Sunday's daughter, now a startlingly sophisticated 7-year-old, took her own set of photos of knees and chopped-off heads floating in the sky. In the Far East, Sahara was met with great reverence because of a rare, bluish birthmark on her right hand. In Thailand, she was told she was marked by the Buddha, and in India they said she was the reincarnation of a holy person. She was invited to special meditations or ceremonies that even her mother could not attend.
``I don't know what I make of it,'' Sunday said. ``I have investigated enough mysteries to know that I don't know anything I thought I knew. I've had so many experiences that can't be understood with Western logic or reason. There's no template for understanding this with the Western mind.''
Indeed, her account of her travels and work is laced with mystical stories. In Thailand, a nun explained that the vibrations and buzzing plaguing them during a temple stay were the work of angry spirits, not bats. As soon as they asked the Buddha for permission to stay -- a custom they had overlooked -- the invisible attacks stopped.
In Australia, Sunday said, a stay at a reservation was fruitless, until one night she had a half-dream in which someone came and whispered three secrets in her ear. When she asked the chief elder about it the next day, he said she had been initiated by a dreamtime spirit and that her work could at last begin.
Sunday's trips are funded by a group of collectors and donors that includes Alice Walker, Bill Cosby, Gloria Steinem, Bonnie Raitt, Quincy Jones and Heavy D.
When she raises the money, she means to continue the spiritual leaders project in the rain forests in South America and extend her portfolio to Jewish mystics, Coptic Christians and indigenous shamans.
Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize- winning author, said she had just finished writing ``The Temple of My Familiar'' when Sunday returned from her Africa trip.
``It was as if she had gone into my novel or imagination and found the people I was writing about. I was just floored,'' Walker said. ``She captured the most wonderful strength and dignity and at-homeness.''
Sunday's most serious fan, however, is probably the 7-year-old who came early to last week's opening dressed in a long, flowered skirt and a pink headband.
``Since she's going into the human mind and heart, this is up there and this is down there,'' Sahara explained of a photograph in which the sky and earth are transposed. She jumped up and down and ran along the corridor. ``Mommy,'' she said. ``Your work is beautiful.''
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