Maya and the Gordian Knot is a startlingly honest examination of a friendship forged out of mutual loss. Michael and Jennifer have both lost their respective spouses. Newly acquainted, they brave the uncharted terrain of grief's free-fall. The ballast they provide for one another in the grittiest of times is finally what the book is about. And they discover, together, what lengths friendship can travel in the most hopeless of life's moments. The format of the book honors their separate voices, mining the difference that gender and type of loss might offer.  It is also an investigation of desperate madness--a hard look at the bewilderingly unstable geography of grief.   At the conclusion of the book the authors  own up more fully to their shared world as professional musicians.  They look closely at how music both creates and shapes us, circumscribing our lives as the unnoticed medicine of body, mind and heart.