#6: Far Away So Close

"Mama used to say that music was the essence of the human soul, and the only true religion. Not just the music that comes out of saxophones and trumpets and vocal chords, but MUSIC—the rhythm of being, of knowing and not knowing, of trying and growing and sharing. The rhythm, she would say, of MIND and SPIRIT." Chapter 7 from "The Last Sandoval", a novel I'm peddling to agents, about a shell-shocked twenty-year old LatinX writing in a diary from a shack in a State sanctioned shantytown in a near-distant future (2077) where she has lost her beloved mother, as well as her aunt, uncle and maternal grandparents to the consequences of a too “slow-to-come-to-Jesus” socially unconscious, climate-blind industrial plutocracy... Writing her way to a sense of hope and love and bone-deep feeling where they had each been frozen senseless by the times.