Parables for the New Conversation is a spellbinding odyssey through metaphor and prose, personal sagas and historic events, where together author and reader explore the proposal that at its most profound level, life is really about having fun.

This book might remind one at first of Khalil Gibran’s classic The Prophet, with its collection of metaphorical stories on a variety of subjects relating to the human condition. And yet, from its very first parable, the tone of Parables for the New Conversation is noticeably different. The people on the island of Allandon begin to laugh when the hermit emerges from forty years of silence to speak his wisdom, because they have already ascertained the lesson he offers through their lived experience—the need to remind one another not to take ourselves so seriously!

More and more, our search for meaning and fulfillment is moving away from the loftiness of ritualized religion to a simpler and more personal spiritual space grounded in laughter and shared experience. In the new conversation people are invited to bring all their thoughts, beliefs, fears, and dreams without being judged. In a space where no truth is sacrosanct, where such polarities as East and West converge and spirituality and materialism can stand side by side, we can truly seize the possibility of moving into the seat of creator—of our fortunes, our relationships, our lives.