Eugene Sierras

Eugene has had a lifelong love of philosophy, which has guided his life since early childhood. He grew up in the desert southwest of Arizona and can remember as a boy when the state had less than a million people in it. The vast, empty deserts, the mountains, and the indigenous people were always easily accessible, often within or just beyond the city limits. As a youth, he spent long hours alone in the desert and mountains learning and appreciating the solitude of sparsely populated places. After graduating from the University of Arizona in 1964 with a BS in zoology, he was called to active duty with the United States Navy and served until his retirement in 1986. During that service, he qualified as a surface officer and a naval flight officer assigned to various fighter squadrons and embarked on several different aircraft carriers. He had two combat tours in Southeast Asia in the Tonkin Gulf off the coast of North Vietnam. He retired from the navy in 1986. After retirement from the navy, he completed a second career with the Arizona Department of Public Safety where he served as a police dispatcher and licensing agent for private investigators and agencies and security guards and agencies. He worked with uniformed highway patrol officers and with criminal investigators. He currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife, a granddaughter, and great-grandson.

The main source of the stories in this book comes from the experiences relayed to me by our customers visiting the Catholic store which I and my co-partner opened the last years of our careers in teaching. (in preparation for a transition to retirement.). A majority of my shoppers were Catholic, but there were many of other faiths including Protestants, Buddhists, Jews, Muslim and those who described themselves as atheists or agnostics. Readers of this book may be moved by the expressions of faith by residents of our community. Reared as a Catholic I have had questions of faith. However, I have been deeply moved by the religious fervor and faith of those who have related their experiences to me. It has truly made a difference in my life. My husband, also reared in a Catholic family, has been more skeptical of miracles of those about which we have written about. We shared an encounter together in Eloy, Arizona with the "Lady in the Bell Tower" which has had a significant impact on his life. This miraculous event has been witnessed by several hundred people of different faiths and nationalities. The narratives of miraculous encounters in this book may have an everlasting effect on those who read it and may serve as a segue of common values to a sometimes politically and religiously divided people.

The essential idea of the graphic novel, Walk in the Light, is simple. It is that everything in Creation is connected by a force. Many people have grasped and understood this fact, but it has taken the writings of many others in many different fields of study through human history to understand this. Those fields, those disciplines, those sources, include ancient scriptures, the works of mystics and the endeavors of no nonsense scientists who seek to understand the world and universe. It includes the experience of ancient peoples and cultures who have bequeathed us their traditions in what we today refer to as mythology. It includes those thinkers who can study and develop more deeply a better understanding of our universe and our roles in it by using all of these disciplines in an interdisciplinary synthesis.