SO THIS IS TODAY

So this is today ...

   and I am both happy and sad, wondering how that can be.

This photograph of Chief Big Foot left dead and frozen in the snow 

will forever be etched in the minds of American Indians

 as a reminder of the inhumane treatment rendered to their ancestors by the federal government.

Estimates are some 300 men, women and children were killed at the Wounded Knee Massacre today in 1890.

It need not have happened.  

But hate looks the same as everyone else until there are no witnesses.

It is important to always remember what happened by the hands of evil men 

because evil men still exist today. 

Even now, there are evil people who spew out hatred against others 

who may not be their same race, color or religion today.

MY FRIEND AND COLLABORATOR, 

ROBERT ROSSMANN

has a new web page out:

 http://www.robertrossmann.com/

Now available on cdbaby.com

A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens, recorded live by Robert Rossmann. 

Soon to be out on audio by Robert as well: 

                         

He  just finished Chapter 5 
of his new production for me.

The grey clouds swirled angrily, silently, looking as if God had burned the sins of yesterday, casting them to the winds.  Meilori hugged my arm.  

 I looked down, watching her silently, effortlessly holding my universe together.    

Sometimes I can feel my heart straining under the weight of all the lives I’ve taken.   

Then, I look into her slanted eyes, jade quarter moons waiting to rise, and the world makes sense again.

I looked away from her as if she were the sun.  Yet, I still saw her, like the sun, even without looking.  Love is like that.

“Beloved,” she sighed.  “One day your compassion will be the death of us.”

I nodded.  “All my futile efforts to make the world better: a dream, a dream … that most like will end in nothing, leaving me where I laid down.”

I bent my head, kissing her soft lips lightly.  “But I wish you to know that you inspired it.”

Meilori turned wet eyes away from me, and Sammy said from behind us, “I reckon that in a sense, Lady Meilori, we are all each other’s consequences.”

“Just so,” she murmured.  “Just so.”

Meilori sighed, “We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn them behind us, 

with nothing to show for our efforts except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the heat at our backs.”

MAY YOUR NEW YEAR BE EVEN BETTER THAN YOU WISH IT TO BE!

GHOST OF A CHANCE 40_THINGS CAN ALWAYS GET WORSE

Today is a somber day for those of us with Lakota blood :

The massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota was on this day in 1890,

the U. S. 7th Calvary gunning down hundreds of unarmed Lakota Indian warriors and their families.

As framed in Dee Brown’s influential, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the massacre represented not only the culmination of the Indian Wars

but the mindset which began to form with the arrival of Columbus.

His last chapter described the Wounded Knee killings, his last paragraph describing the transport of the fifty-one wounded Indian survivors to shelter in a nearby Episcopal mission:

It was the fourth day after Christmas in the Year of Our Lord 1890. When the first torn and bleeding bodies were carried into the candlelit church,

those who were conscious could see Christmas greenery hanging from the open rafters.

Across the chancel front above the pulpit was strung a crudely lettered banner: PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TO MEN.



{Turquoise Woman back again. I will not comment on the irony of the above. You two-leggeds carry your own destruction within you. But I last left DreamSinger and his companions in Hell, fighting a losing battle in the inferno.

But things can always get worse ...

especially in Hell.}

The horn of Epona flashed up, blocking a downward sweep of a sword from a frothing bull-man. The unicorn staggered back a step at the impact.


I darted out with my borrowed sword, hooking the back hooves of the minotaur, sending it sprawling.

Crazy Horse, true to his word to protect Gypsy, spun, leapt in a graceful twirl, and blocked three separate blows from a man-bull, a black-scaled demon, and an evil frog-like creature whose name I was just as happy not to be familiar with. In fact, I would have been even happier not to be familiar with the disgusting thing at all.

A throaty voice shrieked above us : "Enough."


I looked up as the Sphinx of Thebes husked, "The Turquoise Woman."


Dressed in a clinging, moon-white buckskin dress, her alabastor arms held up high, Estanatlehi sailed gracefully down the endless depths of the rumbling hellsky.

Her living lightning hair flowed up as she slid down the inflamed face of Hell itself. The Lakota warriors respectfully hid their eyes from the length of supple leg revealed by her flight.

Long, long ago legends say that one warrior had allowed lust to fill his chest at the sight of her. Turquoise eyes had flashed. And only a pile of bleached, gleaming bones had remained of that unwise warrior.

She landed gracefully beside me, clucking her tongue at me. "DreamSinger, you risk the lives of my Spirit Warriors on pawns."

She gathered Gypsy up in her supple arms. "Come, noble cat."

The Turquoise Woman looked at my Lakota friends and last upon the Sphinx. "You all have earned passage to that Land That Knows No Shadows."

She flicked cold, unreadable turquoise eyes to me. "And you. You go to fight your true enemy : DayStar!"

Hell blurred around me. I was no longer on the plains of Hell. I was inside a burning church. The flames were spreading from where I stood as if my very touch were deadly to this place.

I was facing a stained glass window of Lucifer raising his fist to the closed gate to Heaven. Below it was a bronze plaque : FIRST CHURCH OF DAYSTAR.

Yeah, even in Hell, things could always get worse.
***