MEMOIR
January 2025 update
Below is a synopsis of the memoir I’ve serialized here on Substack, along with a link to the Table of Contents listing all available chapters—some free, others available to paid subscribers.
Working Titles
Over time, I’ve played with two titles for this book:
The Rising of the Divine Feminine and the Buddhist Monks Across the Road: A Memoir
Becoming Friends with the Buddhist Monks Across the Road: a Memoir of Reclaiming the Divine Feminine
What is the story?
This is a spiritual literary memoir about a Manhattan couple who retreats to the backwoods of New Hampshire—only to form unexpected friendships with a group of Thai Forest Buddhist monks.
Think:
WINTERING by Katherine May
meets
THE ACCIDENTAL BUDDHIST by Dinty Moore
with echoes of
THE ROAD FROM COORAIN by Jill Ker Conway.
At the time, my husband Jamie was Executive Director of Systems Architecture at J.P. Morgan, and I was VP of Subsidiary Rights at Penguin Young Readers. Our journey inward began on the rugged trails of the Tour du Mont Blanc—a 100 mile walk around the massif that straddles parts of France, Italy and Switzerland—when Jamie first experienced symptoms of a debilitating illness.
In the wake of his diagnosis and treatment for a malignant tumor just above his heart, we left our high-stress New York City jobs and took refuge in TreeTops, our fifty-year-old log cabin in the woods of southern New Hampshire, for what we thought would be a one-year sabbatical.
Serendipitously, I was led to study world religions in an interfaith seminary program. Then, just as we considered returning to city life, a group of Thai Forest Buddhist monks moved in across the road.
I was raised in a counter-culture family in Australia, in a home built by my parents that was only accessible by water. Jamie’s American upbringing was more conventional. But our deepening friendships with the monks invited us to examine the hidden costs of modern Western life—especially the cultural obsession with productivity and consumption.
This memoir offers a counter-narrative to the dominant patriarchal systems and explores the alchemy of spiritual awakening, relationality, illness, and ecological consciousness. It’s for readers yearning to rediscover a sacred balance between being and doing, yin and yang, feminine and masculine—energies that exist within us all and as described by Dr. Carl Jung as anima and animus.
Why this story matters
Our world is out of balance.
The suppression of the Divine Feminine—intuition, nurturing, receptivity, loving kindness, compassion, Earth-honoring wisdom long embodied by indigenous cultures—has led to profound spiritual and ecological crisis. But by reclaiming this energy within ourselves, we help restore harmony without. This memoir is both a personal journey and a spiritual offering: a story of healing, surrender, love, and rediscovering wholeness in communion with nature and spirit.
More and more people are waking up to the fact that when we do not live our lives in balance with the energies of the Divine Feminine and the Sacred Masculine, energies that indigenous faith traditions have honored since time immemorial — Mother Earth and Father Sky, Brother Sun and Sister Moon — we become unbalanced and we pay the price of stress, so often leading to illness in body, mind, emotions, and spirit.
Through re-claiming the divine feminine, we bring back the balance; offering a spiritual response to our present ecological crisis.
A Note on Access
When I first began publishing this Substack in September 2022, all chapters were free. Over time, I shifted to a hybrid model: new chapters are free for one month, after which they move behind a paywall.
If a chapter isn’t linked in the Table of Contents, it simply hasn’t been serialized yet.
To read beyond Chapter 4, you’ll need a paid subscription. You might think of it as buying me a cup of tea or coffee in support of the sacred work of creative expression, in this case through creative nonfiction writing. ☕🕊️
Thank you for reading, for supporting, and for walking this journey alongside me.
With gratitude,
Camilla Sanderson
Copyright © 2023 by Camilla Sanderson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or reprinted without the author’s written permission.
