The Wild Book is being born - and it's probably too early to tell you about this at all but I feel spring moving through me and I just . . . want to.

I’ve been quietly working on a new book, which I’ve titled, for now, The Wild Book.

It started last summer, after my stroke. Before the brain surgery—a simple procedure to coil off and neutralize the aneurysm they found. Surprise! A hidden fault line, a small rupture waiting in the shadows, only revealing itself when the ground beneath me shifted.

In those first weeks, everything felt urgent. My words, my memory, my ability to weave meaning the way I always had—what if I lost them? What if the part of me that knew how to hold a thread, to follow a story, to recognize a pattern in the chaos, was gone?

So I did what I have always done when faced with the unknown: I wrote.

At first, I thought The Wild Book was something new—something fresh-born in the wake of rupture. A record of what it felt like to stand at the edge of everything I knew, to look over the rim and see what remained when certainty fell away.

But as I wrote, I realized: I have been writing this book for years. For decades. For my whole life.

Every dream I recorded in my journals. Every transmission received from The Guides. Every thread of insight I followed. It was all part of the same wild light, threading itself through every opening in my life.

Maybe that’s how it always is. Maybe life is always weaving and reweaving us into new shapes. Maybe the stories we think we are just beginning have been quietly forming in the dark, waiting for us to notice.

And so, here it is. Or rather, here it begins to make itself known.

Over the next weeks and months, I’ll be sharing chapters, fragments, pieces of The Wild Book as they emerge. I don’t yet know exactly what shape it will take. But I know that I am following something real, something alive, something that moves and speaks in its own way.

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I’ll post them here on Becoming Real - and as the book develops, I’ll start putting them in order over at All The Books I’m Writing, the other space where I post. There (and here) I’m experimenting, trying this and trying that, figuring out how to make a book out loud right here on Substack.

I chose this photo, which was taken several years ago, because I like how it feels when I look at it. Here, I’m sitting in the little one room office I used to rent - at my enormous desk. Spiral sketchpad filled with scribbled notes beside me, propped against the window. I am holding a pen. I am smiling.