Twenty-three-year-old writer Suzanne Clores, a member of Generation X, experiences a panic attack in New York City, a feeling that she needs something more in her life than the light spirituality offered by women's magazine articles on "getting a great bod from yoga, chasing the blues away with herbal remedies, and decorating the home using Feng Shui." The author decides to explore different spiritual paths off the main thoroughfares of religion — paths chosen by women yearning for the same individual connection with God.
Raised a Catholic as a child, Clores begins her private pilgrimage by attending a Wicca festival held a few days before Halloween in the garden of an East Greenwich Village magic store. An American-born shaman in New Jersey helps the author connect with her power animal — a turtle — and to deal with some grief over her grandmother. Clores then finds that yoga infuses her body with energy and vision. Her experience of meditation and her study of Shambhala, a training process developed by the Tibetan master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, are very practical in her eyes.
The author feels cut off and separated from her Vodou fantasy by race and culture. Adverse to following a guru, Clores nonetheless enjoys a brief encounter with her cousin Mary who lives in a Washington, D.C., center with other devotees of Meher Baba (1894 - 1969). This well-written memoir ends with an account of the author's experience of a rare, ecstatic dancing ceremony.
Clores, in the end, laments her own inability to take the leap of faith or to settle down with a regular spiritual practice. Or, as she notes near the end of the journey: "Devotion, I'm happy to reconfirm, is holy: it's another word for brave." This guided tour through one Generation Xer's soul searching offers a smorgasbord of insights into the contemporary spiritual scene.
