The Midnight Carnival

A Tale of Remembering

By Jocelyn Bates

In 2021, within seven days of each other, both of my parents died.

They were my spiritual foundation. My holistic roots. The people who taught me that there was more to this world than what most people could see.

And then they were gone.

What came after wasn't a breakdown — though it held all the ingredients of one. It was something stranger and more sacred than that. It was a descent. A crossing. A journey through grief so complete it cracked me open at the level of the soul.

The Midnight Carnival is what came through that crack.

This is not a book I wrote.

It's a book that wrote itself through me — in the language of myth, dream, and memory. Part fantasy, part spiritual memoir, part creative invocation. Fiction on the surface. Truth in every bone.

It follows one woman's journey through a world that exists just beyond the edges of the ordinary — where grief becomes a doorway, where the soul's deepest forgetting becomes the path back to remembering, and where healing doesn't arrive as an answer but as a recognition.

Oh. I remember this. I remember me.

This book is for you if

You have known loss that changed the shape of everything.

You have felt the fog — the one that settles in after grief, after trauma, after life asks more of you than you thought you could give.

You have always sensed there is more to existence than what most people settle for — and you are hungry for a story that speaks to that knowing rather than dismissing it.

You are ready to stop trying to fix yourself and start remembering who you actually are.

You want to feel — not just read. To be moved at the level of the soul, not just the mind.

A moment from inside the Carnival

This moment emerges deep within the Carnival — not as an explanation, but as a remembering. Let it find you wherever you are.

"This wasn't about just her grief; it wasn't about just her parents, not even the lives she had lived before this one. She remembered the moment her Soul came into being. The first time she chose separation. The moment her Soul said Yes to forgetting, to the human path, to embodiment, aching and longing. The moment her Soul began its journey of Remembering.

And the elephants, they knew. They had always known. They were the holders of memory, the original record keepers. Their bodies, vast and quiet, carried the stories of every grief not spoken, every song unsung, every soul who forgot their name."

What you'll leave with

Not answers. Not a system. Not a prescription for healing.

A felt sense — deep in your body — that anything is possible.

That the grief you've carried has a purpose.

That the forgetting was always part of the remembering.

That you are not broken. You never were.

Get your copy

Paperback | $19.99

Available on Amazon or order a signed copy directly from me.

"Her work centers on creative sovereignty, remembrance, and reclaiming the sacred threads of personal mythology." — Insight Timer listener

If the book called something forward in you that wants to go deeper —