STARK RAVING ZEN

Sensing her mental well-being unraveling, a woman embarks on a road trip that proves to be a mind-expanding voyage of spiritual discovery in this memoir.

According to Sweetland, she had her first conversation with the spirit world when she was about 2 years old and still in her crib. After hearing a female voice say “Be careful,” she recalls a visit by three witches. She reflects that these spirits were “guardians” who would bear “silent witness” to her “life with an alcoholic father and a chronically depressed mother. Through the years of teenage anorexia, escapism with alcohol, and a sense of constant loneliness.” Growing older, the author forged a career in veterinary medicine, but after 20 years in the profession, she felt the urge to quit and take a road trip to California with her dog, Arya. Fate decided otherwise, and she found herself drawn to New Mexico. There, she tells readers, she learned that the guiding voice she had been hearing in her left ear was that of Mangas Coloradas, a 19th-century Apache warrior. The trip turned out to be a catalyst for a spiritual awakening that released her from the bonds of her torturous past. Sweetland depicts a range of phenomena she experienced—including visions, voices, and precognitive dreams—with a sedate, straightforward lucidity. Describing astral travel, she writes: “I left the deep cosmos and reentered the earth’s atmosphere, finding my house safely held by the surrounding fir, cedar, and pine-forested neighborhood. I phased back in through a wall, no need for doors.” The author’s willingness to gaze into the darkest recesses of existence may prove disturbing for some, as when she recalls her mother’s gruesome death following a battle with lung cancer: “As my mother’s crimson blood repainted the white sterility of the hospital floor; every red blood cell jumped from the sinking ship, pouring from her ears, her eyes, her nose.” Besides her ability to shock, Sweetland offers some pithy nuggets of wisdom, drawing on Zen Buddhist influences: “My identity is not my career. I won’t disappear because I’ve quit the only life I have ever known.” Skeptics will struggle with the bizarre nature of the author’s spiritual adventures while those open to ideas of mediums and the existence of higher dimensions should find this book enthralling.

A bold, if occasionally terrifying, personal account of spiritual transformation.