This Week's Featured Reader Response by MY MOM & DAD!

Thank you, Mom and Dad, for your Amazon Review of Inertia...it means everything to me!

Kim Cope Tait's Inertia is a beautiful, descriptive tale that gives us a stirring glimpse into the rational fear of losing someone we love and the sanguine hope that it can be meaningfully explained. The book pierces the heart with an emotionally charged journey on the rollercoaster cycle of grief. The story is told with awe inspiring prose that evokes both tears and joy. We simply love this book!  --Dan & Gail Cope

Couple of pros, yeah? : D Thanks, guys!! xo

The Wanderlust Festival is right around the corner...please join us at Sugar and Spice Wine Bar & Coffee Lounge

This Week's Featured Reader Response by Tyne Pike-Sprenger

Thank you, Tyne, for this beautiful response to Inertia...

"Inertia is a novel that touches an innate human desire to comprehend the elusive nature of life. For anyone that has ever risked fully giving themselves to someone, has experienced love or its unfathomable loss, Inertia pulls at fear and despair, offering in its place the hope of finding something tangible we can forever hold onto. Long after you finish the final page, the emotions and experiences linger as you contemplate the world that exists through the vivid imagery of Kim Cope Tait's writing. Once in awhile, Tait suggests, we are blessed by some remarkable soul whose life will drastically impact our own. Every once in awhile we are also lucky to fall into a story, like Inertia, that will forever change our understanding of this divine existence."  --Tyne Pike-Sprenger

Tree Dreams

Atoms stack themselves, one upon the other, in the shape of my intention until the thing is made real. Real and palpable before me: heavy branches, thick with meaning, dripping with whispering green. I touch them with my hands, marvel at my own creation, the pulsing light of divine collusion passing from the rough bark to my fingertips, my palms flattened against it.

Why is it so hard to sit with our creation? Study its striations, its nuances of color and texture? Why do we deny its perfection before we even explore it? It is because, I think, what we articulate in our minds rarely resembles the outward manifestation in the ways we expect it to. I dream a tree and then turn away from the willow that grows overnight in my yard. Never mind the miracle of its engenderment--I dreamt a pine!

No. I will love this willow up, read its message like braille, intuiting its likeness to the seeds I held for so long in my heart, until my knowing encompasses its perfection, until it teaches me all I wanted to learn from it, even before it broke the warm earth that enclosed its slumber.

Featured Reader Response: "Poetic Medicine" by Kerry Balaam

Thank you to Kerry Balaam of Waimea for this week's Featured Reader Response. The story of her relationship to Inertia is like a poem itself. I love it and am deeply honored by her words. In gratitude...

"When I first read Inertia, I was in flight, literally, on an airplane above the ocean. The day before, I had attended the funeral of a young man I loved, so I was grappling with fresh devastation as I traveled. Both my origin and destination were places my high school friend called home before he passed away suddenly in an accident at age 26. Deepening the melancholy of my pilgrimage was another pain, the acute awareness that I had lived, in the very same two locations, with another young man, my college sweetheart, until only a few years ago, when he was killed as a passenger in a car accident at age 25.


"There in the sky, in transit between places where I'd repeatedly loved and lost so much, between two spots on the planet so full of memories and so marred by premature death, I looked down on the Pacific, clutching Kim Cope Tait's pages to my chest as I leaned to peer out of the tiny oval portal over the expansive blue. This body of water plays a key role in Inertia, uniting California, Hawaii, and New Zealand, the novel's solid-ground settings. Illustrated aptly by Noe Erger's cover art--a rushing swirl threatening to barrel the viewer--waves form a fluid motif throughout Inertia's story and the power of ocean depths serves as a fitting metaphor for an unstoppable, all-engulfing 'momentum toward fate.' Inertia's narrators are, perhaps necessarily then, surfers.

"They are also writers. And their story is about shared, "real" experiences of unbelievable, heart-shattering coincidences, with "super real" meaning beyond the scope of individual lifetimes. Inertia is a lesson in relinquishing isolated, and often possessively held, grief, in awe of truths greater than ourselves and our grasp. It is also a memorial to the departures of spirits by whom we've been so blessed, by whose loss we are so broken, and ultimately, by whose enduring light we open so fully to the living we've yet to do.

"As I read Inertia, I soon began to feel that I was hovering, not only above the sea, but above the storm of my "personal spiral," above my hurting. The great poet Hafiz expresses his desire to turn himself into a 'Forest / Herb,' and begs his reader 'Apply me to your / Wounds.' For me, Cope Tait's poetic telling of Inertia's story functioned in exactly this way, as a divine healing salve for my most tender and internal injuries. Intervals of 'crazy urgency' arising 'in my ribcage' as I identified with Jake, gave way to a quieter, more deeply held and ancient knowing, a profound sense of peace. Just as my airplane's wheels reached down to meet the runway, I'd gained 'traction.' Inertia had provided not only medicine for my heartache, but also momentum to my soul's journey. Moving forward, I'm agreeing again: 'What can I be but this thing that remains?'"

The Dealio.

Horoscope

Lunar eclipse in Gemini on Tuesday and a New Moon in my House of Self-Undoing on Wednesday. Do I really need a house of self-undoing? Why do I even have that? Time, my horoscope says, to identify what beliefs--fears and blockages--are keeping me from my destiny. I contemplate this for a while, feel the whisper of unease as it slinks up my back and curls itself around my ears. Could there be beliefs I hold, of which I am not even cognizant, that stunt my forward motion? That close me off from the abundance and bounty the Universe has for me? I've heard of this. I've even seen it. Probably done it. But then I recognize the habit of self-doubt--familiar indeed. And then I reject it. No.

First of all, there is nothing that is wholly true for me and every single other person born under the zodiac sign of Cancer. Not one thing. I am every moment fulfilling my destiny, moving with force into my future which is happening, as Stoppard's Guildenstern says, now...and now...and now. It is a destiny divinely sketched and loosely governed by what my transcendent self desires to learn in this lifetime.

Out in the ether, I looked at what I could do/be/have in this lifetime. Yes and please, I sighed, and with my hands I built the rough shape of a meaningful existence. Agreed to navigate it as best I could. Nodded to kindred spirits who also agreed--to what we would live, how we would grow, what we would teach each other. All of it loosely contained by my need to evolve as a spirit, I put it together. And yes, my destiny unfolds every second.

I still my bird-like heart and live my knowing. I sing the prayer of my perfect intent and make an origami lotus from this page of words. Words that attempt to define my wildness, to circumscribe my heroic pathways, to delineate the ethereal. No, I say aloud again, because I reject such confinement, such limitation--is it not language like this that plants the seeds of such fear? Don't its authors, with their suggestion, begin the process of germinating those beliefs and thereby grow them where there might have been others, and only to validate themselves. Not prophesy but engenderment, one must finally concede.

Though it would be a comfort, perhaps, if a stranger could tell us how best to approach a particular day or week, and in a weekly mass email at that, ulimtately one's greatest comfort must be drawn from the fact that one is the author of her own destiny, and just by showing up, she begins to manifest it.

This Week's Featured Reader Response by Betsy Boland

I have so enjoyed and appreciated reading the responses that readers have had to Inertia, many of which have been posted on Inertia's Amazon web page. I decided I'd like to give them a little more exposure (and happily Inertia, too) by posting one each week here on my blog. This week's review comes from Betsy Boland in Waimea, Hawaii. Thank you so much for your beautiful words!
  
     "'Calling all angels/Calling all angels/ Walk me through this one/Don't leave me alone'... In their hopeful chorus, Jane Siberry and K.D. Lang solicit solace for humanity during life's most uncertain moments. To such a heartfelt, human plea, Kim Cope Tait's Inertia invokes a deeply sacred, propitious reply. Tait's divinely woven, resonant tale, is a wise, eloquent, healing response, delivered on the wings of her angelic but very earthy characters, to every reader who ever dared shout out to the heavens for company in the wake of loss.
     "There is great art to the manner in which Tait intently elicits the power of youthful passion and friendship while gently prying the band-aid from the wounds of mature grief in order to spread a spiritual balm capable of freeing hearts and souls. She writes in beautiful, vivid, nuanced prose, guiding us through an entrancing, ethereal weave of beginning and end, where we become instantly and steadfastly connected to Inertia's select cast of characters - seemingly molded from our own flesh, in the silhouette of our own spirit - and are enticed into their compelling story.
     "Tait's young school mates walk firmly in this world, and anchor us in the rich, weighty experience of being in a body and in each other's lives, with such utter love and intensity. In contrast, her grown up soul mates hover more tentatively in the world, and echo our inherent hesitation; we're so often not really sure how this life goes.
     "Seekers and skeptics alike will find themselves stealing a glance at everyone they encounter, or perhaps peeking within their own implausible souls, in the hope of recognizing someone akin to the unforgettable, down to Earth angels in Kim Cope Tait's Inertia. In the end, it is our own silent asking and quiet knowing in which Inertia beckons us to truly believe, in order to be fully present in our lives and to understand our blessings from those passed. Inertia will appeal to all six of your senses, linger in your life, and keep you searching eagerly on the bookshelves for more from Kim Cope Tait."