Maya and the Gordian Knot

Maya and the Gordian Knot is a startlingly honest examination of a friendship forged out of mutual loss. Michael and Jennifer have both lost their respective spouses. Newly acquainted, they brave the uncharted terrain of grief's free-fall. The ballast they provide for one another in the grittiest of times is finally what the book is about. And they discover, together, what lengths friendship can travel in the most hopeless of life's moments. The format of the book honors their separate voices, mining the difference that gender and type of loss might offer.  It is also an investigation of desperate madness--a hard look at the bewilderingly unstable geography of grief.   At the conclusion of the book the authors  own up more fully to their shared world as professional musicians.  They look closely at how music both creates and shapes us, circumscribing our lives as the unnoticed medicine of body, mind and heart.

This is the story of survival. Of learning again how to breathe, to trust the stability of your bones to support your standing up to walk out the door into another day. Maya and the Gordian Knot speaks to the courage of the simple acts, the unreguarded heroism of being, This is the frank conversation between a man and a woman newly met in grief; the testament to their efforts to articulate the strange, unboundaried world of death. The format of the book honors their separate voices, mining the difference that gender and type of loss might offer. It is also an investigation of desperate madness--a hard look at the bewilderingly unstable geography of grief. At the conclusion of the book the authors own up more fully to their shared world as professional musicians. They look closely at how music both creates and shapes us, circumscribing our lives as the unnoticed medicine of body, mind and heart. We all die. People and creatures we love dearly, die. We are breathed in and out of life in a predictable rhythm--and yet knowing that doesn't seem to mitigate the pain of loss. Our response to one another in the moments when time collapses, when reliability has suddenly and utterly vanished, makes us who we are as a community. We need to be able to talk about death, to talk about the nature of grieving and to abide with those among us who are lost in roaring uncertainty--we need to hold the filaments of dailyness about them until the ground reemerges under their feet again. And we need to talk about how to do that well--because if we have loved, it's a descent we all face. Maya and the Gordian Knot slips us inside grief's skin in hopes that we may become better friends to one another when we face the worst.

Jennifer Schloming lives in Southern Oregon, with her partner Jim Marin and a 17 year old Maine Coon cat. Over the years, the family homestead has been faithfully guarded by 3 trusty yellow labradors, the last of whom just went into the ground. She makes her living as a conductor, teacher, music director, pianist and vocal coach. Her current book-in-progress is BeseechingWisdom:Justifying60. HersonGalen,amusical theater graduate of Northwestern University, is currently in L.A., preparing to launch the next round of national auditions.