Kindred Lights
By Kindred Lights
The memoir that generated the framework
There is a Thanksgiving table at the end of this story. The whole family — healed, no performance required, something a stranger might simply call grace. Getting there required everything she had.
This is the memoir of how one woman went from a holding cell floor to that table. Through a narcissistic marriage, three DUIs, a custody war, cancer, and a child in crisis — and came out the other side not merely surviving but transformed. Not into someone new. Into more of what she had always been.
The thing she had been searching for, it turned out, was never missing. There is something on the other side of the worst thing that ever happened to you worth having. There is. This is what it looks like.
“At a Miracles Workshop in Truckee, CA, I was witness to one of the most profound transformations I have ever seen occur in a person. She completely turned her life around by applying the principles of Radical Forgiveness. You cannot read this book without being changed for the better by it.”
Colin Tipping · Author of Radical Forgiveness
“If you will read only one self-help book — or one memoir — this year, make it Exalted Quest. The writing is intelligent, passionate, ultimately convincing. Here is the story of a woman who pulled herself up.”
Pacific Book Review ★ Notable Book
The third book in the Hero’s Path of Love series. The evidence behind the framework. The life the other books map. The carpet burns that qualify everything else.
The life before the floor. A Napa Valley wedding in silk and glass slippers. Two marriages. Three DUIs. A custody war that cost everything. Sir Ego at full operating capacity, certain he knows best.
The holding cell floor. Rehab. The karmariculum dream that named everything. Eight years of practicing the Five Steps in a demanding nonprofit — the ordinary conditions that turned out to be exactly the laboratory needed.
The children who became healers. The parents finally understood. The cancer that required a different kind of courage. The laughter meditation. The Thanksgiving table. The Wise One in full residence — and Sir Ego, improbably, her most enthusiastic ally.
Feature Screenplay Finalist — 2023 California Women’s Film Festival
The story recognized across formsFrom the opening chapter. The Napa Valley vineyard. The silk gown. The first hint of what was underneath the lottery.
Napa Valley in October is almost offensively beautiful. The vines had gone amber and crimson, and the light came in at an angle that made everything look designed for a painting. I walked down a garden aisle in a handmade silk gown and my nearly glass slippers from Harrods in London, the valley spread below us like a promise someone had arranged on purpose.
I believed every bit of it. I want to be honest about that. I was not young. I was not naive in the ordinary sense. I had read the books, done the therapy, logged the miles. I had also, some months earlier on a trip he had arranged to Bora Bora, already glimpsed the particular quality of his stillness when something displeased him — a coolness that moved through the room like a change in air pressure. I had filed it. I had explanations. He had chosen me, and that was the thing I kept returning to, the thing that made all the other things negotiable.
My script said: this is the one. Reality had filed a different brief.
From Exalted Quest: The Path of Love — Part I, Glass Slippers
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The Wise One doesn’t pursue. The kindred find each other.
