Richard Bach and telling your own story
Friends, I imagine that, like me, a lot of you discovered Jonathan Livingston Seagull when you were very young, and have gone on to read everything by Richard Bach that came your way. I’ve read them all, from his first book, Stranger to the Ground, to the Ferret Chronicles in which he is currently immersed. I must say, when I read Illusions, back in the 1970s sometime, it never occurred to me that I would one day be one of the publishers of the full Messiah’s Handbook. What magical lives we lead! (When we don’t get in our own way.)
Speaking of magic, here’s a bit from Richard’s Preface to Messiah’s Handbook:
… I held the book a long time, remembering.
Everything in this book may be wrong, sure enough. But everything may be right, as well. Right and wrong’s not up to a book. I’m the only one to say what’s true for me. I’m responsible.
I leafed through the pages, wondering. Is the book returned to me the same one I threw away, so long ago? Had it been resting quietly underground or had it been changing to become what some future reader needed to remember?
At last, eyes closed, I held the Handbook once more and asked.Dear strange mystical volume, why did you come back?
Riffled the pages for a moment, opened my eyes and saw.
  Every person,
all the events of your life,
are there because you have drawn them there.What you choose to do with them is up to you.
…
Some of the ideas I’ve found in this book I’ve said in others: there are words here from Illusions and One and Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Out of My Mind and The Ferret Chronicles. A writer’s life, like a reader’s, is fiction and fact, it’s almost-happened and half-remembered and once-dreamed. The smallest part of our being is history that somebody else can verify.
Yet fiction and reality are friends; the only way to tell some truths is in the language of stories.
The only way to tell some truths is in the language of stories. True enough – and I don’t know any better teller of stories, teller of truth, than Richard Bach. The nice thing about Messiah’s Handbook is that it is designed to help you tell your own stories, find your own truth. That’s what we’re here to do, is it not?