Update:
Our memoir-fantasie has been renamed, “Lucy Like-a-Charm,”
in honour of my beloved Lucy.

Scheherazade’s Sea Website is Active! Please check out our ongoing activities, photos, musings, and works-in-progress at https://scheherazadessea.wordpress.com/ .

Above is one of my favourite photos of Lucy and myself, taken in 2014, in Sydney, Australia. We are cuddling, leaning intimately cheek to cheek, eyes closed in peaceful contentment. I wore a fuchsia pink hoodie and Lucy is wrapped snugly in a red flannel snoodie that I sewed for her. We had just moved into a dilapidated house along William Street, Paddington. It was old, and cold, but we were warm and cosy together, curled up in a small couch with a bright pink throw rug. I created a fantasia image from the original photograph, placing us in the midst of a flurry of large, round peonies, against blue sky and white clouds. The poem, “Wake Up in My Dreams”, which will also be the title of our epic memoir-fantasie, when completed, appears on the right of the image:

Dancing with my shadows,
Whispering, “Good Night!”
Humming silent wishes,
Smiling deep inside.
Dancing with my shadows,
Jarful of moonbeams!
Come, lay down beside me,
Wake up in my dreams.
(©Dawn-joy Leong, 2010)

Lucy Like-a-Charm, love of my life, and a central figure in my journey, left the mortal realm in 2023. Since then, I have begun working on the final chapter of our epic multimodal transdisciplinary autobiography. It has been a bumpy process – churning, swirling, turning, tumbling, weeping, laughing, mourning, rejoicing, flying and falling all at once. I even survived a near-death experience a few months after Lucy departed, which forced me to stop working outside of home for an entire year. Art, with passion and purpose, is never easy. And I know that I signed up for the challenge when I broke away from the Golden Cage of pampered subjugation. There was never a moment that I regretted this concerted decision and action. But after Lucy suddenly left me, I was thrown into a dark vortex, lost in a desolation I had never known before. I simply couldn’t imagine a life without her anymore. Yet, she returned to me, vibrant and resonant inside my grieving spirit, bringing resolution to unanswered questions that I had written and sung about long before her appearance in my life. Lucy continued to be my channel of Divine Grace. And thus, I continued to live, and now, I embrace the honour of a profound Grief, the other side of Lucy’s perfect Love. A grief that did not break me, but instead is holding me up and leading me gently onward, even in the midst of my yearning to be with her again. I now see life and death from a different perspective, it is as if I have entered a whole new paradigm of existence where there is no longer a clear demarcation between the two.

Two years on, and ‘progress’ has been slow, but not frustratingly so. My ‘art’ is an entity in itself, which I am not the master or owner of, but merely a human facilitator. It will unfold as it wishes, inexorably. I have learned and grown as a human, as an artist, and as a researcher. At this part of Scheherazade’s journey, the focus for the finale segment of the dancing, singing, speaking memoir in three-part Sonata Form, in honour of Lucy’s legacy, returns us more intensely to what was awakened by my PhD research and dissertation on autism, parallel embodiment and elemental empathy, which was inspired and informed by Lucy herself.

The tentative subtitle of the finale ‘recapitulation’ is, “Exploring the Dream”. This time around, I intend to launch into a deep-dive into scientific discoveries in interspecies connectivity, eclectic existences, networks of communications beyond the human, and alternative sentience.

Please follow us in Scheherazae’s Sea, and contact me via scheherazadessea@gmail.com if you are interested in supporting the completion of our memoir, or speaking engagements. Thank you!