Unreal to Real

I have long had a dream, an impossible dream.  I wanted to write a book.  I really love writing but then came a slippery slope, I started writing blogs.  Finally came the deathblow:  I started to want my blog posts to be meaningful, insightful and I wanted people to read them.  I went from being able to write quickly and easily to having to labor over everything that I wrote.  I feared that what I wrote would not be good enough, would not be wise enough or, worst of all, would actually be harmful to those who read it.

Over the summer, I came face to face with one of my greatest fears—which partly formed the fear that blogging awoke in me—and eleven days ago, I watched it evaporate in the intense heat of my yoga sadhana.  Since that moment, life has opened up to me more than it ever has and presented me, day after day, with exactly the experiences I feared most.  In every experience, I felt free to finally let myself go completely.  There were still moments of fear but they shriveled beneath the light that burns in me.  This post, however, is not about fear nor is it about that burning light.  This post is about one of the amazing things that has happened:  A Book.

For years I have dreamed of being an author.  I started writing my first novel at age 15 but I never finished it.  I have since started writing three other books, all unfinished.  Fear, that soul crushing fear, made sure that I never wrote, The End.  The fear is dead and this week I found something amazing that has given me the tools I need to write.  Now my fingers have taken on a life of their own, words fly off them onto this keyboard or through a pen.  I woke at 5:30 this morning and this happened:

Mind Maps!

At first glance, they may not look like much but those two pieces of paper are astounding.  They are maps.  The one on the left maps out 14 books that are just screaming for me to write them.  The one on the right is a map of the lucky book I start writing today.  If you enlarge the image and look closely, you will see parts of the maps.  The book map seems to reveal a common theme, can you guess what that theme might be?

The second map reveals some of the topics in the first book.  You probably have a good idea what the overall theme is by now but, looking at the second map, you really have to ask yourself one question:  Zombies?

Jai Bhagwan!