About Book
Day Breaks Over Dharamsala was a 20-year writing journey that started in 1990. A year later, I moved to an island to finish it. I had no idea that I had another twenty years to go. To begin with, it was a book full of anguish, fear and loathing--for both self and other. It had no redeeming humor, no redemption, and no India. It chronicled a different trip, to California, down a highway of recrimination, shame and rage. I had a lot of healing ahead of me. Throughout the years this book was hot on the back burner of my life. I knew it was the book I had to write before I died; but until India, I didn't know how to write it. Which doesn't mean I didn't write it. In 2004, before leaving on that trip, I had more than 350 pages written. I intended, finally, to finish it when I returned home. Instead I got depressed.
Getting home from that first trip to India sent me for cover--literally: I couldn't come out from under the bed covers. I hated being home. I hated living in paradise. I hated my clean and tidy neighborhood. I hated the beauty of it all. This was a very weird experience. I stayed under the covers wondering why I felt this way. What did it mean? I didn't know that India was going to change my life. I didn't even now it had--until I was wrestling in bed with such profound and bewildering depression. What exactly was I missing? And why was I missing it?
Answering these questions laid the foundation for what this book became--a romp through the exhilaration of India and the exhilaration of realizing my own freedom. These were two inextricable experiences. When I came out from under the covers I realized that I could start the book over and write it within the ecstasy of those weeks in India; and by doing so, I could slip in the agony at well-timed moments. I could also re-live the joy of the journey and anchor it more firmly in my life. So, it is a book of technical contrivance. It is also inspired by what I have learned about the act of writing: Intention is everything. I tossed my hat into the ring of intention and trusted the writing. I rode the wave of the present tense through my journey to India and I told the truth about my past.
Although I had no idea that I would actually be writing about the trip, out of long-standing habit I took a skinny reporter's notebook for journal jottings. Then, at the very last moment, my son sent me off with his small point-and-shoot digital camera. India was so visually intoxicating, and the digital image so cheap and easy, that I went nuts with the thing. This was a tremendous gift because when I realized that the book I'd started so long ago could now ride India over the finish line, I had all this visual reminder and reporter's resource.
I did not map the book out ahead of time. As the trip unfolded through the writing it opened up moments from which to depart from the journey and enter the wilderness. All I could do was trust this would happen. It is the one true thing I have learned about writing--if I let it, it will happen. I cannot think my way through anything, let alone an entire book. I had to feel my way through the dark and light of language. There is no way out but through. I know that. Writing it, however, is a whole different story. So most of all, I let it write me.
There were many drafts. Literary agent, Ned Leavitt, encouraged me into the depths. For this I am profoundly grateful. Otherwise, my courage would have faltered and the difficulties detoured. And when there was no immediately enthusiastic publisher, Ned encouraged me to self-publish. This, too, was a great gift. In the end, I got precisely the book I wanted.
Now it's up to the reader.
