black bird and a pear tree : the story of Lucia & Wally, 1945-2019

In black bird and a pear tree, Dr. Lucia Birnbaum invites us to shed old silencing skins to sashay onto lava-transformed and rose-infused dance floors reverberating with riff-gifts of prescient knowing and heart-full, insight-brimming, and transporting poetic prose, the great Strega Nonna—lover and godmother to us all—calls us here into concert with her namesakes from so many spirals ago.

Emerging from the dark subterranean sea of simmering chaos, she bears light-filled buried maps of shimmering suppressed wisdom from our African ancestors. With an authenticity that only someone who has risked both career and cash flow can fully embody, Lucia’s visionary recovery of the seed-carrying legacy of caring, sharing, and healing—toward regeneration of life-sustaining and celebratory culture—offers both inspiration and practical guidance at this most auspicious and perilous time on the planet: to embrace Other as kin is to nurture and cherish the diversity that is portal and pathway to the flourishing of all sentient beings. To read these stories is to be

expanded into vistas of new possibilities by a heart broken wide open to the deep generativity of love.