I’m thrilled to announce the birth of my latest creative baby! A sequel to The Fleur Trilogy, The Mysterious Composition of Tears is the first book of the series, The Further Adventures of Fleur.
From her youngest years—skipping and flapping and “butterfly effect-ing” her way to extraordinary discoveries and even a Nobel Prize—Fleur Robins has led me on a merry chase. Why did I ever imagine I’d heard the last of her? Sure enough, as the pandemic wrapped us all in a dense blanket of isolation early in 2020, up popped Fleur and her crew to keep me company!
I’ve learned by now that an upwelling of Fleur’s voice inside me inevitably gives rise to tears. I’ve felt so fortunate to be invited to accompany such an enchanting, challenging, inventive, unstintingly honest, and quirkily curious soul. As a Jungian analyst, I witness daily how tears serve the great purpose of re-connecting us with our depths, where all our experiences matter. We cry in pain and memory and longing, we cry over rejection and in fear, we cry at funerals and weddings. We cry in joy. Who doesn’t cry at witnessing a birth?
Lord knows, the Spirit of these Times has been drenched in tears: tears over the loss of millions of human lives to Covid and the wholesale extinction of other species due to environmental degradation and climate change; tears of dread about what’s to come for future generations; tears of dismay about our beleaguered democracy; tears of rage over the politicization of what should be slam dunks of common decency and communal welfare; tears of love as we learn through our suffering to more deeply cherish one another, to celebrate the best of the human spirit when we see it, to honor the beauty of our extraordinary green Mother, who offers her bounty so generously no matter how badly we’ve misused her, how much we’ve taken her for granted.
Fleur has been my teacher about our interconnection with one another and the phenomenal world. How could I have failed to respond—trying my very best to do justice to her—as she revealed this new incarnation of herself? A woman now with two extraordinary children of her own, she was eager to lead me into a post-Covid world marked by a terrible worsening of the climate crisis, by inexplicable Shimmers appearing out of nowhere, by teenagers being initiated into the capacity to converse with stones and animals and trees, by a multiplication of End of Times cults, by the crash of the internet, and by the emergence of new means of communication transcending our much-vaunted iEverythings. Fleur was thrilled to introduce me to her gifted offspring Callou Callay and Wolf, to Assefa and Lemlem’s equally talented Ife and Medr, and to a boy with haunting moonstone eyes whose intensity, longing, and wounding end up marking him as a reluctant change agent in our species’ fate.
The Mysterious Composition of Tears evolved under Fleur’s tutelage into a novel that is part ecological fiction, part sci-fi, and part a tale of teenage romance, aging siblings, talking trees, and the brilliant Fleur herself communing—sometimes comically and sometimes as seriously as it gets—with the likes of physicists Wolfgang Pauli and Richard Feynman in a realm beyond the limitations of time and incarnation. The result is a wild ride, and I’d love to share it with you!
Speaking of incarnations, this is the first blog post born from my newly designed webpage, created in collaboration with the talented Dessy Pavlova. I encourage you to access its links and carousels and alleyways to explore the ongoing journey of Fleur and her pals. You’ll find little treats from some of Fleur’s inspirations and influences, ranging from environmental advocates, C.G. Jung, and the mind-boggling wizards of quantum physics. You can sign up on the website to keep abreast of the latest news about Fleur and even reach out to chat with me via email or to schedule a virtual book club visit, which I particularly enjoy in these Zoom-y times.
And speaking of treats, I’d love to have you join me on Saturday, September 10th, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Pacific Time at my “hybrid” (in-person and via Zoom) Book Launch Event, where I’ll be reading from the new novel and signing books for those attending in person at the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. My books will be on sale at the bookstore, and guests who choose to order a book while registering for Zoom attendance will receive signed copies.
Registration is free, but you need to register to attend. Why not register right now? It’s easy—just click here!
I’d be delighted to see you in person or via Zoom at the celebration of this new creative baby, so full of the big questions that have arisen during these perilous times and striving in her own way to discern an answer or two.
