up, heart pounding, and ran into the house. I grabbed a glass of water with shaking hands, trying to anchor myself back into a body that suddenly felt too small, too fragile, too porous to contain what I had just experienced.

That was my second mystical experience.

It was not gentle. It was not comforting. It was not designed for a child.

It was a revelation — the kind that rips the veil off the world and shows you what lies beneath the surface of everything.

And it happened at the exact moment my life was already splitting open:

• I was reading Shakespeare aloud in my room, as if decoding a secret language.

• I was devouring books with a hunger that felt like pressure from the inside.

• I was attending Mass and feeling the dissonance between ritual and reality — sensing that the priests and nuns had forgotten the mysteries they were meant to embody.

• I was watching my parents say one thing and live another, learning early that adults often perform roles they do not inhabit.

• I was moving constantly, never rooted, always liminal, living between worlds both literally and spiritually.

I was a child dissolving into OM while the surface world around me made no sense.

This is how mystics are made.

Not through devotion. Not through discipline. Not through lineage.

Through rupture.

Through dissolution.

Through moments that terrify you because they reveal a truth your life is not yet big enough to hold.

The rabbi at the bedside was the first sign. The dissolution into OM was the second. Together, they formed the axis of my early life — the two poles of a world I would spend decades learning to navigate.

This chapter is the beginning of that navigation.

CHAPTER THREE — The First Keys

The summer I dissolved into OM was also the summer I was given my first two keys — the objects that would outlive every house, every school, every identity, every version of myself.

My astrology chart. And a round stained‑glass Libra ornament.

I don’t have much from my childhood. We moved constantly — always uprooted, always in transition, always liminal. Most of my belongings were lost, left behind, or discarded in the churn of relocation.

But I still have those two things.

The chart. The ornament.

They survived because they were never “belongings.” They were markers — signs placed in my path by the same intelligence that had sent the rabbi to my bedside and dissolved me into OM.

My mother had left the Church by then. She was seeking, restless, hungry for something real. She had stepped out of the sanctioned rituals and into the wild terrain of the paranormal, dragging me with her into rooms where the air felt charged and the adults spoke in hushed, reverent tones.

She brought home books on astrology. She took me to meditation groups. She handed me my first chart — a wheel of symbols I didn’t understand but felt magnetized by.

It was a map. A code. A mirror.

I didn’t know how to read it, but I knew it was important. I knew it was mine.

And the Libra ornament — round, luminous, stained glass — felt like a talisman. A reminder that there was a pattern to my life, a symmetry, a design.

This was the beginning of my study of astrology.

Not as a hobby. Not as entertainment. But as a language — one I would pick up and put down many times, each return marking a new phase of my development.

Astrology became the thread that wove through every decade of my life:

• Western astrology first

• then psychological astrology

• then esoteric astrology

• then Jyotisha

• then Nadi

• then the D9

• then the Atmakaraka

• then the karmic architecture

• then the soul’s curriculum

Each time I returned, I understood more. Each time I returned, I was a different person. Each time I returned, the chart revealed a new layer.

But it all began that summer I was only 10 years old.

The rabbi at the bedside. The dissolution into OM. The first astrology chart. The Libra ornament. The voracious reading. The Shakespeare obsession. The pressure to understand. The dissonance of Mass. The incoherence of my parents. The constant moving. The liminality.

It was all one initiation.

One curriculum. One intelligence shaping a child who would grow into a woman trained to see beneath the surface of things.

This chapter is the moment the universe handed me the first keys to the life I would eventually live.

Stay tuned.

Om Shivaya Namaha