Gray Henry is many things: publisher (Fons Vitae Press and Bosnian school books during the war), film maker (Timothy Leary Buddhist enlightenment re-enactments), spiritual explorer (has a direct line to the Dalai Lama), globe-trotter and mother (her children were born in Libya and Egypt).

Sum them all up and you get something resembling a national treasure. Gray was born in Louisville but educated at Sarah Lawrence College in New York where she studied art history and world religions. She took up residence in Manhattan for 10 years where she worked with Leary but says, “The film studio was really a front for the transformation of the soul” and she eventually decided America was spiritually impoverished. So she took off on a trek across northern Africa in the 1970s.

When she and her Venezuelan husband landed in Egypt she says they met people there from Germany and France and remote places of the world. “I realized,” she says, “that we were an entire generation of people from many countries seeking knowledge and spiritual enlightenment.”

She and her husband became educators in Egypt before later moving to England and becoming publishers of some of the first objective translations of Islamic texts. Hers was a most adventurous and rich life until her parents became sick and elderly back home here in Louisville.

“My passion was world religion,” Gray explains. “I studied it, I lectured it and published it. But the highest commandment in any religion is to honor your father and mother. And I realized I was a hypocrite letting my parents die here alone. So, I came home to Kentucky.” And she brought her learned understanding and appreciation for the world with her and set up her publishing company in the basement of her father’s house.  There she is surrounded in the flesh by the tangible evidence of her travels . . . but also by the very real connection to herself and to home.