Another excerpt - This time from Chapter 4

Hi friends!

The book is coming along fantastically. I am enjoying the process immensely and each day finds new challenges and new joy.
It is weird recalling so many events and conversations from my journey -weirder yet to take my own experiences and embellish them in pseudo fictional form. Half real, have fiction - half me, half fiction. Half dream, half fiction. Its been fun - Here is a small piece of Chapter 4 - FIRST DRAFT of course...

“Oh good lord! What are you doing?” she said when she stepped out onto the porch and saw me lying facedown in the yard, my right ear pressed to the ground.  

“I couldn’t hear anything, so I thought I’d try this,” I said. 

Really, I was just teasing her. The fact was that I had zero idea of what I was doing. I didn’t know how to listen to the ground or hear the bugs moving or how to talk to dew drops or anything. I had been outside for an hour and still did not get what Zhou had told me to do. 

I had sat in the quiet. I didn’t say anything. I listened but all I heard were the neighbors having a loud cookout full of drunken laughter and I heard three kids from the house behind ours. They were playing football. I heard a fire truck go by and I heard the traffic from the neighborhood as people did their weekend comings and goings. What I did NOT hear were bugs and molecules and the wind in my hair. 

“I give up,” I said as I stood and brushed the dying grass from my clothes. “None of this is me. I feel like an idiot.”