Hi there and welcome…I’m so glad you popped in. Let me introduce myself, I’m Hermy although I write under the pen name of HLBalcomb.

Let me start our visit with one of my favorite teaching tricks that I used religiously on the first day of class maybe because a piece of me is a little superstitious, for around 15 years, I used the same trick with each and every class.  I would introduce myself, and then, I would immediately transition to the question: “If you had to describe yourself in three symbols, what would they be and why? Knowing that a symbol by definition is really anything of importance to the quality of one’s life.” Reason being for my question, I wholeheartedly believe that questions are stories within a shorter context.

So here are my three sacred symbols…South Africa, motherhood, and hope.

I’m originally from South Africa although the United States has been my home for almost 30 years. In 2000, I was on my way back to South Africa, Cape Town to be specific, when my life crossed paths with a handsome stranger. As you can probably guess, I never made it to Cape Town. Instead, I married the handsome stranger and 2 decades, 4 beautiful children, 2 dogs, and a home that is under construction as we piece it back together through a labor-of-love endeavor — marrying the love of my life remains the best decision although I still lovingly call him my Handsome Lovely because that is where the seed of our love was planted when a handsome stranger became my partner-in-life’s adventures.

A little bit of a confession here, motherhood was never a priority for me. In fact, the idea of it was always quite a daunting concept before I actually became a mother myself.  Today, my friends often laugh at me for having 4 children. Yet, motherhood, kind of like South Africa, cast a spell on me when I wasn’t looking. Now, I can’t imagine my life without  the love, support, and happy chaos that a family of 6 brings along with 2 emotionally demanding dogs and a house which is permanently being worked on when we have a free weekend here-and-there to remind me of what matters is always within arm’s reach — surround yourself with what matters, the single most powerful ingredient to living a life of immeasurable richness that starts with the quality of connections that we share with those nearest and dearest to us.

My last symbol is hope — it has become both my professional and academic focus for the last 15 years (really since 1996). Hope remains the one commonality that connects all human beings to each other. More specifically, my academic focus of specialization is exploring how to connect to hope when you’re hopeless?

Answering that single question is what I believe is the next frontier of the concept self-actualization, a concept popularized by Professor Abraham Maslow in 1943. It is that single question that has been both a source of frustration and inspiration, as I weave the answer into all areas of my work — writing, speaking, teaching interchangeably.

All my writing is based on three important premises….

Premise One: “We mature not by age, but by stories”…the magic of stories is that they naturally speak to the goodness within us. The parts of us that helps us to be a little slower to judge and a lot quicker to explore the notion of indifference. And that’s why I love being a storyteller because it gives me the freedom to play with opposing viewpoints, contradictions, and our unedited humanity in a meaningful way.

Premise Two: “Whomsoever embraces their creativity along with their individuality, embraces all possibility deep within.” I firmly believe we have it all wrong. We should be selfish. Selfishness should be celebrated within our culture. At the same time, when I use the word selfishness, I mean learning all that we can about ourselves — our self-worth, so that we can take ourselves out of the equation and look at life from a broader perspective. And that can only happen when we embrace both our individuality along with our creativity, two parts of identity that define, celebrate, and liberate the essence of us. My novel CINDERELLA IN FOCUS, Cindy’s Secret is a journey into the depths of what we love about the traditional Cinderella fairy tale that starts when Cindy made the conscious choice to learn about her inner fortitude: her light as much as her darkness. In the process, she learned about her inner possibility through her unedited curiosity.

Premise Three: “To love deeply is to live freely”..to love remains the bravest thing we can do to connect authentically to the world both around and within us. Love is the means to exploring the richness of live outside of our experience. When we love, we open ourselves to disappointment, heartache, and rejection, yet we open ourselves to the sacredness of what it means to be living a pathway of higher thinking, deeper living. Rumi called what I like to think of this experience as “Only from the heart can you touch the sky.” Only from the heart can we learn what it means to give and receive love simultaniously, especially during challenging seasons of our life’s story.

The greatest strength of my writing is its concepts. I’m an idea person. I love to explore new ways of seeing the ordinary, and that has always been my greatest strength as a teacher, too.

I write not because I want to save the world, I write because together I think we can explore the ordinary through the power of our collective unedited stories of hope, encouragement, and truths that start when one person decides to be their own kind of brave…and their bravery reminds the world that our Higher Self, another word for self-actualization, is a narrative of second chances.

Sincerely,

H.L.Balcomb

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