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No writer lives on words alone. My work on this book has been sustained by an Indra’s Web’s worth of love and support from Chris Heath; Claire, Tray, Tahlia, and Braden Noble; the many streams of my Karson clan and the British wing of my family; Constance Crosby; Janet Muff; Judy Altman; Nancy Mozur; Robin Wynslow; Alison Crowley; Jeanine Roose; Suzanne Ecker; Pamela Kirst; Carol Blake; the late Judie Harte and Fred Erwin; Frances Hatfield; Leah Shelleda; Deborah Howell and Neil Baylis; Cydny Rothe and Roy Kushel; Molly Jordan; Kathie Clarke; Wendy Wyman-McGinty; Christophe Le Mouël; Robin Palmer; Harriet Friedman; Jane Reynolds; JoAnn Culbert-Koehn; Daniel House; Patty Micciche; Sadie Mestman; Sofia Borges; Elizabeth Trupin-Pulli; the Kickass Kindness Council comprised of Carolyn Raffensperger, Alison Rose Levy, Gary Anderson, and David Eisenberg; Yvette Cantu Schneider; Susan Rodgers Hammond; Marcella and Jay Kerwin; and those Krazy Katzenjammers, Clothilde and Finn.
I’m profoundly touched by the generosity of artist Sylvia Fein in granting me permission to use her exquisite painting, “Bound Together,” on this book’s cover.
A big thank you to Smoky Zeidel and the rest of my Thomas-Jacob tribe, and especially to the marvelous Melinda Clayton—what a blessing it is to have a publisher who gets my voice and advocates for it so intelligently and wholeheartedly.
My mother Ethel Karson was an inspiring embodiment of the generosity of the world soul; I owe my love of this glorious planet, the earthiness of my humor, my trust in my calling to write, and my commitment to future generations to her, to my father Charles Karson, and to my bubbie and zayda Bessie and Chaim Wodlinger.
I’m deeply grateful to the friends and readers of Fleur, who’ve kept their ears close enough to the ground and their spirits close enough to the stars to hear her and appreciate her story. It’s no small thing in this life to be heard.
And finally, I bow to that skipping spirit who beckoned to me over a decade ago, Fleur herself, who’s been my joy and my teacher, driving home to me the values of failure, contrition, curiosity, transparency, and surrender to the great mystery of love. With Pandora’s devils making hay on land, sea, and air, is there really any doubt whether we should pry open her pithos and attempt to earn its last ingredient by committing ourselves to the flourishing of future generations? The butterflies and the babies have already voted and continue to do so. Can we ourselves afford not to?
