Synopsis
She stood at a dark abyss filled with ten thousand unanswered questions. And she
had to decide whether to keep asking them.
When her cold, distant mother began slowly dying, Debbi Flittner did what daughters do — she showed up. She navigated the maze of her mother's final days alongside her sisters, held the silence her mother had always preferred, and said goodbye to a woman she had never fully known.
And then the questions began. Who was her mother, really? What made her so secretive — so unable to reach her own daughters? What was she hiding, and why? The answers led Debbi back through her own childhood in remote red rock country during the West's dam-building era — a lonely girl who escaped her silent home by wandering outside, befriending lizards and plants and the ancient sandstone landscape of the Colorado Plateau. Back to her grandmother's house. Back to a spry, ninety-year-old aunt who had been waiting, all this time, to finally share the hidden stories.
What she found was not a tidy resolution. It was something more honest — and more lasting.
The Ten Thousand Things is a soulful, generational memoir written and illustrated by the author — a quietly extraordinary account of a daughter's search for a mother she never fully knew, set against the ancient landscape of the Colorado Plateau during one of the most dramatic eras in Western American history. For readers of Terry Tempest Williams, Mary Oliver, and anyone who has ever stood at their own dark abyss and kept asking the questions anyway.
For readers who love:
— Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge and When Women Were Birds — Southwest landscape memoir and Colorado Plateau nature writing — Mother-daughter reconciliation and emotionally distant parent narratives — Spiritual memoir that finds the sacred in family, grief, and the natural world —Generational family mystery and oral history
Come along on this soulful journey. Find a deeper acceptance of family, belonging, and a surprising
meaning of one's own purpose — illumined by a universal Love that shines through all beings
everywhere, including the ancient peoples there from the beginning of it all.
About the Author
Debbi Flittner is a licensed psychotherapist and former lawyer who has followed the spiritual thread of her life for thirty five years. She lives with her husband and two cats in their overgrown cottage outside the city limits of Portland, Oregon, near her daughter and grandchildren. She returns frequently to her much-loved red rock country of the Colorado Plateau, and to the Rio Grande valley. This is her first book. You can find out more about her writing, photography and travels on her website, at DebbiFlittner.com.
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