"...Everyone who reads this book will see himself or herself in one of the woman. Then again, each reader will probably see a little bit of himself in all of the women...and Jeff."

"Every time I visit the San Francisco Bay Area
I drive up the coast and take a long walk on Stinson Beach.
After reading "Birthsong", the next time I visit won't just be a drive and a walk. It will be a pilgrimage."

Jeff is given only one month by a for a New York publisher to rewrite his book manuscript, "The Global Way". To spend only one month redoing what took 30 years to write, Jeff packs up his laptop and clothes and goes off on a intensive, solo 'writer's retreat' at a rented cabin at Stinson Beach, California.

Every morning Jeff walks the 3-mile length of the beach where over the course of a few days he meets nine women. Then one night Marcella, his rental agent, commandeers Jeff's cabin for a meeting with the same women Jeff met on the beach. Marcella surprises Jeff by asking him to lead an all-night marathon with her women friends to ponder ways to alter the current destructive course of corporate globalization to a spiritual and social course of care for everyone and everything in the world.

As the moon rises on a still and magical night they meander down to the beach where they create much more than an enlightened plan for the world.

When the full moon reaches its zenith one of the women gives birth to a baby boy, while another woman nearly drowns after a rogue wave snatches her from the beach. What began with talk about saving the world ends up with the women saving themselves.

Jeff Hardy's motivation for writing "Birthsong" is his past experience building hospitals all over the world, getting people together to build "Towers of Caring" as the antithesis of the "Towers of Babel."

As the reader of "Birthsong" will learn early on, Jeff's goal is to give people reason for hope in a troubled world. Nine women in "Birthsong" will help him do just that.

The person and spirit of Jeff is true. Stinson Beach is real. The spirit of each of the nine women are also real because they are women Jeff has known and loved in his own life. This includes Jeff's late friend, Mme. Van der does der Willebois-Ingenhous, otherwise known as "Great Aunt Mary" of Amsterdam, Holland, who "plays" Marcella, and Masha Rubanovskaya, a Russian exchange student who lived with the author's family for a year when she was 15 years old, who "plays" Masha.

And, of course, there's Jeff, the real life author of the fictional book, "Birthsong", who "plays" Jeff the fictional author of the real life book, "The Global Way" that Jeff writes about in "Birthsong". Read on...

Of "The Global Way", Jeff Hardy's nonfiction book that inspired "Birthsong",
Jean Sasson, NY Times bestselling author of the international
best seller of The Princess Sultana Trilogy writes:

"Jeff Hardy's brilliant work is powerful, probing and essential for a world mired in misunderstanding and upheaval. Spiritually motivated and resounding with humor and clarity, Hardy's book cuts through the mist of global issues, tackling the complexities that confront a contemporary world, a world vitally connected, yet still beset with age-old problems. There is a great deal of wisdom in this highly readable, well-written book."