Category: Possibilities

Where the Heart Leads – music video

Joe2 Comments

I’m excited to announce that I just published a music video for the second book in my “Journey of a Spirit Healer” spiritual fantasy series. The video’s title is the same as the that of the second book.

Watch Where the Heart Leads.

Once again, I had a blast creating the video. I worked with ChatGPT to create the lyrics and had great fun using Music AI Generator to create a song that felt more cinematic and adventure-driven than the first one.

The song follows Thom as his world continues to expand while he attends the Acadium, a school for children with a passion for learning. Life continues to lead him toward experiences he could never have anticipated. One is encountering a dragon, and the other is finding himself drawn to a boy his age,who is also studying to be a healer.

One of the themes running through Where the Heart Leads is something I’m quite familiar with: having experiences and learnings that point to different directions we might take, ones that we hadn’t imagined before. In those situations, sometimes all you can see is the next step. Yet, when you listen to your intuition, guided by your angels, you find the courage to take that step, trusting that the path will reveal itself.

Creating the video also gave me an opportunity to bring Thom’s world to life visually: Jonathan, Tovah, Mekial, Kami, the Acadium, and some of the experiences that shape Thom’s journey.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to watch it. And if you know someone who enjoys young-adult fantasy, stories about spiritual gifts and discovering one’s purpose, or LGBTQ+ characters finding their way, I’d be grateful if you shared it with them.

Where the Heart Leads, Book Two of Journeys of a Spirit Healer, is available on Amazon.

p.s. I’m hard at work on book 3 in the series, which make become a 6 book series rather than 5. The current plan is to release it early in 2027.

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The Dream I Had Upside Down

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Two nights ago, I woke from a dream about being in school again. In this one, I was studying for a test, reviewing chapters from the assigned book and reminding myself to go through my class notes next.

School dreams have been frequent for me over the years. In my frustration, I called out to my divine advisors, “What the hell are you trying to tell me this time? What am I failing to understand? Where am I lacking?”

Their answer came immediately and was quite lengthy.

You’re interpreting the dream upside down. You’ve been seeing it as a sign that there’s some deficit you have to overcome and feeling shame as a result. But it simply means that in some aspects of your life, you are a student. Think about it. Is there something wrong with a fifth grader because he isn’t a ninth grader? Is a senior in high school somehow a failure because she isn’t a junior in college?

No. The fifth grader is learning at a level appropriate for his developmental stage. The senior is studying topics fitting for someone about to graduate and pursue an advanced degree.

There’s no lack. There’s no failure. You’re right where you need to be. Embrace it and recognize those dreams not as something negative, but as a marker revealing that you’ve reached a transformative point and are about to enter the next stage of your development as an incarnate spiritual being.

Over the last twenty-four hours, I’ve been holding those messages tenderly, really trying to take them in. As I’ve written elsewhere, for much of my life I believed I wasn’t good enough and had to make up for some faulty or broken part of me. I believed the school dreams reinforced that.

How different might things have been if I’d recognized the true message behind them?

You might have noticed that even that question implies a lack on my part: a regret over something I should have understood. It’s a challenge to let that negativity go.

Have you ever had school dreams like mine? Have you also interpreted them negatively?

As my divine advisors explained, we are all beings in development, each at some stage in our lives according to our path. We are where we need to be. We’re not lacking. We’re learning, and before us are opportunities that invite us to grow and expand.

And my advisors have a final comment:

Celebrate who you are in this moment. You’ve come a long way. And that’s some achievement!

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Beyond What We Can Imagine

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I was raised in the Catholic faith. And honestly, even with a Catholic education, I didn’t spend much time considering what I believed. That changed when I went to college.

My first roommate was also Catholic but didn’t seem to follow some of its doctrines, particularly the prohibition of sex before marriage. His behavior confused me. My next roommate had also been raised Catholic but had become a born-again Christian and attempted to convert me. When he challenged my beliefs, I couldn’t answer why I believed them.

Thus began a time of faith exploration.

During that time, one thing that always annoyed me in books and homilies was the use of the word ‘mystery’ as part of their explanation, thus ending the conversation. Since I was studying engineering, my mind was being trained to think logically. Calling something a mystery felt like a ‘lame’ copout used by someone who didn’t have the complete answer.

Later, I studied theology in the seminary and had the opportunity to dig more deeply into Catholic beliefs and their origins. In the process, I discovered that the interpretations of every theologian or scriptural scholar didn’t always match. It freaked my engineering brain out until I realized each based their understanding on their experience and knowledge. That realization freed me to explore my beliefs from the perspective of whether they made sense to me and my experience.

For the next forty years, I continued my exploration through workshops, books, and podcasts. One thing remained important to me: everything had to fit together. In fact, it was frustrating when they didn’t. But a few months ago, I had a major aha moment.

As remarkable as the human brain is, it’s still part of a physical world and thus limited by what it can conceive as possible. Now some of you know that I love SciFi and fantasy. You would think it would enable my mind to go further. It might, in some ways, but beneath that it is still constrained by what is believable.

And suddenly, I found myself back where I started.

Mystery. Perhaps there really are things my mind cannot imagine or comprehend.

Now, that doesn’t stop my questioning. In fact, it opens that process up to allow things not to make sense and allowing my understandings to change and expand as the unexpected unfolds.

So maybe those scriptural scholars and homilists weren’t so lame after all. Well, some of them still were.

What about you? How do you hold the idea of mystery? Do you think minds are limited because they are contained within a physical existence? Can something you don’t understand still be true?

After all, we never know what’s waiting around the corner.

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