TRACI L. SLATTON
Author Blog
Fun New Review of THE LOVE OF MY (OTHER) LIFE
Momma’s Books blog — “So many books, so little time”– did a sweet review of my novel THE LOVE OF MY (OTHER) LIFE. Check it out.
“In the end I was left with a tear in my eye and a smile on my face! I enjoyed the story and I am glad that I took the time to read it. There are a few things that just get you to think.”
FALLEN & COLD LIGHT trailer
Here it is! Check it out in 1080, it looks terrific!
With thanks to Todd & Amara at Book Candy Studios.
Recently I met my beloved friend Gerda in Munich. Gerda is Bavarian; she and her husband Mark, a retired American army field officer, had offered to help me with research for the WW2 novel I’m working on.
Gerda is an extraordinary person: she’s present and conscious with an open heart. Always. I’ve been her friend for seventeen years and I’ve never seen her falter. Amazing. When she gives me advice, I follow it. Just before I got on the S-bahn heading to the airport, she gave me homework. She noted that it was, indeed, practicum to which she expected me to commit.
“Be soft and be happy, Traci,” she said, with her quirky smile. I engraved her words on my heart.
Her assignment goes to the core of an ache I carry with me. I’ve lived a life filled with karma both astoundingly fortunate and excruciatingly challenging. In the latter category fall attacks I’ve endured from intimates. Worse, the people who come after me, since they are close to me, know my vulnerabilities. They know how to twist everything to magnify my faults and to minimize my positive attributes. They know how to make it all my fault (whatever it is). The pattern is that they don’t take ownership of their own aggression.
This speaks to another of Gerda’s constant reminders to me: “Trust yourself, Traci. When people come after you, it’s their stuff.”
So it is with this personal liet-motif in mind that I read MIRACLES HAPPEN: The Transformational Power of Past-Life Memories. It’s a rich, beautiful book full of anecdotes about miraculous shifts in consciousness, shifts that deeply, profoundly, alter lives for the better. In concrete, practical, lasting ways.
The springboard for these shifts is past-life regression therapy. Dr. Weiss and his daughter Amy Weiss explain the process in lucid detail. They weave together the divers stories with gentle explication of spiritual learnings. Love is what matters. Our growth, our lessons, take infinite paths and forms, but the end point is the same: loving consciousness. We go through loss and humiliation and suffering, victory and grace and transformation, and we all get there, eventually. To a feeling-being-place informed by limitless love.
We are spiritual beings traveling in precious physical bodies, in companionship with our beloveds. The worldly obstacles and prizes on which we spend ourselves matter not at all, ultimately. They’re picayune when compared to the agency of the immortal soul. “Be soft and be happy,” indeed.
This book eases the ache. It helps me balance the immediacy of it all with the long view. The things that weigh on my heart wash out and leave behind the miracle of this heart, now, traveling through forever, finding beloveds along the way. This book leaves me grateful. I think it will ease the ache for anyone who reads it. We all carry our own ache.
I recommend the book softly and happily. It’s a spark of grace for anyone who opens to its light.
Business in Milan with my Italian publisher, Marco Tropea Editore, afforded me a timely opportunity to take a train into Bavaria.
I’m working on a new novel set in Munich and Berlin during the Second World War. For detail and realism, I need to experience a place. Reading books, listening to on-line lectures, and watching videos are no substitute for trudging through a city, absorbing through my pores the buildings and people and language, the smell of wurst and rich taste of Augustiner beer and slant of light through chestnut trees.
Munich is a lovely city in which to practice the writerly art of osmosis. Its buildings rollick through the ages, from the Romanesque Peterskirche to the neo-Baroque Justizpalast to the modern skyscraper Hypo-Haus. In the center of town, the Marienplatz bustles with a heterogeneous mix of people. It’s easy to get around because of the dazzling array of public transportation choices: the bus, the tram, the S-bahn, and the U-bahn–all very efficient.
In this world of dialectic, dichotomy, and duality, where there is beauty, there is found ugliness, and where there is light, comes the darkness. Lovely Munich’s history harbors astonishing cruelty. Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp and the deadly prototype for all others, lies twenty kilometers outside of town.
A story set in Germany during this time necessarily references concentration camps. Germans seem to agree. When I joined a tour to Dachau, which had been a munitions factory during the First World War, Tom the Welsh tour guide commented, “Germans study what happened here, they face it honestly. I regularly see school classes.”
Indeed, I spied a group of young people who looked like high school students. They listened carefully to their teacher, a bespectacled woman who spoke with a fierce thoughtfulness that elicited from them a corresponding intensity of focus.
Read the rest of my post here on the Huffington Post.
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My two favorite quotes of the day:
“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear
“Insanity is rare in individuals–but in groups, parties, nations and ages, it is the rule.”
― Nietzsche
I will be live on internet radio tomorrow 4/5 at 6:30 pm. Tune in here.
SABIN HOWARD SCULPTURE SHOW
The Italian Academy Foundation, along with the Institute for Classical Architecture and Art, will present the work of Sabin HowarSABIN HOWARD SCULPTURE SHOWd from March 2 to March 22 at the Institute’s historic west 44th street headquarters.
