Never Give Up
Dear Painting Friends Worldwide,
After 23 years of incubation, my little fairy tale allegory is finally published… a story to help the world, The King Who Sang The Song of the Grandmother. This is a labor of love, not to make money.
Paperback ( $5.49) and Kindle (99¢) on Amazon.
Read sample of book and ORDER A PERSONALLY SIGNED PAPERBACK (available in US only).
I need your help. The story needs to be a movie. Do you know any movie producers? Directors? Any connections in the movie industry would help.
Let me tell you how the idea got started 23 years ago.
It was 1998 and my book, Painting From The Source: Awakening The Artists’ Soul In Everyone was just published by Harper Collins in English-speaking countries around the world. On a dark cold winter night near Hudson, New York, I watched a video movie about the life of Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus, the 14th-century French astrologer, physician and reputed “seer,” who accurately predicted future devastating events such as plagues, the French Revolution, and World War I and II.
At the end of the movie, I was deeply touched by his agony witnessing mankind’s endless destruction—humans never learning from their mistakes. I experienced a compelling passion to help in some way, as if Nostradamus was personally calling to me across the centuries. His plight got me thinking about the root cause of endless wars, cruelty, destruction, and what I could do to contribute to a shift in the collective human psyche, which is what I knew was required—that is, a quantum shift in the collective human psyche. All my varied life experiences (and possibly Karma) seemed to come together with an idea…we need an international blockbuster movie, a Hero’s Journey about a powerful, ruthless, charismatic American businessman whose industry is harmful to the environment. In this movie, our hero must go through hardships and ordeals from which he emerges redeemed and transformed…with a radical change in behavior. He must go on a “vision quest” in the wilderness, and the audience must go through this transformational experience with him.
I could see the movie in my mind, scenes, and characters, but I am not a writer, and try as I did, I was not able to write the contemporary story with believable characters and plot. But a strange thing happened. When I wrote the story in the form of a dreamscape fairytale it began to flow: “Once upon a time, there was a powerful King…”
Over the years I wrote the fairy tale story in fits and starts. I procrastinated. I moved to Ojai, in southern California in 2006. I thought the movie should be screened before the end of the Mayan calendar (2012) so I went back to work on the story in 2010. I looked for a screenwriter to write the screenplay. After all, I did live in the backyard to “movie land.” But no luck. The end of the Mayan Calendar came and went. I watched the world sink deeper into disaster, repeating and escalating the same mistakes as in the past.
In 2016 I moved to Oracle, Arizona and after renovating my new home studio, I turned again to the story that was haunting me. I realized in 2019 that I just needed to get the fairytale version self-published so I had something tangible to show a movie producer. But still, my painting workshops, needs of the home, and family took precedence.
Now in 2022, two years into the pandemic I feel the isolation; with global warming escalating I feel the extreme erratic weather; with political polarization I feel the pain of losing friendships. In the summer of 2021, the ending of a brief intense love affair threw me into a soul spin. Personally, all the unconscious sins of the past came back to bite me, while at the same time, all the collective sins of the past are further threatening existence in our world. Now, there is no choice, no place to hide, no place to run. No excuses. It is my Soul duty. The story must be completed, the baby must be born so I can move on. And so it is.
I don’t know where the story will go, if it has merit or not, but as the steward of the story, I must launch it into the world sink or swim. Maybe it is worthy of inspiring a skilled movie producer or director. As Victor Hugo famously said, “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” Be it so!!
Love and bless,
