THE LEAGUE OF FIVE

{"There is a garden in every childhood --

an enchanted place where colors are brighter,

the air softer,

and the morning more fragrant than ever again."

- Elizabeth Lawrence.}


Some have emailed me asking about the mysterious League of Five that I mentioned in the post of yesterday.

I forget that I have new friends, unfamiliar with my older posts.

So pull up a cyber-chair and let me introduce you to something my mother sparked into being:

You see, the origins of the League of Five stretches back to my childhood.

That league was given birth by:

Mystery and wonder.


They were the seeds from which grew the League of Five.

I've talked about Edith Hamilton's MYTHOLOGY with its stunning illustrations by Steele Savage.

As a child I caught sight of mythic Proteus rising from the wine dark sea,

And heard shadowed Triton blow death from his wreathed horn.
 

Mythology and fantasy were the mid-wives of the League of Five. And my tales show it.

But I want to speak on what the League of Five taught me ... and what it might teach you:

LESSON ONE:

{Mystery is the siren call for all lovers of fiction. Better to leave out commas than mystery in your tales.}
 

BEAU GESTE --
Its first sentence : "The place was silent and aware."

Mystery.

A desert fortress manned by the dead.

Every French Foreign Legionnaire was standing at his post along the wall. Every man held a rife aimed out at the endless sands. Every man was dead.


Who stood the last dead man up?


That question drove me to check out a book as thick as the Bible.

I remember sitting down that April 1st with my four junior high chums in study hall. 

They couldn't get over the size of the book. They looked at me like I was crazy. Then, I told them the mystery.

Tommy and Gary snapped up the remaining two copies in the school library. Raymond and B.J. (we called him Beej) had to go to the two different branches of the city library for their copies.

And then, my four friends, sluggish students at best, were racing with me through the pages to discover the solution to the mystery.

But then came stolen jewels and desert danger. We were hooked.

Mid-way through the book, I discovered the classic movie marathon that Saturday was going to show BEAU GESTE, starring Gary Cooper and Ray Milland.

The five of us roughed it that night in front of the TV.

After the movie, we planned on sleeping on the floor of my front room. It would be like we were French Foreign Legionnaires on a mission.

We were enthralled. We booed the bad guys. We cheered on Gary Cooper. And we sniffed back embarassing tears when he died.
But with the mystery solved, my four friends didn't want to go on.

The solution fizzled the fun of the reading. We all moped. A throat was cleared. We turned around.

Mother sat with a leather-bound volume in her hands, and with her voice blessed with the magic of the Lakota Storyteller and the lyrical beauty of the Celtic bard, she smiled,

"Let me read you five something --
 

LESSON TWO:

A GREAT VILLAIN WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN.

{And he will keep your readers' interest up high -- so no lukewarm antagonists. Think epic. Think primal.}

Mother, in her rich, deep voice, read low like distant thunder :

"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline,

high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan,

a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of true cat-green.

Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government--

which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence.

Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."
 

She put down the book on her lap and intoned, "That, young men, is the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. Do you want to hear more?"

Man, did we! And so the League of Five was born.

For every Saturday night for the rest of that year and all through my last year of junior high, 

we sat cross-legged on the front room floor and listened to all thirteen of the Fu Manchu novels ...

along with the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starting with "The Adventure of the Speckled Band." I never went to sleep after that without looking at my headboard!

LESSON THREE :

NOTHING LASTS FOREVER ... NOT THE BAD ... CERTAINLY NOT THE GOOD.

{Instill that truth into your tale, and it will intensify the fragility of the human body and the enduring courage of its spirit.

And if it teaches your readers to hold gently and gratefully the love they find, so much the better.}
Unknown to us, Mother was teaching us the value of a mind that thought beneath the surface, that grew stronger with use as with any muscle.

We made special nights of it when the classic movie marathon played any Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Fu Manchu movie. 

Flash Gordon with Ming the Merciless was great. It was like seeing Fu Manchu in a space opera.

But the seasons pulled us apart to different cities, to different high schools, to different destinations.

Fatal car accident. War. Disease. Mugger's bullet.

Until now, only I remain of the League of Five.


But every April 1st, in the late evening hours, I sit down and pull BEAU GESTE from the shelf. 

I read aloud the words, "The place was silent and aware."

And no matter the room I find myself ...

it is silent ...

and it is aware.

I see five wide-eyed boys, their eyes gleaming with wonder and awe, 

listening once more to my mother reading into the wee hours of the morning,

her voice a beacon in the darkness of our imaginations.

I pull down my worn copy of THE INSIDIOUS DR. FU MANCHU and turn to chapter two with Sir Denis Nayland Smith's description of his adversary.

After a few moments, the words blur. But that is all right. I know the words by heart.

What novel meant so much to you that you just had to share it with a friend or friends? Tell me. I'd like to know.

Compare it to what you are writing now. Did it have any effect on your style or genre of writing? Please write me on that, too.
***********************

***
This is a tune that the League of Five would have liked, each of us imagining ourselves fighting together in some grand adventure:

WHEN MET WITH CRUELTY

Two of my friends evoked memories of dense cruelty yesterday:


Inger:

A dumb doctor in the ER, at UCLA no less, who insinuated that my husband must be an alcoholic since he has liver cancer. Or so he sounded to me anyway. 

Janie: (In reply to Inger had her own memory):

 Inger, I was in the hospital once with a liver problem and a doctor I didn't even know came in the room and shouted at me 

that I needed to get myself to Alcoholics Anonymous. I was appalled and embarrassed to the point that I didn't know what to do or say. I rarely drink.


Once Upon A Time ...


Mother was just starting her battle with Cancer.  

She promised her doctor she would not smoke.  Mother always kept her word.


She said everything could be taken from you but honor.  That you had to give away yourself.
 

Alas, the Nurses Break Room was right next door, and they smoked like chimneys!

One evening I walked in to find Mother sitting, shivering with eyes filled with tears.

My face become flint, and I said low, "What happened, and who is going to be sorry they see me?"

Mother smiled evilly, "Oh, your friend, Sandra, and I have decided how to handle it."

"Uh, oh," I said.

She said, "Oh, nothing obscene, nothing twisted, nothing illegal."

Her doctor had come into her room, sniffed the smoky air (courtesy of the Nurses Break Room) and yelled for ten minutes at her.  

"It is bad enough you lie about smoking but to blame the nurses!"

Mother told him to leave and not to come back.

"I will go when I am ready!"

Mother picked up the steel bedpan and weakly stepped towards him.  


"You are about to be the first doctor crowned with a bedpan ... and this one is full."


He left, promising to be back tomorrow.

And that is all Mother would say.  

She had me repeat all the terrible, corny, but heart-healing jokes my young customers brought each day as their presents to my sick mother.  

We ended the evening visit by softly singing SIDE BY SIDE, our song when I was very little.

I came the next morning, but she would still say nothing of what she and Sandra planned.

As I walked down the hospital hallway that evening, every nurse I passed tried to keep a straight face but broke out laughing.

Uh, oh.

I walked into Mother's room.  A big smile on her face, she sat on the side of her bed, twirling a rubber chicken. 


"I lied about the twisted."

The next morning there was an 8 X 10 framed blow-up of the picture taken by Sandra 

of Mother swatting the stunned doctor with the rubber chicken.

Sandra smirked, "Hey, what was he going to say to the police?  I've been assaulted by a rubber chicken?"

The doctor's partner always came after that.  But he walked in smiling.  He didn't like his partner either.

HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THE BEAR?

On this day in 1907 Kenneth Grahame wrote the first of a series of letters to his son, Alastair,

describing the Toad, Rat, Mole and Badger adventures that eventually became The Wind in the Willows.

Grahame had been inventing such bedtime stories for several years and the letter, occasioned by his being separated from Alastair on his seventh birthday, picks up what seems to be a continuing tale:

"Have you heard about the Toad? He was never taken prisoner by brigands at all. It was all a horrid low trick of his."

Alastair was an only child, born blind in one eye and with a squint in the other.

He was plagued by health problems throughout his short life. Alastair eventually committed suicide on a railway track

while an undergraduate at Oxford University, two days before his 20th birthday on 7 May 1920.

Out of respect for Kenneth Grahame, Alastair's demise was recorded as an accidental death.

Mother once told me that the folly of most two-leggeds was that they wanted "happy endings"

when the best one could hope for was the appreciating of the happy moments in between the dawning of the light and the dying of it.

"Can't we have both, Mama?," I remember asking, coughing from double pneumonia.

She ruffled my hair and smiled sadly, "Perhaps you will be the exception, Little One. I will pray so."

Perhaps Alastair's suicide was brought on by his handicap and his maladjustment to an adult world that seemed, to him as to Rat, more than adventure:

"And beyond the Wild Wood again?" [Mole] asked: "Where it's all blue and dim, and one sees what may be hills or perhaps they mayn't, and something like the smoke of towns, or is it only cloud-drift?"

"Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,'" said the Rat. "And that's something that doesn't matter, either to you or me. I've never been there, and I'm never going, nor you either, if you've got any sense at all."

Grahame himself is described as one who pined for but never took the Open Road,

as an escape from his banking career and a loveless marriage.

When he offered THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS to his publisher he described it as a book "of life, sunshine, running water, woodlands, dusty roads, winter firesides, free of problems,

clear of the clash of sex, of life as it might fairly be supposed to be regarded by some of the wise, small things 'that glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck."

My own THE BEAR WITH 2 SHADOWS grew from my own childhood tales told to me by Mother

as she hugged me as I shivered and coughed from double pneumonia. We were iced in our basement apartment in Detroit by one of the worst ice storms in remembrance.

Phones down. Just new in town. All alone.

So Mother merged bits of myth and legend she remembered from both sides of her bloodline : Lakota and Celtic.

She was sure I would die, and she wanted my last moments to be filled, not with fear and dread, but with awe, wonder, and magic.

She told of The Turquoise Woman, whose touch was icy but whose heart was warm. My shivers were from her embrace.

And that hulking shadow at the foot of my bed? Why, that was Hibbs, the bear with two shadows, protector of all hurting children.

He was there for me.

And a world of wonder and magic opened up in my feverish mind, birthing a happy moment for my mother : despite the odds, I grew better. I lived.

Have you heard about the bear? He saved a little boy once. A bit of that little boy still lives ... in my heart.
***

NO MATTER YOUR WINTER, SPRING WILL COME

Your unconscious speaks to you all the time.

Usually, the din of our present moment drowns it out. Usually.

But the unconscious is a tricky little bugger.

As I was driving today in the blinding rains,

courtesy of this terrible winter storm brutalizing the whole country,

a car darted recklessly in front of me. I drive as if everyone around me is suicidal and moronic --

so there was no accident.

Through the blurred windshield, I spotted the bumper sticker on it.

I thought I read : NO MATTER YOUR WINTER, SPRING WILL COME.

When the windshield wipers sqeaked me a clear view, my impression wasn't even close to the true words of the sticker.

Don't ask. Just content yourself with the fact that it matched perfectly the mindset of a suicidal moron.

But it got me to thinking as I drove home. My unconscious mind was right.

Life is a circle of seasons. No winter stays forever. No summer is endless. Trauma will end. Healing will begin. And no joy lasts forever.

My blog friends email me :

some are struggling in the middle of their novels;

some are just trying to overcome the inertia of pushing the beginning of their narrative over that first hill;

while others are brooding about revisions : where to prune, where to further illuminate.

Whatever season you find yourself struggling in, know that with the trials,

there are also pleasures involved with each season. Both blessings and blights have expiration dates.

Life is both less and more than you may think.

It is a fragile tangle of perceptions that exist in a fleeting moment in time.

This moment.


See? It is already gone : that moment when your eyes first spied the title over my post.

And that is something my half-Lakota mother taught me as we looked out over Lake Michigan at a frosty sunset while she spun me tales of the Twilight of the Gods, and what it meant to be courageous.

Suddenly, she turned to me and said : "Breathe each breath, little one. No two are the same. Remember the colors that paint this sky. Remember me, little one. Remember, and this sunset ... and I ... we will never leave you. Never."

At lunch today I read a few poems of Emily Dickinson. Writing of that sunset from so long ago has reminded me of her "Blazing in Gold." Here is a snippet :

"Blazing in gold and quenching in purple,
Leaping like leopards to the sky,
Then at the feet of the old horizon
Laying her spotted face to die…."

Another favorite comes from Christina Georgina Rossetti's "From Sunset To Star Rise" :

"I live alone, I look to die alone:
Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge,
Ghosts of my buried years and friends come back,
My heart goes sighing after swallows flown
On sometime summer's unreturning track."

We write our tales, spinning them of the silk of our imagination and perceptions. We sail the dark seas of longing and desire ... to be published? No. I think we sail for a shore other than the need to be heard. No, we sail upon the Sea of Dreams to connect to others of like spirit out in the darkness.

That is why we sail upon uncertain seas to tell our stories ... to reach another heart like ours: hurting, hoping, and helping. That is a star worthy of charting our course by.

What did John Masefield write?

I must go down to the sea again,
to the lonely sea and sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship

And a star to steer by.
*****************************

NO MATTER YOUR WINTER, SPRING WILL COME

Your unconscious speaks to you all the time. Usually, the din of our present moment drowns it out. Usually.

But the unconscious is a tricky little bugger.

As I was driving today in the blinding rains, courtesy of long-reaching Hurricane Alex, a car darted recklessly in front of me. I drive as if everyone around me is suicidal and moronic -- so there was no accident.

Through the blurred windshield, I spotted the bumper sticker on it. I thought I read : NO MATTER YOUR WINTER, SPRING WILL COME. When the windshield wipers sqeaked me a clear view, my impression wasn't even close to the true words of the sticker.

Don't ask. Just content yourself with the fact that it matched perfectly the mindset of a suicidal moron.

But it got me to thinking as I drove home. My unconscious mind was right. Life is a circle of seasons. No winter stays forever. No summer is endless. Trauma will end. Healing will begin. And no joy lasts forever.

My blog friends email me :

some are struggling in the middle of their novels;

some are just trying to overcome the inertia of pushing the beginning of their narrative over that first hill;

while others are brooding about revisions : where to prune, where to further illuminate.

Whatever season you find yourself struggling in, know that with the trials, there are also pleasures involved with each season. Both blessings and blights have expiration dates.

Life is both less and more than you may think. It is a fragile tangle of perceptions that exist in a fleeting moment in time.

This moment.


See? It is already gone : that moment when your eyes first spied the title over my post.

And that is something my half-Lakota mother taught me as we looked out over Lake Michigan at a frosty sunset while she spun me tales of the Twilight of the Gods, and what it meant to be courageous.

Suddenly, she turned to me and said : "Breathe each breath, little one. No two are the same. Remember the colors that paint this sky. Remember me, little one. Remember, and this sunset ... and I ... we will never leave you. Never."

Yesterday I wrote of Emily Dickinson. Writing of that sunset from so long ago has reminded me of her "Blazing in Gold." Here is a snippet :

"Blazing in gold and quenching in purple,
Leaping like leopards to the sky,
Then at the feet of the old horizon
Laying her spotted face to die…."

Another favorite comes from Christina Georgina Rossetti's "From Sunset To Star Rise" :

"I live alone, I look to die alone:
Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge,
Ghosts of my buried years and friends come back,
My heart goes sighing after swallows flown
On sometime summer's unreturning track."

We write our tales, spinning them of the silk of our imagination and perceptions. We sail the dark seas of longing and desire ... to be published? No. I think we sail for a shore other than the need to be heard. No, we sail upon the Sea of Dreams to connect to others of like spirit out in the darkness.

That is why we sail upon uncertain seas to tell our stories ... to reach another heart like ours: hurting, hoping, and helping. That is a star worthy of charting our course by.

What did John Masefield write?

I must go down to the sea again,
to the lonely sea and sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship

And a star to steer by.
*****************************
Post Script : If you would like to see how an agent truly views queries and the writers who send them, go to this delightful, enlightening post by agent, Anita Bartholomew of Salkind Literary Agency : http://www.editorsandauthors.com/

A HOSPITAL ON STILTS?

Ever see a hospital on stilts?

You could have yesterday ...

if you had driven with me down what I call "the Last Exit to Eden" :

The Creole Nature Trail.

I don't often drive to the small rural hospital at the end of its winding roads. When I do, I take the opportunity to enjoy the sights and sounds of this last taste of wilderness that civilization affords us.

We've talked about symbolism yesterday. The first stop of my journey was laden with symbolism : the gas station situated at a lonely crossroads, appropriately named "4 Corners."

My half-Lakota mother told me often of the spiritual power in the crossroads spinning off to the four directions, of the personal impact of our individual decisions, and of the crossroads of my birth.

I was born in a hospital built at the hub of a crossroads. As a young child, I listened intently to the story Mother repeatedly told me : that for each child born at the crossroads, an angel and a demon came for possession of the child's soul.

"Mine, too, Mama?"

"Yes, little one. Yours, too."

I remember swallowing hard. "What happened?"

"They fought, fought hard. At first they used fiery swords."

"Wow."

"But each was as fast as the other. Then, they wrestled. But both kept slipping out of each other's holds. Finally, they began to arm wrestle, pitting the strength of their spirits one against the other."

This time I couldn't swallow. "Who won, Mama?"

"Neither."

"Neither?"

"They are fighting inside you still."

"Right now?"

"Yes, right now. But soon one will win."

"Who?"

"The one you choose, little one."

"I choose the angel!"

"Not with words, Roland. With actions. With each dark action, the demon grows stronger, the angel weaker. With each hard choice of doing what is right, the angel grows stronger, the demon angrier."

She ruffled the hair on my head lightly. "Choose wisely, son. Choose wisely."

Sometimes in that dark night of the soul we all must face at times, I can feel them struggling still. And then, it is oh, so hard to choose wisely. But I try. I try.

But we began this post by talking about a hospital on stilts. They are more huge concrete pylons than stilts ... yet, that little boy from long ago is still alive inside me.

Hurricane Rita scoured all evidence of Man from Cameron Parish with its gouging fingers of wind, hurled debris, and tidal waves of surging water. So all the structures are now built on stilts of wood or concrete. It is so odd to pass a mobile home, towering some 20 feet in the air ... so tall it takes three tiers of stairs to reach its front door.

Not that there are many structures to be found further along these lonely roads. And down the misty stretch of concrete, there is a long, winding "S" of a curve under towering Cypress tree sentinels that I love to drive. It is beautiful beyond my meager power to describe.

After pulling out on the straightway, I looked for my old friends who seem to know when I am coming : a small herd of wild horses. And I was not disappointed. There they were, alert heads up, tails swishing in expectation.

They happily took up our old game : racing alongside my van ... which I slowed to stretch out our fun. I had a new friend for the second time in my wanderings here : a lone egret sailing gracefully above us as if curious at this odd ritual between part-Lakota and horses.

It actually swooped down in front of my van and around it in an elegant dance of grace and beauty. And as I always do, I rolled down my windows to drink in the sounds of the pounding hooves, the gusting winds, and the haunting cry of distant hunting hawks. But as with all moments of breath-stealing beauty, it was over, the horses pulling off to other games, other interests. I waved a bitter-sweet goodbye to them and drove onto the strangest bridge I have ever driven over.

It sweeps high up, twirls like an "S", then slowly descends to a road with water and isolated islands of vegetation as far as you can see. At its apex, the clouds were dark and brooding as if Estanatlehi, The Turquoise Woman of Lakota myth, was showing me her anger at Man's ugly, oily destruction of her Gulf waters.

As I reached the top, I slowed, taking in the scalp-tingling view of what the world must have appeared before Man, and I seemed to hear The Turquoise Woman murmur in my ear : "Be careful, Little Lakota. Veer not to the left nor to the right. For eight lonely miles there is no shoulder to this tiny road. Break down here, and I will show you all the mercy BP is showing me."

The second largest population of alligators in the U.S. reside here, so it was not unexpected to see one rise up from the waters beside the small road at the foot of the bridge. Our eyes met. Two species regarded each other in a moment brief yet enlongated as strange encounters sometimes are.

Its yellow-flecked slit eyes were cold windows into reptilian memories of times when Man was yet to be and scaled monsters walked the earth as savage kings. But I sped by, and the spell was shattered. The alligator slipped silently beneath the dark waters, searching for easier prey.

I finally made it to the sprawling "hospital on stilts" as the little boy inside me insists on calling it. It was eerie and quiet. I remembered the last time I'd been there.

A mother and her little girl had walked out of the hospital. I waved at the little girl and winked. Catching me by surprise, the girl giggled and ran staight to me, wrapping her tiny arms around my waist in a happy hug. The mother came up to me, shaking her head in wonder.

"It must be that you have such kind eyes," she said.

I smiled at the memory and walked into my hospital on stilts.
**************************
And here is the song I listened to over and over again on my blood run along the last exit to Eden :


And in keeping with showing movie trailers for movies that I think might be fun :

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY

It's Mother's Day. My own mother's spirit has long since traveled to that Land which knows no shadow. I know she waits for me there with Sooner, the wolf-dog that once roamed the hills with Mother when she was a young girl.

When Mother visited the harsh home from which she had been taken to spend years in an orphanage, she was surprised her beloved Sooner was still alive. No other human could approach her.

But when Mother kneeled in front of her, Sooner laid her big head in Mother's lap. The wolf-dog finally felt the soft fingers stroke her that she had waited years to feel again. Sooner let out a long, slow sigh. And then, she died.

In my worldview, Sooner went to where she sat in that Land Of No Shadows with wagging tail until Mother walked up to her to kneel once again and hug that big head.

Yes, it is Mother's Day. What do I give? And to whom? I am a story teller. And so I give to all of you a story Mother told me as my double pneumonia grew worse, and the winter shadows deepened in our basement apartment without power. It comes from my Native American/Celtic fantasy THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS. But the teaching tale is my mother's.


The adult Hibbs looked at the pond beside which Estanatlehi, the Turquoise Woman stood. She looked at him expectantly. What was she waiting for?

And then, Hibbs smiled. He knew that look. She expected him to remember. And with that very thought, he did. Time once again reached out from his mind and drew the bear back into his wondrous, seemingly endless, days as an innocent, ever curious, cub.

In the crisp memory, whose embrace swallowed him whole, he was kneeling on the sandy bank of the Snaking River, deep within the deadly wilderness of the Valley of the Shadow. And once again he was staring into the reflection of his river face and wondering if it lived its own life deep underneath the silver glass of the still waters.

Suddenly, a rock was tossed into the middle of the river-face, blurring it in spreading ripples which pushed out one after another, and Hibbs heard the soft voice of GrandMother.

“Always in circles. Never in squares.”

The startled cub bounded to his furry feet and turned around, happiness quickly replaced by nose-wrinkling puzzlement. “What?”

Tall, regal, Estanatlehi walked with the grace of the wind itself given form right up to Hibbs. “The ripples, Little One. You have never seen a square one, nor will you ever. Why do you think that is?”

Hibbs’ nose wiggled in hard thought until, right shoulder hunched up a bit, just in case he was guessing wrong, said, “B-Because that is the nature of ripples?”

Estanatlehi sighed, “The story of your life, O Slow of Thought.”

“Huh?”

She laughed soft. “You are both right and wrong. The nature of Life itself is a circle, Little One.”

Hibbs’ mouth dropped. “Truly?”

Long, icy fingers ruffled the fur atop his small head as whisper-soft laughter swept along above him by the breath of the winds themselves. “Truly.”

“Look up to Giizi, the sun. And remember my moon? See younder the rainbow, half hid by the tree-filled horizon. And think back on our trip to the StarMountain Olympus, where you saw my world in all its beauty and majesty. All are round, like the great hurricane you rode over in my arms last moon.”

Hibbs shivered at the memory. “S-So the circle is the way of Life?”

Slender fingers tweaked his nose gently. “Wiser than you know. From childhood to childhood are the days of all Two-Leggeds. The winter flows from spring to summer to autumn back to winter once more. As my world is a circle, so is all Life.”

Cold lips kissed the top of his little head. “Mystery explained.”

Once more back in the present, Hibbs sighed deep, his muzzle wrinkled in a smile of happy remembrance. "Mystery explained."

Estanatlehi stiffened, her own eyes going back into the mists of the past, finding both solace and loss in the journey.

*********************************************

May all of you find solace in your memories today and in the days to come.

Roland, a grateful son.

THIS IS THE MOMENT

This is the moment.

What moment? The only one we have. And it speeds by so quickly it is gone before we can reach out and grasp it.

See? It is already gone : that moment when your eyes first spied that sunset over Corsica.

And that is why my half-Lakota mother murmured to me as we looked out over Lake Michigan and that frosty sunset of so long ago : "Breathe each breath, little one. No two are the same. Remember the colors that paint this sky. Remember me, little one. Remember, and we will never leave you. Never."

On this day in 1864, Emily Dickinson's "Blazing in Gold" was first published. Here is a snippet :

"Blazing in gold and quenching in purple,
Leaping like leopards to the sky,
Then at the feet of the old horizon
Laying her spotted face to die…."

And from Christina Georgina Rossetti comes this bit from "From Sunset To Star Rise" :

"I live alone, I look to die alone:
Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge,
Ghosts of my buried years and friends come back,
My heart goes sighing after swallows flown
On sometime summer's unreturning track."

My mother once told me that I could do no better than to live the prayer of St. Francis. And thanks to a new friend, Angela, I have this beautiful video to share with all of you :