Zen Love

Obsessive Traveler. Soulful Explorer. Spiritual Seeker... how can someone like this choose to follow love and become an ordinary suburban PTA-parent? Ready to follow love instead of denying it. Wanting to resist, she can't. Joining a ready-made family needing nurturing, she comes to realize, is the path to Self-Love she'd always sought.

Serving others intrigues this former She-pirate, now wife and Angel Mom. As she nurtures others, she evolves. But that doesn't stop shit from happening.

Imagine the world as it is quickly becoming. People inter-relating in extended families, bridging previously uncharted barriers that reach as far as human yearnings. In the USA alone, divorce and family disruption happen to over half the population. Everyone is affected by tightly-knit groups, tribal families, busting up. But that doesn't change our having integral roles in the human family's story. Humankind is, after all, descended from the same humanly-blended family. True, we are in our difficult puberty stage, just like any problematic teenager is: not quite fully mature.

This love story is actually a many-person allegory. A multi-decade saga of challenges every one of us has to face, sooner or later, when difficult people and their impossible behavior creeps too close. Zen Love glides easily from awful to wonderful just as true life, too, brings with every choice encountered. Captured in vivid narrative, we come to intimately know the major players surrounding the spiritual journey of this blended family. Each true account seems stranger-than-fiction, meeting intolerable people and their heinous behavior amid the banality of a small town. Lord, author of three previous books, breathes life into this true drama of what could be called a horror, by those less willing to believe that "Things are not what they appear to be."

The final destination of this blended family-the same as everyone wants from life as well as from an engrossing story-is the opened-awareness needed to choose happiness. That opening, the mythological Big Heart, is where we meet, equally, together. It is the inside place within each of us, where Zen Love originates. teZa Lord's true story directs us toward-and proves-that we are all one big blended family of humanity.