I have sometimes been told, “You should write books like this (the Llama Llama books).”

But those books are already written, and furthermore there is certainly no shortage of lovely and captivating social-emotional books for children. What there is a shortage of is inspired books for children. Inspired – in spirit. When my children were growing up in the ’80’s and early 90’s, there was a plethora of small publishers putting out very creative books with divergent ideas and certainly they were touching on the edge of ‘in spirit’, which could have seen further development. But instead of developing further those publishers and books have been swept away. You can still find books along traditional religious lines, of course. But we are in startlingly new times. Shocking actually.

Traditional religious institutions have been summarily dismissed by the overarching Western materialistic mainstream. Dismissed by a dogmatic science, dismissed by technology’s incursions into our mindset bringing the focus on entertainment and pending doom. The very mention of God brings silent eye-rolling in the young. God is a word dragging so much baggage from the abuses and failures of the past centuries that it can hardly find a landing spot in the consciousness of these times. I say ‘failures’ as well as abuses, because traditional religions have failed to bring about transformation of consciousness, have failed to bring about the connection to divine realities we are in such need of.

With the generation of my grandchildren I have been dismayed by the lack, the absolute dearth of inspired books for children. If you don’t choose the old traditional religious books, there is not a book to be found where there is the slightest incursion of the spirit inhabiting the pages. Therefore, we can’t talk about it.

This is why I have written The Star Children books, hoping to find a way to allow a little bit of other-worldliness into the stream of the story.

Eliore falls through the clouds, from Little Star and Eliore

Eliore falling through the clouds to land on earth is very symbolic of our own fall into our difficulties. Maybe too much desire and wilfulness obliterate wisdom and care?