Photo credit: Courtesy of Richard J.Marks
“I just can’t thank you enough for gathering tonight for the celebration party for the release of my audio book Rise to The Sun: 7 Footsteps and 7 Prayers for Getting Out of Hell,” said author Richard J.Marks during a ZOOM book party with friends. “You’ll learn a little bit about the book, but what I really wanted to do tonight is make it a party more than anything else. It’s not to educate, it’s to just be together; so I hope you’ll take a pause when you listen to some of the material in there. I narrated the book during COVID and so it was important to me in the making of the presentation to share with you that we are still all connected during COVID. Lots of things have happened to bring us closer to each other during this time. I’m going to just say greetings from New York City where everything has changed this year. COVID-19 in my book, interestingly, are intertwined. Part of the audio book is music and singing is how we share and it’s also how we pause. And so in the next top hour, we’ll share not just with words, but with audio and visuals, video and music and blend spirituality and culture.”
Book synopsis: “Rise to the Sun: 7 Footsteps and 7 Prayers for Getting Out of Hell plays with travel and journey in two senses – forward on a physical road and into the heart of the self. This book on spiritual healing is a voyage to freedom set in the context of our times. A timely and necessary work, Rise to the Sun illustrates how humankind must seek to heal its own innate suffering before it can hope to succeed in healing the various external crises affecting our planet. The 7 Footsteps and 7 Prayers unlock a kinder, gentler, and long-lasting engine for transformation. As we leave hell behind, we unlock and unchain all that prevents us from being worthy of love. This gentle book guides us to feel safe in the face of change – to actualize new ways of seeing life and gaining freedom. The art of living is learning to be good to ourselves. The author, along with the brave women and men who open up their stories and teachings, are our living teachers.”
“There’s one word for Rise to The Sun that I’d like to solve, to fix our minds upon what the book is really about and the word is freedom. It’s about making freedom the most important thing. I don’t know how else to explain it. I don’t want to go into what we’ve all endured this year, but I can say that freedom is extremely important. And I think that the journey towards freedom is the one that we should be taking. It’s about wanting freedom. And so the journey to freedom is a progression for those of us starting a new path and a new purpose. It’s not just starting over and not just letting go, but taking responsibility for the freedom that we gain, because we should ask what happens when freedom gets taken away or how to restore it.”
“We have to take responsibility for having freedom, for sharing it and for living it. But before we can do all that in Rise to The Sun, the central idea is seeing retraining ourselves. There’s a quote in the book it’s high up in the prologue. Many people believe that to fix ourselves in the world, we need to do things. I need to do this. I need to do that. I need to focus on fixing that, but I believe something differently. I believe we need to see things differently before we try to fix everything differently, which is why I wrote the book. And we all know since we were little kids that the process of spiritual healing happens when we take time with art and prayers and singing and music, these opened us up to seeing beauty and learning to share with others is what’s supposed to be shared our being worthy of love. So I would like to share this presentation with you.” Click on the video below.
Richard J. Marks, author
“Here’s what a footstep is: Technically, it’s a way forward, moving your feet forward and walking forward. But here is what the seven footsteps guide us towards which is a way of life conduct, how we behave. It’s what we share. And I’ve learned it’s the kinder, gentler way. The upside of recording an audio book during COVID 19 was how quiet New York City was just looking at Park Avenue in the middle of the day. You can see both emptiness and beauty, five or six cars, pink flowers, the entire length of Park Avenue, feeling like the earth just sent us older [selves] to our rooms to think about what we’d done. Moving from grief and trauma to freedom is what the seven footsteps are about.”
