Most of us have been touched by “the other side” at one time or another in our lives.

In 2014, my first book, Jumping: a Novel, was published by Hampton Roads. It is the story of a boy who turns twenty-one and jumps into a bottomless void at the edge of town. It won their 2014 Next Best Fiction Writer contest.  They put it in the category of contemporary fantasy, a category I knew nothing about and never would have expected to be writing in if I had known about it. 

It came anyway.

Jumping paved the way for its pushy sister, The Other Side of Resistance: Stories of Living Beyond Dying. It’s non-fiction, filled with my own stories of contact with “the other side,” though I’m no expert on after-life experiences, or near-death experiences, or reincarnation experiences.

It came anyway.

So, what did I learn?

• We don’t come into this world as a blank slate.

• I’m an example of how we come prepared. We come prepared to take a risk, to share our truest stories, to be a resource, to be part of the solution.

• We don’t do it alone. We come connected to guidance, on “the other side.”

• The other side has something to say.

“The crisis in your time is the greatest to be faced in recorded history . . . It needs to be, to provide the energy to propel you–to propel us–to the next stage in human development. And here is where we burst categories. That is what a transformative crisis does–it bursts categories. From the far side of the crisis there is no going back, because everything is different. You are different. . . . What can the defining crisis of your time be but a spiritual one?”  (The Guys Upstairs, Frank DeMarco, 2025)

The time is now, if we’re ever going to do it.