The Ten Thousand ThingsA Coming of Age Spiritual Memoir
How do you make peace with a cold, distant mother who is slowly dying? In her debut memoir, The Ten Thousand Things: My Mother, The Desert, and Life on the Colorado Plateau, the author was faced with this very question. Diving in to help her, she soon recalled harsh, lonely childhood memories in remote red rock country, during the West’s dam-building era. There, she escaped her silent home by wandering outside—befriending lizards, plants and the native sandstone landscape.
Alongside her sisters, the author navigates the maze of her mother’s needs and sees her through her final days, but then finds herself at a dark abyss filled with ten thousand unanswered questions.
Who was her mother, really? What made her so secretive and unable to connect with her daughters? What was she hiding, and why? The author’s young memories hold clues that lead her back to her parent’s hometown, where she spent long-ago summer weeks at her grandmother’s house. There, a spry, 90-year old aunt now willingly shares old tales about both her parents. With her aunt’s help, the author finally fills in—yet doesn’t find—a singular meaning resolving who her mother was.
Come along on this soulful, generational journey of loss and love. Find a deeper acceptance of family, belonging, and a surprising meaning of one’s own purpose, illumined by a universal Love that shines through all beings everywhere, including ancient peoples there from the beginning of it all.
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A Note From the Author
“I wrote this book to explore and share the stories I carried as a child—-how I craved a mother’s love, and struggled with often frightening relationships with other family members. As an adult, these early experiences of emotional neglect left me feeling ashamed, lonely, and undirected in my life. If you’ve felt this way too, this book is also for you, and will inspire you. Find yourself in these tenderly woven childhood stories, and see the hidden treasures your own unique journey holds for you.
I grew beyond invisible silences of patriarchal stereotypes and sparse family of origin expectations and was challenged to live my life quite differently from others in my family. If you also achieved your dreams financially or professionally, but in mid-life dared to follow your heart into an authentic, passion-filled livelihood, you will recognize your own courageous hard won story and be held by the daring of this adventure.
I wrote this book especially for daughters of cold mothers who could not really love them, yet who were resilient enough to delve into the shadows of their early environments, and find there riches of deeper understanding that connect each of us to our wholeness. This story is for you. You may find, as I did, that family elders hold knowing, and ancestors long gone have sent messages through their actions down the lineage to be unraveled and absorbed at just the right time.
Bring yourself into this healing balm of a story, rich with the presence of universal Love and the grounding magic of Grace found in timeless spiritual traditions, lived through my own self-acceptance, and unfolding expression of the Divine Feminine.
Come and explore with a child’s fear and wonder the enchanting red rock desert of northern Arizona and southern Utah’s canyon country. Travel into the beauty of Zion National Park, and into breathless vistas and canyons sacred to the Navajo, Hopi, and other tribes whose ancestral homes are found throughout the Colorado Plateau. Learn how one child fell deeply in love with these landscapes, and the living and ancient cultures that inspired her to seek what she loved, and to find a deeper acceptance of all the parts of herself. Celebrate yourself, too as you see how she moved through family of origin adversity to find love for herself and for community around her.” ~Debbi
Debbi Flittner is a licensed psychotherapist and former lawyer who has followed the spiritual thread of her life for thirty five years. She lives with her husband and two cats in their overgrown cottage outside the city limits of Portland, Oregon, near her daughter and grandchildren. She returns frequently to her much-loved red rock country of the Colorado Plateau, and to the Rio Grande valley. This is her first book.
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