This linked collection is part truth, part fiction. I personally did not walk on fire or find a body on a beach but a co-worker I knew did both, and as I wrote her story it felt like my own; I began to identify with the woman walking, with Jewel’s desire to confront her fears then to let them go, “into the fire.”
Jewel is an alter ego, “a second self, a trusted friend, the opposite side of a personality.” Travel offers a chance to try on new versions of yourself that you put on when you arrive and leave behind as you depart. Coming home, you reassess who you thought you were before you left and who you really are, or want to be. But this kind of internal shift can erupt anywhere, even at home, as you explore foreign emotions, or recognize what is extraordinary and always mysterious about everyday life wherever you are.
Here, Jewel navigates the stage of life between 25 and 45, from the day she finds a body on a wild California beach to crossroads encounters with mystics, lovers, beggars, surgeons, and sailors on the shores of Maui and streets of San Miguel de Allende, Lisbon, Larkspur, Mill Valley, and Barcelona. Falling in love, whether with the one she marries, her newborn babies, total strangers, or the places she goes, calls forth conflicting sensations: ease/excitement, pleasure/danger, attachment/release.
One eye sees and the other is blind as Jewel learns to love and grieve by staying in motion, finding and losing her way in the crowds and landscapes, heart cracked open.