A Tapestry becomes a Book

My earliest memories center around the air raid drills of WWII when our family would huddle under a tent constructed of blankets on the tiny back porch of our home in Sanford, NC. My father, a minister, would hold a small, lighted candle and try to explain “war.” My immature mind just could not grasp why people would kill each other just because they couldn’t agree on something. Today my more mature mind is still haunted by the same question, especially when I catch myself in anger wishing the source of my anger (usually a person I love, or they would not have had the power to hurt me) would just drop dead. At some early age, these concepts of love and war began to weave a mysterious tapestry that has hung in the shadows of my thinking for years.

From time to time, I would be made aware of how love and war each elicited our most intense passions and fears. They both possess the power to tap into our deepest fears and our highest hopes. Fear is the basis for war. Hope is the basis for love. Both states place our very souls on trial. One could destroy us and the other could save us. For most of my life, I've focused mainly on the love threads in my mental tapestry. My first two published books explore why and whom we love and how to resolve relationship problems. However, during this past decade, I have become critically and painfully aware that the threads of fear, greed and control have the power to destroy love, our planet--and therefore, ourselves. When we deny them within our psyches, they grow, like mushrooms in the dark, and can dominate our thoughts and behaviors. It then becomes easier for us to follow leaders, who are ruled by these darker aspects of human nature, into unjust wars.

I began to realize that to fully understand human nature I must expand my psychological perspective to include our evolutionary biological history. If I were going to make a serious effort to control my own "demons'--always lurking in the shadows of my mind, ready to sabatoge me and my relationships, I needed to get help. I guess when the author is ready to stretch, a co-author apprears. In this case, it was Rudolf Harmsen, a biologist, retired from Queens University (Kingston, Canada) who shared my interest, my curiosity and my love for writing. We formed a team over five years ago to unravel the mysteries of the human tapestry and from those threads produce a book that could help us understand why we have turned so easily to destructive wars to resolve conflicts and why we must be willing to make alternative choices and some sacrifices. Our choices must be based on cooperation and compassion rather than deadly competitions, involving weapons of mass destruction, if we are to survive as a species beyond this century. We have recently completed the first draft of our book, Love and War: the Dueling Shadows of Our Minds. It has been written as a prescription to educate our minds and hearts as to how we could end war and create more enduring love. The purpose of my blog is to interest you in joining us so that we can live more peacefully while sharing our planetary home.