Thirteen Tellings for the Hard Seasons of a Life
In the old Indian way, you are handed a story — told slowly, around a fire, by someone who has carried it a long time. The story does not tell you what to do. It sits beside you, and something in it knows something in you.
Siṃhī: The Becoming is built that way: thirteen tellings, each complete in itself, each a meeting between a young lioness and a teacher she did not expect. People come to a book like this because something has happened, or because something will not stop asking. Below are the thirteen, matched to the seasons that bring people to them. Begin with yours.
When someone has just died.
The first telling. A young lioness loses her mother, and a storm drives her into a dark cave — and in the dark, a story about a boy, a fire, and everything a teacher leaves behind. It does not explain grief. It keeps you company in the first night of it.
When you keep searching and nothing fills it.
She hears a song no one else hears, and circles everywhere she knows looking for where it comes from, and does not find it. An ancient tortoise tells her about a race won without leaving home. "You are the cave. The cave is inside you."
When you cannot accept what you are.
The smallest teacher in the book stops a hunt with a single sentence, and names the first obstacle: not knowing what you are. For shame, and for the long war some of us wage against our own nature.
When the panic comes back.
The old terror returns the way old terrors do — larger than the practice you thought had healed it. This telling carries the oldest medicine story there is: a churning that brings up poison before it brings up nectar, and the one who holds the poison so it harms no one. For anxiety, for panic, and for why it gets worse before it gets better.
When you feel too small for what life is asking.
At the edge of an impossible undertaking she meets the strongest being she has ever seen — and the story he tells is about a squirrel, and the day his strength was not enough. "Devotion is the measure. Not size."
When it wasn't fair.
A small bird tells her about the forest boy — the finest archer in the world, self-taught before a clay statue — and what the world asked of him anyway. No one fixes it. Someone witnesses it. "Does it get easier?" "You get stronger. That is not the same thing." For the job that was taken, the marriage that ended, the thing that was done to you.
When everything is burning down.
Divorce. Diagnosis. The year the whole structure of a life goes. The fire comes to the valley, and a voice inside it points to the ancient tree — still standing because it was burned once. "The scar is not what almost killed it. The scar is the teaching."
When you find out where you really come from.
A telling about a boy in a basket on a river — born one thing, raised another, choosing at last what to be. For adoption, for family secrets, for the ground shifting under your name.
When you loved someone and it wasn't enough to save them.
The great bird's telling: a pair of wings given completely, and cut anyway — and what the sky does with what was cut. For caregivers, for hospice rooms, for everyone who gave everything and lost anyway. What you gave changed what the ones who remain can carry. That is not nothing.
When you are facing what cannot be won.
A young warrior enters a formation he knows he cannot leave, and tells it without bitterness — with the calm of someone who has been all the way inside. This is the telling for mortality itself, and it does not end where you think it ends.
When you know what you must do and cannot do it.
The morning of a war. A bow falls from the hand of the finest archer alive, and a charioteer begins to speak. The oldest song about action there is — for the crossroads where every choice costs.
When someone you love is dying now.
On a bare stone at sunrise she meets a woman who once followed Death itself down the road — and in that meeting the lioness says the season's whole teaching aloud: "I have learned to hold both." Grief, and life. At once.
When it is time to become who you are.
The last telling belongs to the lioness herself. What it holds, the book keeps — only this: the sky was clear, and she was home. For the calling. For the wanting-for-more that was never really about more.
Every telling is complete on its own. The book is meant to be entered anywhere — the way you would sit down at a fire already burning. If one of these seasons is yours, begin there.
Begin where you are.
Some seasons want a story. Some want a room. There is one of those too — an hour of lying down and going inside, in Ashland or online.
Sessions are sixty dollars.
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