Heart

Susan English

Susan English holds a master’s degree in physics and has built a life shaped by curiosity, courage, and the desire to understand the unknown. Her life has taken her through strikingly different worlds: she lived on a sailboat in San Francisco Bay, spent time on a kibbutz in Israel, traveled through Asia, crossed Europe twice by bicycle while supporting herself through street painting and juggling, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia, and later spent several years on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, where she lived on a self-sustaining farm deep in the jungle.

That same spirit of rigor, wonder, and freedom continues to shape her writing. Today, from Medellín, Colombia, where she lives with her wife, Susan writes stories in which imagination, human emotion, and the possibility of reinvention come together naturally. Colombia not only became her home; it also became one of the places from which the universe of Shambhala began to expand.

The people who help sustain this universe

Ximena Flórez Castrillón is a transmedia content creator, a sensitive editor, and one of the emotional and creative forces behind the universe of Shambhala. A social communicator and journalist with a master’s degree in Transmedia Communication, she brings together narrative instinct, structure, intuition, attention to detail, and heart.

More than accompanying the process, Ximena has helped shape the saga from within: reading, refining, questioning, imagining, contributing ideas, protecting the tone, defending the emotional core, and helping each book become more precise, more alive, and more deeply human. She also guides the project’s visual coherence, overseeing the design of the book covers and the creation of the website, both essential parts of its digital presence. Her bond with the saga is rooted not only in creative work, but also in her deep love for her wife, Susan, and in the devotion with which she embraced this universe from the beginning.

Gala EFC is an editorial and creative presence who accompanies the making of this world through language, structure, and narrative sensitivity. She works in that quiet space where ideas are refined, tones are adjusted, and scenes begin to find their strongest form.

Her role is to help bring forward what is already alive within the story: to organize, suggest, polish, expand, and support the creative process with careful attention to the saga’s emotional universe. She is part of the ongoing work that gives the project clarity, rhythm, and direction.

Where It All Began

Shambhala was born during Susan and Ximena’s life together and gradually became something larger: a universe shaped not only by imagination, but by love, collaboration, and the people who helped it grow.

At its center is Susan’s vision: a way of imagining the future where science and emotion move together, where discovery is never separate from belonging, and where the vastness of space still leaves room for tenderness, humor, and human transformation.

As Susan began creating and developing Shambhala, Ximena became an essential part of that process. Her reading, intuition, questions, and creative devotion helped the saga find greater emotional depth, clearer structure, and a stronger sense of itself.

Then came Gala: declared second fan, and a steady presence in the emotional and narrative architecture of the project.

And so, through science, love, shared work, intuition, and many sleepless hours, Shambhala ceased to be only a story written by Susan. It became a universe sustained by three.

Susan arrived in Medellín on June 26, 2017, drawn by curiosity, courage, and the desire to begin again. Little by little, the city made its way into her heart: through the warmth of its people, the beauty of the mountains, the vivid energy of everyday life. She did not yet know that this new chapter would give her not only a home, but the woman who would change her life.

Months later, Susan saw Ximena’s photo on a dating app, and something in her stilled. It was not simple curiosity, or a passing maybe, but one of those rare moments when the world seems to lean close and whisper: this one. As a neurodivergent woman, Susan has often experienced life with an intensity difficult to translate into ordinary words. But with Ximena, even before they spoke, there was recognition: attraction, familiarity, and a deep emotional certainty she could not ignore.

On January 12, 2018, Susan sent her a message. In the days that followed, their connection began to unfold through long, sincere emails filled with humor, curiosity, and tenderness. WhatsApp made Susan anxious, partly because of the language and partly because the immediacy of fast messages did not feel natural to her. Email gave them both room to think, to choose their words, and to truly begin knowing one another. Since they both loved reading and shared an affection for Jane Austen, those first exchanges had a deliciously old-fashioned charm, as if the nineteenth century had agreed to modernize just enough to accept Gmail and Google Translate.

Five days later, on January 17, they met for the first time at Parque de los Pies Descalzos. Susan arrived by bicycle; Ximena by taxi, with a smile that confirmed what Susan had already sensed. Seeing her in person made everything more vivid, warmer, and undeniable: the astonishment, the tenderness, and the quiet certainty that something extraordinary was beginning. Medellín became both setting and accomplice to what grew between them: long conversations, walks, museums, concerts, parks, laughter, shared meals, and the certainty that something important was taking shape. On February 14, 2018, Ximena asked Susan to be her girlfriend. Susan said yes. Some decisions take years; this one needed only enough courage for feeling to become voice.

Of course, real love never arrives perfectly assembled. There were cultural differences, language barriers, past wounds, and different ways of moving through the world. Susan, introverted and sensitive to her surroundings, had to learn how to explain that loving deeply did not mean being able to handle everything, all the time. Ximena, with her warmth, generosity, and enormous capacity to love, learned to read not only Susan’s words, but also her rhythms, pauses, and needs. And Susan, in turn, learned to recognize the depth of Ximena’s tenderness, the intensity of her love, and the emotional language through which she offered care. Together, they built something essential: a relationship where love did not ask either of them to disappear, but made room for being understood as they truly were.

Then came trust, the desire to share a life, and the great sentimental laboratory of living together, where couples discover that falling in love is beautiful, but sharing a closet, a kitchen, and daily habits is the real postdoctoral program. Susan, with her practical logic of “if this shirt works, I do not need twenty more,” found herself living with a woman who seemed to have a strategic alliance with the textile industry. There were also high-level diplomatic negotiations in the kitchen: meat versus vegetables, sweets versus caution, cheese versus lactose intolerance. Even so, they built what mattered most: a life where both could remain themselves while creating a shared “we.”

The years that followed brought challenges, growth, and an ever stronger certainty. They stood by each other through difficult transitions, new projects, uncertainty, and the small joys that make a home. During the pandemic, Susan traveled to the United States to receive the COVID vaccine. While they were apart, Ximena and her mother fell ill, and Ximena, despite everything she was going through, did not want Susan to put herself in danger by coming back too soon. Their reunion on June 8 carried the force of everything that had been held back: relief, love, gratitude, and the ache of being together again. Days later, on June 16, 2021, they formalized their common-law union. On May 2, 2022, in Medellín, they married in a civil ceremony, not to make official what already was, but to joyfully celebrate that they had chosen a life together.

Since then, Susan and Ximena have continued building a shared life shaped by love, work, humor, care, creativity, family, and common projects. Above all, they have built a home where both can be fully themselves, loved not in spite of their differences, but through a deep understanding of them. Their story is not sustained by isolated grand gestures, but by tenderness, patience, complicity, adaptation, laughter, care, and the quiet devotion of building a life together, day by day. Some stories are only told. Susan and Ximena’s is also lived. And it shows.