Results by "Norma Levine" in All categories

It is the early '70s. Two best friends and a toddler (the future rock star Melissa Auf der Maur) set out in a red post office van on a 2,000-mile drive from Hay-on-Wye in Wales to Marrakesh in North Africa. Their meandering journey changes abruptly when they meet two American drug dealers from Amsterdam on a secret intelligence mission, with a plentiful supply of pure black Afghan hash. Amidst the dope smoking world of gangster aristocrats and dislocated hippies, they gaze into the hidden worlds within ancient Venetian glass goulamine beads, and that’s when worlds collide.

My budding career as a literary scholar was suddenly hijacked by a singular seemingly random event. It was 1976 when I tiptoed into a tiny Buddhist shrine room in a farmhouse nestled into the Black Mountains of Wales and there beheld a Tibetan master, the 16th Karmapa. That glimpse into the enlightened mind became embedded like a seed and grew into a quest over the next decades to find the key places on our planet called the Hidden Lands. Why did it take decades to get there? What made the right ingredients emerge to penetrate this sacred sanctuary? And who hid it and why?