Death is the Oldest Storyteller. He has been a part of every story ever told. Beginning at the last original apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, Death guides Maria through an awakening. Meet Joe Black meets The Giver, The Oldest Storyteller is a psychological fiction full of humor and wisdom about healing and finding a new beginning.
Excerpts coming soon.
A coffee table book idea.
As I was learning about plant medicines, I wondered what benefits household plants such as chamomile or sage might hold. Sage, for example, got their name because they help with memory. Plants have both male and female reproductive parts, so they get it. They are sick of being projected on—your words not theirs.
I meditate on the plant I’m planning to profile. I become amazed, absorbing all that I can about them: medical studies, history, references in literature, even what “people” like Charlemagne say about them. Echinacea was driving to Joan Jett on Mulholland Drive. Blue Lotus was at a hookah/shisha bar in Berlin.
I wrote three profiles: Chamomile and Sage for Reality Sandwich, and Mucuna Pruriens for the brand Sun Potion. I worked with illustrators Melissa Unger (featured) and Tamara Jafar. It’s meant to be a fun, educational read that redirects some of spotlight to plant life.
Haunted by the past, I was trying to put my life together on the page. I ended up getting so angry at linear time, so angry at this false notion of time, that I decided to break down the boundaries of time and space at Tiago Cafe on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I would enter Live Nation…twelve stories high…at the point I could not move past on the page.
I texted the wise screenwriter.
“You know how I say time bends? Well, I’m going to this Halloween office party to confront it all…”
“It’s an arbitrary line…”
“Arbitrary though it may be…”
How in the past is the past when it keeps showing up in different costumes? In this case, it hit too close to home. I was conducting a storytelling and psychological experiment. “I’ll see you on the other side…”
To letting it all go…
To hanging on too tight and denying that you are…
To the elevator breaking down the second this party started, so we had to take the stairs.
“I get it,” the wise screenwriter said later.
Despair. It’s true. In reality.
“High concept,” he had no problem with it. It was a good idea. “You just don’t have to explain the reality to me. Just put me there. Forget the line.”
I don’t know what this is yet, but I share it because I came up with “The Oldest Storyteller” while I was working on it—he just showed up at this never-ending party…and took me home.
In a little pink sweater on Thanksgiving and I will decide to step out of my current family to deal with my past.
I became a Storytelling Coach and English Teacher at a start-up investment firm called The Family after I graduated from École Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France. Helping people tell their stories, and learning and teaching languages is what propelled me to pursue writing.
As the Culture Editor at The Rogue Magazine in Los Angeles, I interviewed artists and entertainers. Moved by the outstanding results that “psychedelic medicines” were yielding, I ended up becoming a Senior Editor and Writer at Reality Sandwich, the editorial branch of a psychedelic wellness company Delic. Finally, I spearheaded an interview series on people of color making a difference in the psychedelic space for The Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines.
Carl Jung’s The Red Book meets Dante’s Inferno.
The mirror mirrors on the wall cracked under the force of Hades’ feet. I moved through the pieces. A cut across my cheek, blood, to the other side.
Across his cheek, he drew his hand.
“Feel.”
He flew from the shadows of the master bedroom like my father would in the middle of the night: half in moonlight, half in shadow in the crack of the curtain.
“Merí…now I leave you…”
“Thank you…”
Through a vast black, Hades moved between mirrors. He chased me down the beaches of Cuma, chariots of one working out horses in rows. Through the black I flew back without a vehicle, clouds of cosmic dust rising into a majestic wall.
“I am Hades—I am the gate!”
It was obvious; I was amazed.
“I have seen Gods die to become ordinary men and I have seen ordinary men die to become extraordinary men!”
He closed the doors to Hades like a statesman, reverently, for the mystery of Man to a vanishing point— the pupil of his eye.
“And you are one of them.”
“Impatients…”
I saw the orange geraniums cascading off a balcony, the afternoon time bended. A sunbeam hit my eye, and I saw a slit.
“And through a dark eye…”
The Oracle of Cuma drifted across canyon and sky: a dual image, man and woman.
“I walked through unknown territory…”
Standing at the front of a tourist boat, through the Fjords of Norway in the bitter cold, the Oracle of Cuma smiled against snowcapped mountains.
“Time is sensational, isn’t it?”
My mother whose real nickname is Dr. J gave me away to a total stranger when I was four years old. My father didn’t pick me up for four years. When I returned to her office of mirrors being obliterated, I decided to launch an undercover investigation into what just happened to me.
Dr. J was a pathological liar—or? She claimed that my father was a child molester, a rapist, and that she was dying from terminal illnesses. Was Dr. J a prodigy, prescient, or a tale as old as time? I thought to myself that perhaps it was my greatest strength—that I was a child doing this. What did just happen to me?
Vestibulum ornare nulla et turpis volutpat, rhoncus lacinia elit auctor. Quisque luctus purus neque, quis tristique felis venenatis vitae. Nam lobortis orci at erat bibendum, at fermentum ex tincidunt. Donec efficitur ligula at eros maximus mollis.
I started singing as a child. It was all I did, so when I went back to Naples at the end of my twenties, my relatives were shocked that I had stopped. Alongside this disbelief is the subplot in Christmas in Naples is a Sport. With long fingernails on one hand, my cousin Carmine struggles with his parents admirably to put his guitar aside when the time comes to get a “real job.”
Music is like breathing in Naples, so the whole family began singing to me upon arrival. I needed to learn the language as fast as humanly possible—give me the ancient expressions, the songs, I said. Love; they were so in love with their music, they became a chorus translating the songs in Italian all at once just for me—shouting, singing, laughing, disagreeing, breaking down poetry with their hands.
Aperitivi con amici?
“Drinks with friends” is the official kick-off for what I call “The Holy Trinity of Christmas.” We’ve been feasting nonstop for this moment—three days no pause: Eve, Day, and the Feast of Santo Stefano, also known as The Day of Leftovers.
Windows down, the sun was setting, cars were honking. “Gloria” by Laura Branigan was in the streets! We drove through Pomigliano d’Arco for an amusement parade of costumed elves and giant snowman exiting from cafes and storefronts ringing bells welcoming the cars—waving at us at the windows, at everyone.
“Auguri, auguri, auguri!”
“Gloria!”
I cried.
It was everywhere!
A DJ booth was set-up outside every cafe. A saxophonist even stepped out. Trees of Spritz on trays were frosty—crowds had bars surrounded, flooding into the streets. People were enjoying the show from their balconies up. At the bar, a silver coiffed man was singing Gloria! In Italian. He had piano accompaniment.
I had never seen so many Spritz on a tray in my life—flying high above a sea of black hair—very frosty. A tree in the center of this courtyard wrapped in Christmas lights, I could do nothing else but dance—the joy!
“Glora” by Laura Branigan was a Christmas anthem? It was a Christmas miracle.
The band wanted to know—what is Laura Branigan saying? What did all my families eat, what did they listen to? Music is considered food in Naples.
Music became a connecting thread through blood and water, so I’ll be sharing the songs and stories around them on my I Love You More Than Maradona blog.
Death is the Oldest Storyteller. He has been a part of every story ever told. As a master psychologist as well, the Oldest Storyteller guides Maria through many homes as her childhood comes back to life and she awakens to her feelings. What Dreams May Come meets The Giver, the Oldest Storyteller is a moving, humorous, and inspiring psychological fiction about healing and finding a new beginning.
“Time flies…”
It can fly in many ways.
