As a physician, a Western-trained scientist, I believed everything could be explained. In Indian Country I got to meet some traditional healers. When I saw what the medicine man did, I thought that was magical, but they saw their practice as perfectly logical and explainable. Working with American Indians changed my life; they challenged my medical school assumptions about how people got sick and how they got well. Part 1 of the memoir Kindling Spirit: Healing from Within.

Storytellers need to find new fireplaces around which to tell the tale, and Reality Sandwich is one; a community of kindred spirits who share a mythology about how to sustain ourselves (and the planet) in a civil society. Kindling Spirit: Healing from Within, is my story about ordinary triumphs, tragedies, miracles, indigenous wisdom, radical self-acceptance, shamanic healing, and altered states of consciousness; they all reveal how, if we are willing to look at the familiar in new ways, we can create new endings to old stories.