Waking Up in the Great Recession Mormon Desert
"WAKING UP is a fascinating account of two seekers trying to find sense and sanity in our contemporary world, which often seems deliberately designed to make people crazy. The lessons they learn can help anyone find balance in our chaotic culture." ~ Larry Dossey, MD, author of HEALING WORDS and THE POWER OF PREMONITIONS
"This book is a winner. It has everything a good book should have: suspense, excitement, pathos, joy, laughter—-lots of laughter—and great characters you care about and can genuinely root for! And it's non-fiction! But what it has most is love and wisdom. Profound, heart-opening love and wisdom. It is hands down one of the best books on spirituality and its role in meeting the challenges of our time that I have read. And did I say that it's funny, too? Be good to yourself and read this book. Be good to your friends and buy them a copy." ~ David Spangler, author of FACING THE FUTURE and SUBTLE WORLDS: AN EXPLORER'S FIELD NOTES.
WAKING UP IN THE GREAT RECESSION MORMON DESERT is a memoir. Following a series of recession-related miscalculations, it follows Sheryl Karas, and Paul Hood, a spiritual counseling and healing team, from their original home in the beautiful New Age, ultra-progressive town of Santa Cruz, CA to the unspeakably plain eastern Arizona desert. The timing is immediately after the election of Barack Obama and the passage of Proposition 8 (the law repealing gay marriage in California) and they coincidentally and inadvertently find themselves in an ultra-conservative Republican Mormon community. The result is at turns poignant and funny and eventually leads to a spiritual wake-up call that shows the importance of connecting the political and the personal in our task of developing spiritually on the planet.
This book might be described as Michael Moore meets Deepak Chopra if the story was told by a female blogger like Julie Powell ("Julie, Julia"). The book touches on issues millions of Americans have been going through—losing a job, a business, a home, facing bankruptcy. But it is also a story about choosing to live a creative, purpose-driven life, being guided by faith, and finding one's voice in a world that calls out for an end to polarity, injustice and hate. Ultimately, it is about community and reclaiming one’s connection to the greater whole.
