Foreword
An excerpt from the forward by Andrew Harvey:
I am honored to write the foreword to Day Breaks Over Dharamsala by Janet Thomas for three reasons: I have known Janet for four of the many years she has been working on the book and have been an intimate and awed witness to her unflinching heroic struggle with the material she presents. I was born in the sacred world of India and the lessons of my childhood’s exposure to India’s mystical cauldron of chaos and the wonder born from it have infused everything I have done and written. I find in Janet’s marvelous descriptions of India and in her stunned and transformational reactions to it the richest kind of confirmation. The third reason I am honored to be writing in praise of Day Breaks Over Dharamsala is that it is a masterpiece on many levels—as travel writing; as a passionate and wise account of inner revelation; as an account, at once restrained and searing of a great healing from the kind of extreme and prolonged abuse that most of us would have been annihilated by. Day Breaks is the rarest kind of book, an accessible, utterly human and wonderfully unsparing and intelligent description of the hardest task that faces a human being—that of transmuting, through surrender and great longing, horror into grace, soul-stealing brutality into universal, active joyful compassion, and unbearable trauma into a burning sacred passion for all life and all beings.....
Day Breaks Over Dharamsala is
a book of the highest seriousness of purpose, but it is also a delight.
It is a
book not just for survivors of abuse and for all travelers and
spiritual seekers; it is
written with such
nakedness and such grit and wit and jeweled panache that it is also a
book for
dog lovers, people passionate about pizza, gourmets of eccentricity,
bookworms
hungry for arcane information about British churches in the Himalayas,
and all
battered survivors everywhere of post-modern cynicism, corporate
nihilism,
consumerist fantasy, and religious fundamentalism, for anyone, in fact,
who in
Janet Thomas’s words “wants to know I have been alive before I die.”
Janet has cooked up a literary Babette’s Feast with enough pungent, spicy and enticing dishes to delight any palate. To have done so with such a shrewd and exuberant generosity of soul and such directness of heart is the greatest proof of the depth of Janet’s healing and the most blatant sign that Janet has learnt well from her soul mentor the Dalai Lama how to open her arms to everyone in the telling of her story and how to enchant them to rediscover—or discover for the first time—the holy enchantment of an ordinary illumined life. I once asked His Holiness at the end of an interview I had with him, “Why are we here?” He flung back his head and roared with laughter at the bald naiveté of my question. But he knew I was asking him seriously and so, when he had finished laughing, he said, very calmly and quietly, “We are here to embody the transcendent.”
Day Breaks Over Dharamsala “embodies the transcendent” in the journey it incarnates with such wisdom and in so lithe, dancing, elegant a prose, it helps us start to sing our own songs of redemption and begin living and acting from their radical wisdom.
--Andrew
Harvey, September 1, 2009, Oak
Park, Illinois.
Author of The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism.
