The fever that gripped me for two weeks after my possession cooled after the textbooks were filled. Yet my poetic heart blossomed, and I spent my nights composing poems for muses that came into the bars I worked in around the world. Romances and lovers came along with my gifts, and I gratefully accepted every opportunity to share the intimate dances I had. When I moved to Vancouver, B.C. Canada, I quit working in bars, and so my outlet for composing ceased.
The dance continued, and as it did I met someone who I admired from a distance, though she was in my circle of friends often. Circumstances kept us merely friends, but my adoration for her grew over the time we spent together, my attraction to her deepening and forging a devotion that would eventually lead to the tome that I would call my ‘Imajica’ (the name of my favourite Clive Barker novel). A book of truly epic content, emotionally, fantastically, and imaginatively spellbinding.
Kathy shone brighter than many, lighting up the world from her heart. Her radiance was unparalleled. I was underdeveloped emotionally, tainted by my filters and behaviours, and unable to see that light and feel its glory until it was too late. Her radiance touched me and set me free to face the darkest elements of who I had become, and fearlessly acknowledge a lifetime from antiquity where the absence of love in my life had taken my soul into servitude to unrestrained evil.
I remember the joy at being able to spend the night with her at her loft, drinking Red Wine, deep in conversation, acknowledging that this was one of the only times we had been alone together, and how I had dreamed of this moment. She nestled into my arms late that night and I held her, feeling like my life lay ahead of me, her and I together. When I professed how I felt, the morning after she turned to me and said ‘I’ve chosen someone else.’
Ironically, this would happen to me again 15 years, with someone who matched Kathy’s light, and that incident would see me coalesce the love I felt into the book written by Pablo Wairua, The Eyes of Love See All. In Vancouver though, in 2001, I felt like the world had crumbled around me. It was devastating. I felt like I had prepared my entire life to be with Kathy, moving from experience to experience, each giving me more wisdom, crafting my awareness of self, opening my heart, furthering my trust in the process. Yet here I was, momentarily rudderless, bereft of understanding as to why this would happen to me. Kathy gave me her reasons, and I heard her, intently doing my best to acknowledge her, but my devotion remained.
A creative phoenix rose from within, spurred by the unrequited love that poured through me. The urge to express what I was feeling, what I was witnessing (from the past incarnations of my consciousness and hers) was overpowering. It was the kindness of my housemate, Zoe, who let me use her computer that provided me the outlet for my fervour. I wrote with such haste that the first draft of Sanctum was done within weeks. It was a stream of consciousness and I wrote like I was in a daze. The final edition was finished in 2017.
In essence it’s a love story. For me it’s looking at an alternative universe, where Kathy and I forge a different history, alone and eventually together. It takes us into our galactic and antediluvian pasts, for me its also about redemption from my past failings when I was incarnate at the fall of Atlantis (on this timeline, not an alternative one), as much as creating a new future of expansion for all life on this alternative Earth.
I have Kathy to thank for the inspiration for this wondrous book, my heart rests in knowing that I penned this illustrious tale and that my love was never in vain.
