January 2025 update
Below is a synopsis of the memoir I wrote and have serialized here on Substack, in addition to a link providing the Table of Contents; a list of the chapters available — some for free and others behind a paywall.
Over time, I have played with the following 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
by Camilla Sanderson
What is the story?
This spiritual literary memoir, about a Manhattan couple who disappears into the nether regions of New Hampshire, and learns about life and love from a group of Thai Forest Buddhist monks, is perhaps where WINTERING: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May (Riverhead Books/Random House in 2020) meets THE ACCIDENTAL BUDDHIST: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still by Dinty Moore (Algonquin Books, 1997) with a little of THE ROAD FROM COORAIN by Jill Ker Conway (Knopf/Random House in 1989.)
Jamie was the Executive Director of systems architecture at JP Morgan, I was V.P. of subsidiary rights at Penguin Young Readers, and when hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc—a 100 mile walk around the massif that straddles parts of France, Italy and Switzerland—Jamie experienced his first symptoms of a debilitating illness.
In the wake of his diagnosis and treatment of a malignant tumor above his heart, we escaped our high-stress New York City lives to take a sabbatical in TreeTops, a decades-old log-cabin in the woods of Southern New Hampshire.
Serendipitously, I was led to study world religions in a local interfaith seminary program. Then, just as we considered moving back to city-living, a group of Thai Forest Buddhist monks moved in across the road.
I grew up in a counter-culture family in Australia, in a home built by my parents that was only accessible by water. Jamie’s American upbringing had been more conventional. But developing friendships with the Buddhist monks across the road, made us both reckon with the cost of buying into the overarching culture’s demand for high productivity and endless consumerism.
The memoir is a counter-narrative to the dominant patriarchal culture, for readers who are longing for a balance between being and doing; yin and yang; feminine and masculine; all of which are simply energies that exist within us all. The patriarchal hierarchies in our culture have suppressed the Divine Feminine for too long and it is time to alchemically transform those old wounds into personal and spiritual growth, and manifest into being a planet in harmonic balance.
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.
Author’s Note:
When I first began writing this Substack in September 2022, chapters were free to all subscribers. But then I made the decision to release chapters to read for free until one month after publication, at which point they are moved behind the paywall.
If a chapter is not linked in the Table of Contents, it means it has not been serialized.
At this point, to read past chapter 4, you will need to buy a subscription to keep reading — perhaps you can think of it as though you’re buying me a coffee to support this art and craft of creative non-fiction writing.
Enjoy!
Copyright © 2023 by Camilla Sanderson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or reprinted without the author’s written permission.
