December 2013

people of either gender or any age who are in that role. Retired men say they appreciate the book’s philosophical discussion of life.

“It surprises me that they, at that retrospective stage in life, want to hear what a 44-year-old has to say,” Horneffer-Ginter says, smiling.

She says it’s been rewarding to connect with readers both locally and internationally and hear how the book has inspired them.

Parker J. Palmer, author of Healing the Heart of Democracy, The Courage to Teach and Let Your Life Speak, called Horneffer-Ginter a grounded and gifted storyteller. “I love this book so much I read it in one sitting,” Palmer said. One reviewer said reading the book was “like being immersed in a gentle love letter for the soul.”

Horneffer-Ginter, who was born in Detroit in 1969 and has lived in Kalamazoo since age 8, has been thinking about matters of the soul for a long time. As a child, she had a Presbyterian upbringing and a keen sense of wonder. “From a very young age, I would sit in church with such curiosity about God,” she says. “I would often think that, all over the world, people were spending their Sunday mornings in different ways and coming together to answer questions of what life is all about.”

In college, at the University of Michigan, she read the works of Joseph Campbell and was pleased to see he had articulated thoughts that had been running through her head for years.

Many of these thoughts involve the mind/body/spirit connection, a perspective of holistic medicine and mental health that has always fascinated her and that is a unifying theme of her book.

She laughs while recalling her first job, at age 26, teaching alternative and complementary approaches to medicine and bedside manner to students and physicians at a medical school in Chicago through a program hosted by Loyola University.

“A few people were interested in integrative (continued on page 42) w w w.encorekalamazoo.com | 21