The Young Lioness

There is a story I have been carrying for a long time.

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Long before I wrote it down. Long before I drew the first line, the first cub, the first cave. It was alive in me the way something lives before it has a name — felt but not yet spoken.

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I have spent twenty years learning to sit inside myself, always trying, never entirely succeeding yet always growing with steps closer and farther from myself.

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In meditation. In hospice rooms. In sessions with people in the deepest parts of their becoming. And what I kept finding — underneath the grief, underneath the fear, underneath everything that seemed like it was stopping us — was a light that had never gone out.

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A spark. Waiting.

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I have two children. Lyla and Bodhi. And my wife, Ashley. They ask me to read to them. Again and again. One more story. And what I wanted more than anything was to put into their hands something that carried what I know to be true — not as a lesson, not as a teaching — but as a story they could feel in their bodies.

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So I wrote one.

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And then I wrote thirteen.

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Siṃhī — say sim-HEE — is a young lioness. She is alone in a cave in the middle of a storm. She is wet and cold and she has lost her mother, and she does not know the way home.

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She meets a wise snake named Sarpa. And Sarpa tells her a story.

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This is how it has always worked. This is the tradition of the Hitopadeśa, the oldest storybook — the one where wisdom moves through animals, through nested tales, through a voice speaking in the dark to someone who is lost and listening.

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I am that tradition's student.

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The Siṃhī Sanskrit Reader Series is thirteen books. Each one follows the young lioness through one more encounter — with Kūrma, the ancient tortoise who moves slowly and always arrives. With Kālī, who is not spectacle. With Karṇa, the greatest archer alive, whose identity no one knows. With Kṛṣṇa, who comes not as a philosopher but as a charioteer, in the moment when something she loves is moving toward its end.

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The books grow as she grows. The sentences deepen. The silences lengthen. By the last book, she is no longer a cub. And she meets no one. She is the story.

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Every book is written in Sanskrit. Devanāgarī first — the shapes of the syllables themselves. Then transliteration. Then English. With vocabulary and sandhi notes, sentence by sentence, the way a language should be learned — through a story that matters.

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Two books are available now.

Sarpa and Siṃhī: The Beginning — illustrated on every spread, a picture book for any age, the doorway in that includes the second book of…

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Siṃhī: The Becoming — all thirteen books, the complete English literary edition, the whole journey from lost cub to adulthood.

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The Sanskrit readers are coming, one by one.

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I did not write these books to become an author,

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I wrote them because my children asked for one more story. I am just a simple story teller, like we all are…

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Because the tradition of the Hitopadeśa is that wisdom lives inside a story — and a story lives inside the one who tells it — and it passes, quietly, into the one who listens.

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The cave is inside you.

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The light is already there.

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You only have to be still.

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Much Love and Big Hugs,

Teo

The books are available now on the Books page.