This collection of poems and prose poems sings the mysteries that fill the air around the beginnings and endings of life and around the holes and fullness in between. They build a mesmerizing concert of vulnerability, wounding, healing, loving, leaving. The author writes of the often unexpectedly shocking passages of aging with loss and grief, joy and acceptance. She names the danger of teetering on the edge of life and the agony of loving someone who lives there. The author helps us recognize the "breathmakers" when they are most needed. The language romps, soars on imagination, muscles through taboo topics and lights dark places. Through it all appears a theme of putting down roots into what really matters so as to survive and thrive in this complex, ever changing, sometimes frightening and still beautiful world we live in.
About the Author: Sashana Kane Proctor didn't earn a degree in creative writing from anywhere. Nor did she get one in psychology like she set out to do. She has a B. A. in German. (About that she comments, "Go figure"). She has an eclectic job history: preschool child care provider, substitute teacher, cost analyst for a cabinet manufacturing company, gallery director, real estate assistant, drug and alcohol case manager. She was born in southern California, has lived in southwestern Utah, Sacramento, the California central coast area and now resides in Sonoma County, California. It's all manna for a writer: very small people, also referred to as "children," so crammed with learning life, work world struggles, passion of artist souls, boom and bust, courage of addiction survivors, infinite beauty of all the places she has lived. Her work has appeared in Sonoma State University's literary magazine, Women's Voices, Harlot's Sauce, The Scream Online and in 2016 New Millennium Writings. Her play, "Life Sandwich of the Almost Old, a Play About Becoming Well Aged," was performed as readers' theater Guerneville, CA in 2014. And there's the life she has lived in the doing of all this: growing up in a sumptuous and complicated family, with its gifts and scars, deeply loving a man, birthing a home and family with him, learning the unfathomable depths of connection and the ruin in the death of marriage. There has been bearing sons and becoming filled with joy and the forever largeness of being a mother and, later, a grandmother. There has been the privilege of studying with wise teachers, importantly Malidoma Some, who brought the ways of indigenous life to light her own path to beliefs she found in her bones, and Francis Weller, M.F.T., who helped her save her own life, find her own spirit and taught her how to take it into the world. These liaisons led her to discerning how to walk adult women through a year-long initiation process to reclaim their gifts and their inner wisdom. This she did for ten years. And blessedly, there has been love, always love