When Pigs and Horses Fly

Adventure icon Hannah Lyndsey Brown was a throw back, a kind of human time capsule who embodied the morality and values of a different era. She'd spent years crossing oceans, solo, on her own sailboat, away from urban society and her home country. She came home to new rules. Now she was about to go on a journey she'd never signed up for, one that would be a masterclass that would change her forever.

In this book, she shares a memoir of a period in her life during which she would go on another kind of journey — another kind of adventure — one that she'd never really signed up for.

Hannah's experiences, worldwide, had led her to believe that people are inherently good. When she was sick with dengue fever on a tiny island in the Fijian archipelago, the local people there rallied to save her life. When her boat was hopelessly aground in a remote region among the thousands of islands in Indonesia, it was the local fishermen there who found an ingenious way of freeing her vessel — just before the arrival of a major storm that would surely have dashed any hope of survival. There were so many examples, over the years, of beautiful, selfless acts of kindness by the humanity that surrounded her voyages.

When she returns to America, she witnesses the bizarre death of her father as a result of medical bungling in a nearby city hospital. Doctors and hospital administrators disavow any responsibility; they falsify records, and massage narratives for the benefit of auditors and onlookers alike. They were so successful at hiding their failures that Hannah's family would be forced to pay huge sums of money for the very same treatment that killed her father. In twenty-first century America, lying, deceit, and murder at the hands of those we trust most had become normalized.

Hannah's childhood superhero, her father, was her idol. It was he who inspired and empowered within her a will to take on impossible challenges. The loss of her father, her father's "murder", as she called it, cut her to her core. Heartbroken, she would find herself, for the first time, repulsed by the human society that surrounded her. She wanted out — the iconic adventurer would now find herself running away from a new kind of reality that she could not understand. The stage was set, the adventurer was about to go on a journey unlike any other; a journey that would turn into a masterclass and a new wisdom that would change her forever.

There are infinite depths of sobriety — of quiet understanding — into which we naturally acquiesce as we pass through unexpected existential challenges as a result of life's constant companions, loss and unpredictable change. With each of these kinds of new experiences, we gain a deeper level of wisdom. In life, this wisdom is the real prize; for, no one will ever go to his or her grave really believing that they had had a successful life because of all of the superficiality that they had achieved.

(Editor's note: "When Pigs and Horses Fly," is the multimedia version of "Under the Giant Mimosa with the Mango Tree Lover." "Under the Giant Mimosa with the Mango Tree Lover" is Book 1 of the Eryn Kristen Lyle series.)