Alana Eisenbarth

As an explorer of the inner realms, I have often found it difficult to reconcile my findings with the outer realm. In fact, throughout much of my adolescence and early adulthood, my focus was on the darkness, the depressed states into which one is plunged when she cannot make sense of her world. Yet at the bottom of the emotion, when one learns to enter in, is a place at the center of us all, here, the end of mystery and its beginning, stillness and sustenance. When one asks how a world with so many madmen might not tear it down, when one asks why no nuclear war, this is why: those who find this place sustain us. These are the music makers; these, the dreamers of the dream. Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven... The rest is façade.

Thus, the ability to be consumed by moods to their heights and depths becomes portal to the mystic art; her temperament is volatile at first. What she sees around her, aside from the communion she shares with the natural realm, does not interest her. She seeks meaning. She seeks to know what she is and why she has come, and she cannot be satisfied until she knows. Those who seek find answers. Her journey (and consequently my first book) takes her through darkness, love, punishment, body as container, until she discovers (in the second book) the voice within her holds her purpose; until she begins to see it as the voice of her soul, her self in ascension, the highest form, God, what she grows into; until she discovers in telling a story one might be meditating, inhabiting a divine realm, the imagination indeed the intermediary between worlds.

By the end of the second book, I realized I was the story. I had raised my level of consciousness only to fall back again, this time with knowledge of The Fall. For there comes a point on the path of all seekers when every myth that ever was becomes one story, and ‘I’ the hero fall, eat the seeds, the fruit, let go the maiden’s hand, and shatter the vial at my heart.

I did not until late consider what it would mean to accept all of what was being revealed, to accept that what was speaking through me was asking something of me that once lived could not be denied. As long as Aurora existed, I did not have to accept responsibility for what was being asked. I did not have to be the mouthpiece for her message or for God. I did not have to risk ridicule, for it was not myself but a character in a book who was oracle for the divine. In this way, too, if I failed her, it was my failure and the repercussions were mine.

That said, the lyric dialogues that compose these books are as personal as they are universal. Aurora and her interlocutor speak as manifestations of the feminine divine and as such embody the entirety of female experience. In this way, they offer great insight into the predicament in which women find themselves today the brunt of so much violence, weakened in the roles they accept and play. In the words of the Pistis Sophia, “For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin.” To embrace these concepts and understand is to understand truly what we are and the powers that we house.