Notes from the Edge of Becoming
The Sacred Fire of Enia Oaks
I met Enia Oaks the way many deep, serendipitous connections of mine start these days — through the gentle algorithmic nudge of Instagram.
Amid a sea of digital noise, her presence was quiet but magnetic, like a late-night jazz riff that stops you mid-scroll. Her words pierced the ether, softened my breath, and whispered: “You are not alone.”
It didn’t take long before I, Diamond Michael Scott, Global Book Ambassador of Great Books, Great Minds, knew this was more than a passing encounter. This was a soul project. A revelation. A voice rising out of stillness.
Her book, From a Studio in Oakland, California: 108 Notes on Existence, is one of the most intimate and luminous testaments to the human experience I’ve read in years. It is not merely a book—it is a balm, a reckoning, and a mirror held up to your own aching, evolving self.
With the clarity of a physician and the tenderness of a poet, Oaks gives us the kind of writing that ignites community, connection, and conversation—one note, one page, one soul at a time.
The Reckoning That Birthed the Book
When I asked Enia what cracked her open, what prompted her to write this offering, she didn’t flinch. Her honesty was like a scalpel: precise and unflinching. The rupture, she said, came from within the very system meant to heal. After years working as an emergency medicine doctor, she found herself staring into a healthcare model that had long ceased to honor the human soul.
“I had started a new job that exposed the stark financial underpinnings behind every act of care,” she shared. “Once I saw behind the curtain, the illusion of soul-level service began to dissolve. I questioned whether I wanted to continue to be a doctor at all within a system like this.”
That realization didn’t just change her career path—it transformed her identity. She walked away—not from medicine entirely, but from any role that demanded her soul be left behind in exchange for a paycheck. “I took time off to just reconnect with my humanity,” she told me. And from that sacred pause, the writing came, she says, not as a performance, but as a promise. A quiet offering.
108 Notes: A Sacred Architecture
Enia chose 108 pieces for this book—and this wasn’t an arbitrary choice. “It is held in many spiritual practices as a number that signifies wholeness and completion,” she explained. And true to that sacred geometry, the book moves like a mandala: spiraling inward, outward, and back again. It is not linear. It is alive.
Each note—poem or micro-essay—lands like a prayer. Some are just a few lines. Others unspool like soul maps. Together, they feel like a trail of sacred breadcrumbs, left for anyone walking through the forest of grief, becoming, or slow self-reclamation.
As I read it, I found myself marking pages like sacred sites—little cairns of clarity amid the fog. Oaks has a way of letting her readers feel witnessed, without prescribing how they ought to move forward. Her voice doesn’t direct—it invites. It says, “Sit here with me. You’re not crazy. You’re not broken. You’re simply becoming.”
Writing from the Thin Places
Enia’s work as a doctor—particularly in emergency medicine—infuses this collection with urgency and reverence. She’s lived in the thin spaces where life and death brush shoulders, where the veil between presence and absence thins to a whisper.
“Because I have seen exactly how this life is not guaranteed beyond the exact moment we are in, liberation became imperative,” she told me. And you feel that imperative in every word. She writes like someone who knows time is short, but that depth is eternal.
“I’ve found that it’s often not what is said, but how it’s said that lands most impactfully,” she continued. “Some readers need logic, others need tenderness, and some need indirectness altogether. There are moments when we can’t look directly at what hurts. But we can saddle up next to it. We can let it meet us through an emotive poem, or an open-ended query.”
That’s what Enia Oaks gives us—a thousand tiny doors back to ourselves.
The Rage and Radiance of Black Womanhood
Reading this book as a fellow Black creative, I was struck by its textured balance of ferocity and grace. The permission to feel everything—and still rise.
As a Black woman and healer, Oaks writes from a tender and complex edge. “Once I realized that preserving the softness I cherish in my soul required the ability to defend it, the path ahead became clearer,” she said.
She described the paradox of being expected to be both a pillar and invisible. “That contradiction creates a hollowing state of cognitive dissonance… It’s a kind of psychological ravaging that gives rise to the rage so often mischaracterized in the ‘angry Black woman’ trope.”
But she refuses to let that trope limit her. Instead, she expands the conversation to all who have been told to shrink. “You can just see in a person’s body language how much space they believe they are allowed to take up,” she told me.
Her book is an invitation to take up space. To remember that worthiness outranks every label we’ve been stamped with—poverty, trauma, addiction, race, disability, sexuality. All of it.
“What I Would’ve Told You Sooner”
If there’s one piece in the book that embodies its entire mission, Oaks says it’s the final note: What I Would’ve Told You Sooner.
This piece is a gentle explosion. A reminder that so much of what we’ve been taught—why we should stay small, play polite, or hide—was never true to begin with.
“You have always been worthy of love,” she writes. “And your fidelity in this life belongs not to the noise around you, but to the soul underneath it all.”
I carried that line with me for days. Still do.
This Is a Book to Hold Onto
Reading From a Studio in Oakland is not a one-time event. It’s a book you’ll return to again and again—when your heart is breaking, when you’re making a bold leap, or when you just need to be reminded that your existence is sacred.
It is the embodiment of our mission at Great Books, Great Minds: Igniting a New World of Community, Connection, and Conversation One Book At a Time. Oaks has gifted us a literary artifact—equal parts medicine, mirror, and map.
Connect with Enia Oaks
So here is my invitation to you, dear reader:
If you are standing on the edge of something, if the old life no longer fits and the new one hasn’t fully arrived, read this book. Let it find you.
Buy a copy of From a Studio in Oakland, California: 108 Notes on Existence. Read it slowly. Highlight recklessly. Dog-ear the pages. Gift it to someone you love.
Connect with her HERE
And follow @enia_oaks on Instagram, in her quiet corner of social media, or wherever she continues to drop soul notes. Because voices like hers aren’t just healing, they are necessary in the studio of our own stillness.
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