Love Bade Me Welcome -- The Life of Phyllis Ott by Phyllis Silverman Ott-Toltz and Barbara Bamberger Scott
Trade Paperback	5 ½ x 8 ½	Biography
Release date: February 2006	270 pages	ISBN: 1-933016-39-6
	List Price: $16.95 Your Price: $11.87	Your order will be processed by Blu Sky Media Group

PHYLLIS OTT is a recognized expressionist painter who studied under Hans Hoffman. Her paintings are owned and displayed worldwide, including a collection of murals in India at the Meher Baba Pilgrim Center, visited by thousands of Americans each year. Phyllis graduated Cum Laude from Harvard, with majors in Architecture and Philosophy. Among her professors were some of the greatest minds of the post-war generation. She lived in Woodstock and Greenwich Village during the heyday of the beatnik era. Her sister Bea Silverman married Norman Mailer, who served as the catalyst to break Bea and Phyllis free from their middle-middle-class Jewish morality and who years later became Phyllis' lover.

Phyllis' story is the spiritual quest for the source of the Self. She struggled to accept her role as a woman, as she observed how downtrodden the female sex seemed to be at all times and in all places. Similarly, images of the Holocaust haunted her, as a sensitive Jewish girl growing up during the Second World War. Her father, a disabled hero of World War I, instilled in her the love of "wounded" men, and she married three men who had significant physical handicaps. Her third husband was noted artist, Lynfield Ott, slowly going blind as the two forged their path together, a path that led them to India, to the feet of the renowned spiritual master, Meher Baba.

Phyllis, Lyn and their four children became the only people to reside on the periphery of Meher Baba's American ashram, the Meher Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. There they struggled with a stormy marriage and constant poverty. Phyllis pursued a career as a social worker before returning to the first love of her life, painting. She still lives at the Center, painting, traveling, and entertaining hundreds of visitors each year. Her paintings can be viewed at www.phyllisott.com.

BARBARA BAMBERGER SCOTT, who helped Phyllis in writing this book, is author of Golden Thread (Meher Mownavani Publications, 2003) and With It (Behler Publications, 2004). She is a prize-winning freelance writer and book reviewer. Like Phyllis Ott-Toltz, she is a devotee of Avatar Meher Baba.