Boundless Has a Birthdate!
My memoir about how we are always becoming someone new is arriving with perfect timing -- on a day of rebirth, Winter Solstice, which happens to be my birthday. Mark the date -- 12.21.2024!
It seems I have written a wee book about rebirthing yourself, and now it has a birthdate! Boundless arrives 12.21.2024. It’s my memoir about how, when you have become no one, you can become someone again.
That’s Winter Solstice, and perfect timing for a book that’s about reawakening. It also happens to be my birthday!
So mark the date, and let yourself be invited into a conversation with me about how to rebirth yourself when it feels like your life has reached the still point.
The story of Boundless is about regaining your emotional agility so you can see beyond what you’ve lost and where you got stuck in the first place.
Boundless is available for pre-order!
BOOKSHOP - proceeds go to Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque
Winter Solstice: The light returns
I had the good luck to be born on the point on the calendar when we turn back to the light. Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere is the darkest of the darkest nights, and the longest. The dark is so deep that we still, even with our bright city lights, feel how deep the dearth of light can be. That can feel like despair. We need hope.
At this point, it can feel so dark that it seems senseless to hope for the sun to return, and that is how our ancestors felt when it seemed they had lost the life-giving light.
(It is not an accident that so many spiritual traditions see this time as a season of light and coming together with pure hearts. We bring the firelight to the hearth, light candles and say prayers of peace together. We need that!)
As we head into the darkening days—it seems the light is fading fast at the end of these autumn days—it is a time to ask deeper questions about your life and prepare for the season of dark. Let the dark bring renewal.
Rebirthing out of the darkness
While Boundless is my story, I see it as a portal to all stories about rebirthing. As a writer and a book coach, I believe that the particular points the way to the universal. In other words, the vividness of specific experiences of a character, whether in memoir or fiction, can feel so visceral that it matters not whether you have lived my particular life in my particular place and time. Odysseus is Leopold Bloom is every man. Juliet is Scarlet O’Hara is Taylor Swift is every woman. Dublin is Brooklyn is Bethlehem is every city.
In fact, I call this deft literary technique “The Law of the Particular is Universal.” The great Irish writer James Joyce says it this way, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world."
Because it is vivid, because it is visceral, the particular gets to the heart of things.
[Read more here about why I say the self is the highway to our stories—and why I’m a reluctant memoirist.]
The dark before dawn
My particular brand of not-seeing through the dark was the impending empty nest. As a single mother of twins about to graduate and go anywhere-but-here, I was profoundly aware that in raising two brilliant children with uncanny life skills, I had ushered in my own undoing as a mother. In just eight short weeks, two-thirds of my family would be gone.
When you have become no one, how do you become someone again? That is the big question I had as an author and magazine journalist, my beautiful birds about to fly away and the journalism industry I loved so much in a death spiral.
Boundless is a story about how it had to get dark before it got light again. When we rebirth, we let go. We come back into the world with songs of innocence. We become pure and simple again. I experienced a summer of living without things, and then I realized my house had been filled with useless things.
This story of becoming is like so many other stories of becoming: To reinvent ourselves, we strip away tired old narratives so we can be eager and receptive to new ways of walking. This is so liberating that it can leave you breathless.
For so much time during Boundless, I lived on the rarefied air of becoming. First there was the call of the horizon to my twins. I wanted them to soar. Watching them soar felt like I was soaring. Then my turn came—with a hard thunk.
Making a fierce entrance
Birth is a fierce entrance. At first the oxygen feels like poison. The first thing you need is great care. You are a vulnerable creature. You have not quite arrived. A baby may squall in a burning red reluctance to be here, while a mother and father cry tears of joy.
Rebirth is a passage through the dark. All the elements are unfamiliar and threatening again. We may only have in us a lament for the world we’re leaving as we retrace our way to the light. But entering the dark is how we harken our senses to the dawn. To things we haven’t heard or seen until now.
Boundless is about turning your face to the light. Can’t wait for it to be born!
We Move Lightly
Thanks for reading. Let’s play it out with this track, which for me captures the youthful spirit of play and delight, the way we enter the world—and the way we can re-enter the world when we need to feel the unbearable beauty of just being alive.
We Move Lightly, Dustin O’Halloran
More posts on “Behind the Scenes with Boundless”
Welcome to My Book! Boundless Has A Cover Now
Why My Book is Nothing But a House of Cards
Why the Acknowledgments at the Back of Your Book Are a Gratitude Practice
Why I Wrote Boundless, and Why It Wouldn’t Let Me Go
Why Writing Your Book Will Change You As Much As It Will Change the World
From Lived Experience to a Book: The Path of My Memoir, Boundless
More writings on Winter Solstice
I’ve written about the Winter Solstice before. It seems to be one of my “assignments” on this earth, given the day I was born.
On how creatives can draw upon Winter Solstice to find renewal:
“We’ve Turned Back to the Light: The darkening days leading into Winter Solstice are fertile for creatives, when we can excavate the heart, find the hurting places that need solace and tune up the softer heart that forgives.”
https://medium.com/@carolyndawnflynn/weve-turned-back-to-the-light-ddf32f3c56a8
On finding your originality during these darkening days, and discovering your creative voice:
“The Season of Reassurance: Winter Solstice and Uncommon Creativity: Originality can flourish in these darkening days if we are willing to listen to the inner voice”
The pub date makes it even more really real. Congratulations!
So many congratulations, dear Carolyn! Happy birthday to you both!