The Water, The Wind, and The Lee Shore
A memoir about the wisdom of spiritual surrender.
This sweeping memoir takes readers through eight panoramic decades: it begins in 1941, when the world was still at war and Nyack, New York was still a farming community, and continues through the boarding schools of mid-century New England. From there, Brookfield's life is almost hard to believe: he nearly perishes on a sailboat as a pre-teen in the Caribbean and survives to romp through pre-Castro Cuba. He drops out of college and joins the US Army at nineteen as an act of youthful defiance, learns to thrive in boot camp, then skirts death again in a parachuting accident.
Brookfield begins a career in banking in New York City, climbs the ladder of his profession from the very bottom, then decides to leave it behind. He builds a business to help other businesses from scratch, only to see it tragically undone through the shocking malfeasance of a colleague. But this moment, the lowest of his life, contains the seed of his ultimate redemption.
Brookfield's narrative otherwise takes us through such disparate environs as a community of sharecroppers in western Tennessee, the boardrooms of New York City, Memphis, and Little Rock, the pristine waterworld of Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and the mountains of Cashiers, North Carolina. But the deeper journey here is spiritual. What begins as a relentless search for independence and always wanting more ends in learning the wisdom of spiritual surrender. As Brookfield puts it: life actually comes from giving your life away.
The Water, The Wind, and The Lee Shore will resonate with anyone who has felt lost at sea, questioned their purpose, wrestled with the far-reaching ramifications of their choices, or sought meaning beyond worldly achievement. It's also a cautionary tale that reminds us: even at its fiercest, and when we struggle most against it, the wind will carry us exactly where we need to go.
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