Approach this book with an open mind, but fasten your seatbelt and prepare to have that mind bent. Strange Seas chronicles the author's search through past lives, channeling, trance states, dreams, and personal soul-searching, to learn why she has a profound and sometimes unsettling connection to the sea, and especially to whales and dolphins.

Damp grass tickled my ankles as I moved through an English country night, through air scented with the familiar November smells of smoking leaves and sheep-dung. This was my fourth butterfly: golden lovely with peach-tipped wings and emerald feelers. The underbelly gleamed silver-blue as I watched my paintbrush make its arc, gliding across the chapel’s outside wall.

When, at age four, she described being born, her hands indicating the push of walls against her head, and described the haired fruit of her mother's insides, the long dark wet journey down the canal -- then! -- the sudden burst of light, the assault of sound and cold, her grandmother Nonna Rose and her mother Sofia stared at her in terror.

"Morte!" they cried, crossing themselves, and yes, thought Filomena now, being born is the first step toward death.

I was standing there, innocently cemented in the mud between raspberry rows, when all of a sudden, I heard a loud buzzing noise coming right toward me. In a split second, I thought of the space between the collar of my shirt and my bare neck. Then, WHAM! It hit. What it was, I'll never know. But I went crazy, because I was convinced the thing was in my shirt!

Money was scarce and my waistline wasn't. I felt adrift, drowning in self-pity, and my writing had stagnated. Nothing seemed to help and plenty seemed to hurt. To distract myself, I decided to shop the local bargain store and while browsing the aisles, I was inexplicably soothed by a notebook adorned with playful dolphins.