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SHARON HEATH

Who is Fleur Robins?

Fleur Robins is a skipping, whirling, socially clueless, Earth-reverencing, body-bemoaning, quirkily gifted young girl whose blossoming over the course of three books leads her from obsessing over the Void to discovering the pivotal role of the human heart in addressing our species’ direst dilemmas. Follow Fleur, the enchanting creation of novelist Sharon Heath, on the next leg of her remarkable journey.

 

 

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Sharon Heath's sequel to the Fleur Trilogy is available now!

Learn more about Sharon Heath and her latest book The Mysterious Composition of Tears.

Books

Articles

THOUGHTS

About

“The human imagination is a living miracle: our bridge to the wonderings and wisdom of the ancients, to the vibrancy of the present—and to world-altering possibilities. I’m drawn to write stories about socially awkward odd ducks and gifted outsiders who stumble from self-doubt and loneliness toward the solace of love, who sense the suffering of the Earth and seek the mysteries of the universe, who are flawed and goofy and occasionally scarily destructive, and who struggle to find the courage to face the void, sometimes finding within it seeds of renewal, gratitude, and even joy.”

“I ask the trees what purpose we humans could possibly have evolved to fulfill, given our disrespect for their beauty and the beauty of the interwoven natural order. They don’t reveal their secret entirely—they’re trees, after all, and a tree needs to preserve a decent amount of mystery—but they assure me that our species is here for a reason and that some of us are doing a fine job of it. So I want to give a shoutout to those of you who are trying to do justice to the faith of the trees. It would be a damned shame to disappoint them.”

“It’s times like these that we desperately feel the need to be holding each other and holding one another up, exchanging our fears and deepest hopes, sharing the light of connection by which we humans have made our way through the terrifying unknown—what The Fleur Trilogy’s eponymic heroine calls “the void”—for 200,000 years.”

“(I was) very depressed as a child…and I found precious moments of escape reading everything from the backs of Cheerios boxes to Anna Karenina. I just knew back then that writing stories for others to enjoy would be the most wondrous calling in the world. I also ‘knew’ that I might as well forget that desire, as I had no imagination. When…Fleur emerged from within me, chock-full of whimsical, dreadful, and unusual imagination, I realized that something long pent-up and previously invisible was getting released. The sweet irony is that my second—and also abandoned—ambition as a girl was to become an astronomer. The deliciousness of writing about an imaginative child whose insatiably curious mind inquires into the nature of the cosmos hasn’t been lost on me!”

BOOKS

Thoughts and Inspirations

“There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

Wendell Berry

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse."

Paul Hawken

“The question is not ‘Can you make a difference?’ You already do make a difference. It’s just a matter of what kind of a difference you want to make during your life on this planet.”

Mary Cowhey

“Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire. Because it is.”

Greta Thunberg

“Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth.”

Winona LaDuke

“There comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness... that time is now.”

Wangari Maathai

“You are the last, best hope of Earth. We ask you to protect it. Or we, and all living things we cherish, are history.”

Leonardo DiCaprio

“The sorrow, grief, and rage you feel is a measure of your humanity and your evolutionary maturity. As your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal.”

Joanna Macy

“Quantum physics is beginning to realise that the Universe appears to be a dynamic web of interconnected and inseparable energy patterns.”

Barbara Brennan

“To us the only acceptable point of view appears to be one that recognizes both sides of reality—the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical—as compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously. It would be most satisfactory if physics and psyche (i.e., matter and mind) could be viewed as complementary aspects of the same reality.”

Wolfgang Pauli

“The ‘paradox’ is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ‘ought to be.’”

Richard Feynman

“The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”

Werner Heisenberg

“If you are not completely confused by quantum mechanics, you do not understand it.”

John Wheeler

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

C.G. Jung

“The impact of an archetype, whether it takes the form of immediate experience or is expressed through the spoken word, stirs us because it summons up a voice that is stronger than our own. Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices....He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have helped humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.”

C.G. Jung

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”

C.G. Jung

“A life without inner contradiction is either only half a life or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels.”

C.G. Jung

“Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.”

C.G. Jung

“At times, I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing...with which I am not linked.”

C.G. Jung

I don’t know about you, but I have never met a weed I didn’t like…They… force themselves up through little cracks in the sidewalk, edging and pushing and sidling through, just so they can signal, ‘Here I am, sun!’ and breathe.”

Fleur Robins

“…geneticists tell us that we all descend matrilineally from an African woman they dub the Mitochondrial Eve. Can we even begin to imagine how much beauty, how much suffering, how many dreams deferred in the face of implacable reality were undergone by that Eve and all those who came after her? And how much we ourselves matter in the continued stream of life -- our charge to create, through our own willingness to suffer and to dream, an ongoing future that will honor and redeem our ancestors?”

Sharon Heath

“Among some indigenous peoples, the tribe gathers around a newborn child and sings to it its name. Later, if that person goes astray, the tribe circles the individual to again sing that name to him or her. When we remember who we are, we know how to act rightly. And, truly, if there ever was a time, now is the time to do the right thing.”

Sharon Heath

“Today—here, now—is a day to drop back in to the silence, experience the pull of gravity, hear the buzz of the dragonfly and the soft sighs of trees; sing a dirge to the extinction of the Eastern cougar, the Yangtse River Dolphin, and the Dusky Seaside Sparrow; and feel anew what it is to be poised in the vast void of space on the tip of a wild and fertile planet, continually bursting forth with new and astonishingly beautiful and strange forms, one of them us.”

Sharon Heath

“If, like me, you find yourself curled on the couch watching the Oscars with a nice, big bowl of popcorn, take a moment to reflect on how YOU are a star in the life of our planet and in the hearts of those who know you, and imagine how you’d like to more fully make your own conscious impact. From Fleur to me to you: go for it! Tackle that novel that’s been bumping around the corners of your mind, go back and get the degree you never finished, pen that letter to the editor you’ve been itching to write, save an orphaned animal, tell all the people you love that you love them. And dance!”

Sharon Heath

Blog

Singing in the Dark Times

Dec 6, 2017 |

Today I find myself turning again to those fateful lines from  Bertolt Brecht's Motto to the Svendborg Poems, penned in 1939: “In the dark times  Will there also be singing?  Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” In 2017, we humans (or...

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Love in a Time of Climate Change

Aug 26, 2017 |

We're living in some seriously dark times. Yet all around us ~ and inside us ~ the generous, green spark of life continues to bring forth new discoveries, new pleasures, new opportunities to dance our way into what Fleur Robins likes to call further incarnations of...

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Songs of Root and Sky

May 21, 2017 |

I'm a city girl. For most of my life, I've lived in SoCal, with a brief stint in Berkeley as a young teen. My family moved around a lot, but the closest we got to anything resembling raw nature was in my earliest years, when we lived just a few blocks from the Pacific...

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