“An astonishing book. It tells of the determination of love, its capacity to transcend and earth, its refusal to stop before the membrane between the lovers is breached and truth – real, felt, undeniable, unmanufactured truth – emerges.” Claire Gilbert
“an epic of travel and a rich testament to an enduring love.” Colin Thubron
Geography of Heaven: Travels to the Hereafter tells the story of my journey from brokenhearted sceptic to luminist of the shimmering awareness that touch every life.
When my wife Katrin died four years, I needed to know where she had gone. To find her, I embarked on a globe-circling journey to the places where the veil is thin, where our physical world touches the divine. I watched gods walk on fire, heard the voices of water, lay my hand on the stepping stone to another world. On the Great Plains, I sun danced with the Lakota. I felt the rising sun warm my skin in a Himalayan Buddhist sanctuary and atop County Mayo’s sacred Croagh Patrick. On Jacob’s Rock where angels once descended to earth on a ladder, I spent the night avoiding being shot. In Delhi, I was told “the universe will keep sending you loving souls to guide you on this journey” and it did, opening doors, revealing wonders beyond my imagination, until – in five truly extraordinary moments – Katrin was beside me.
Geography of Heaven is the story of that journey, of moments of astonishment and awe, of steps taken with hope and love. Hope “that leads to blissful end” wrote Dante. Hope that “is of the joy to come” as the light from many a star. Hope that can be found in all the world and love that calls to our souls, love that can but lead to truth. Four years ago I would never have believed that this inexplicable enterprise could lead me out of the darkness to an understanding that none of us are created for naught. We are links in a golden chain, bound by connections, performing acts of love the like of which touch every life. We all are gifted brief, scattered moments of shimmering awareness that alight us in the presence of something overwhelming, something mysterious.
Why I Wrote Geography of Heaven
At the start of my search to find Katrin, I was a kind of anthropologist, an objective ‘participant observer’ darting around the globe taking notes about other peoples’ customs. But as my journey unfolded, and as if willed by the unimaginable, I shifted away from a meta perspective, away from the left to the right hemisphere of the brain. I cast aside the notion of being separate. I abandoned academic objectivity. I listened and learnt through lived experience. I embraced ambivalence – the coexistence of opposing attitudes – and accepted the transcendent, that the soul exists.
Marks ‘of externality or otherness’ – to quote C. S. Lewis – added proof for the rigid, mechanistic, rational mind that not only do we live on, not only is there harmony between man and the universe, but that our lives and God’s are one.
As Wordsworth confessed in ‘Tintern Abbey’:
I have felt A Presence . . . . . . a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused . . . A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought And rolls through all things.
I didn’t set out looking for God. I wanted to find my wife. And I believe that Katrin opened a door for me. With her I took a first step towards the beyond. She showed me that when we take our last breath we don’t die. We diffuse into the unity from which we all came, the grounding basis – the primordial transcendence – of all religions. I know now that ‘the dead are invisible, they are not absent,’ as wrote St Augustine, that we remain closer to Allah ‘than his jugular vein’ as states the Qur’an. I am neither prophet nor oracle but – simply put – this was a journey that I had to make.
Read an extract of Geography of Heaven
Four years ago today I set out on a path with no idea of where it would lead, of how long it would take or that my life would change for ever. I stepped through the doors that opened for me and discovered wonders beyond my imagination. I watched gods walk on fire, heard the voices of water, lay my hand on the stepping stone to another world. I woke at midnight to the roar of the Pacific. I danced with the Lakota. I befriended a Zulu healer who retrieved a stranger’s stolen name. I survived a tornado, watched cottonwood leaves shimmer beneath a Midwestern sky and felt the rising sun warm my skin in a Himalayan sanctuary. I lost my heart to a doctor who had met God in her bedroom and, as the aircraft banked above the Amazon rainforest that would crack me open, I brushed away a tear as the miracle of it all moved me beyond words.
This is the story of that journey, of moments of astonishment and awe, of steps taken with hope and love. Hope ‘that leads to blissful end’ wrote the Italian poet. Hope that ‘is of the joy to come’ as the light from many a star. Hope that can be found in all the world and love that calls to our souls, love that can but lead to truth. Four years ago I would never have believed that this inexplicable enterprise could lead me out of the darkness to this wooden table overlooking the sea, into such bright Mediterranean light, to understand at last that none of us are created for naught. We are links in a golden chain, bound by connections, performing acts of love the like of which touch every life. We all are gifted brief, scattered moments of shimmering awareness that alight us in the presence of something overwhelming, something mysterious.
‘All the lessons love can read me,’ wrote the poet, knowing full well that there is always a price to be paid.
