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Description
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Informations
Publié par | eBookIt.com |
Date de parution | 24 mai 2018 |
Nombre de lectures | 1 |
EAN13 | 9780979872662 |
Langue | English |
Poids de l'ouvrage | 1 Mo |
Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.
Extrait
Table of Contents
Manifest Destiny
Introduction
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
PART TWO
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
PART THREE
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
Afterword
About the Author
The Series
Dream Catchers
A Dream Come True - Billi Bear, Medicine Woman, and Spider
Laina & the Vamp
The Lipstick Mountains Memoirs #5
Manifest Destiny
Memoirs of a Dreaming Woman
B. K. Smith
Lipstick Mountains Press
Madison Avenue Publishers LLC www.MadisonAvenuePublishers.com
602-622-1078
The Lipstick Mountains Memoirs #5
MANIFEST DESTINY
Memoirs of a Dreaming Woman
B. K. Smith
Copyright © 2018 B. K. Smith
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9798726-6-2
This book is a work of fiction. People, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, except for historical events, places and figures, is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author.
The Lipstick Mountains Memoirs Series written by B. K. Smith:
#1 CHELSEA MATINEE - Memoirs of an Easy Woman
#2 SANDS POINT - Memoirs of a Money Trader
#3 RATTLE SNAKE LODGE - Memoirs of a Seeing Woman
#4 HORSENECK - The Meaning of Ordeal
#5 MANIFEST DESTINY - Memoirs of a Dreaming Woman
#6 THREADS - Memoirs of a Weaving Woman
Novellas & Novelettes
Laina & the Vamp
The Stilettos Stories:
Just Desserts
The Holding Pen
Manhattan Tryst
The Mayflower Hotel
Lipstick Mountains Press
Madison Avenue Publishers LLC
www.MadisonAvenuePublishers.com
Everything I know I learned from someone.
There are countless people, spirits, flames & butterflies that have contributed to this book.
Whether a weighted hand or a velvet-gloved one, I was touched and mostly thankful.
SKB & KGB & DC, with Love 2017
“The stories people tell,” reminded Honey Badger, “have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That’s why we put stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves. And each other.”
-- Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel
Special thanks to Buck, Catie & Len,
Four White Bears & Glenn Good Thunder.
And, to Monkey: Beware the Coyote. RIP 2016
Manifest Destiny
Memoirs of a Dreaming Woman
B. K. Smith
All I wanted was a white knight
with a warm heart,
soft touch, fast horse…
-- Faith Hill
Lipstick Mountains Press
Madison Avenue Publishers LLC
Introduction
Upon a little cloud I ascend:
thus, I Journey upward.
To a holy place I go,
changing as I pass through the air.
-- Apache medicine song --
In the southern Mazatzal Mountains where “Four Peaks” pokes through the clouds, just north of Apache Lake and opposite the Superstition Wilderness of Arizona, a solitary Indian climbed a grassy slope that overlooked the Rio Verde River and the valley of waving tabosa grass below. A spirit side-winded through the stems. The spirit was a snake of air. It writhed up the slope to the very spot where the young man stood. Just before it reached him, the Indian closed his eyes. The wind touched his straight black and silver hair and rustled it about his face and neck.
The Indian lay down among the rocks, his face turned to the sky. Only his eyes moved. It had been years since he came to this sacred place and pressed his back against these holy rocks. Today, he came to ask for his name. This name would be given to him by a spirit, a sort of guardian spirit, which would leave a talisman. If the spirit were a bird, it left a feather that the Indian tucked into his boot. If it was a bear, it left a claw.
In the old days, humans and animals were the same. They talked freely to one another and huddled in times of bad weather, war, and famine. Sometimes the spirit was a human, the ghost of someone who has passed on to the other place, and stays there pretty much, except to warn of impending danger, then they’ll stop in, throw a few chairs around. Listen here. Listen up . More often it was a frustrated ghost with chores undone, words unspoken or mischief yet to get into. Sometimes the spirit wandered off into the desert and never showed up for this sacred meeting, just never came at all. The Indian would never learn his name, and he would wither away and die young, bereft of the taproot of his existence and his destiny.
The searing Arizona sun climbed slowly higher.
The Indian wondered if he was out of his time-too early or too late. Perhaps the spirits have been chased away by the influx of new settlers from the Midwest and the over-caffeinated tourists from both east coast and west. He didn’t really believe that. He knew they prevailed. He knew the spirits of his ancestors were everywhere up here, always stirring the air, like a kettle of water about to give up the bubble. They were here long before the white man came onto the land five centuries ago. They lived here long before a man was nailed to a cross. Many of them live here now, today, in this place. They light and go again, fading into the desert backdrop, the lightning, and the blowing sand. They are the spirits of this place-they’ve lived here forever, all the way down to the river. And they let it be known you are trampling their gardens, the bloom of their dreams. Indeed, they let it be known.
Blooming Bird 2018
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
THE PINK TACO WAS JUST THE NAME OF A NEW RESTAURANT opening in Scottsdale, said an article “above the fold” in the Arizona Republic, and it was going to be on the new waterfront-a canal in the Old Town section. The Pink Taco . The mayor thought the name was obscene, as did many of the old-timers, mostly migrated mid-and-north westerners, with Evangelical values-Calvinist? Methodist? Mormon? -and many of them gun-toting, devout church-going, born-again and modest women, some with doilies on their heads and hankies up their sleeves. I know, it takes a village.
According to the article, even though there’s a same-name restaurant in Las Vegas, Nevada, off the strip, the name The Pink Taco, for the sake of political, feminist, and diplomatic delicacy, might too much describe a woman’s anatomical venue called privates for a reason.
I laughed out loud.
Because I’m a writer, or maybe it’s why I’m a writer, I find humor and wit in things that have subtle stretched meanings and clever turns that catch you unaware, resurrected from dusty tomes of the most obtuse translated literature, usually funny enough to provoke you, but sometimes bitter like a pill, to sober you, like skidding on ice around a turn. I never thought taco . Rather, I thought cooky . Fortune cookie. Good fortune. May you have many wives… Oh, wait…
I took a break-my weary eyes looked over magnified glasses at the snow-crested mountains in the distance. It was especially cold on the floor of the desert all that week, and I barely went outside. I read. I may have drifted off…
Ode to Dream Catchers:
Bring me all your
dreams, you dreamers. Bring me all your heart’s dreams that
I may wrap them in a
blue-cloud cloth, away
from the too-rough
fingers of the world.
In the living room, on the creamy leather sectional sofa, was where I “camped” on most winter days. Fresh coffee dripped dark French roast and well-water, the twigs snapped in the fireplace, and the drapes pulled wide-open across the eastern wall of the room. The sun came up and it set the room to glow with iridescent light. In the early morning I read; otherwise, I sat with my laptop writing feature articles, ten months out, for a professional magazine. I’m the health prevention Guru. I get in front of a thing. One small match can burn down a whole forest. An avalanche starts out as a rolling pebble. By D. M. English, PhD.
As the warmer days slipped into chilly nights, and eventually into late barren winter with shorter days there was more time for dreaming. Day or night-it was all the same in that light.
That might not mean much to you now, but it will.
Strike a match.
I took hot baths lighting the room with lavender candles, a gift from my neighbor, Leona, a horsewoman from Boston who lived half a mile up the washboard dirt road in the Rio Verde Foothills with her husband, Dick. I stretched out in the warm water, my eyes closed. Relaxed, the petals of my psyche unfurled. I knew it was just a matter of time now; I would be leaving this place, this sacred place, and it was breaking my heart. I bought this old “writing” cottage, I cleaned it up and made it mine, but that was about to change again-I could already feel it beginning, the blistering. Layers were getting ready to separate, peel away and to drift off into the atmosphere like so much biological dust and spiritual flotsam. I knew better than to fight it, that it might only serve to tear a membrane in the psyche. I had to just let go, surrender, and float, like a cloud, like in a dream, because it was, in fact, a dream. It’s the demon mind, that’s where the devil hides, in the tiny black folds, in the shadows, like smoke. The demon mind can even convince you there’s a material world and issue you a credit card, with your name embossed in it, at usury interest rates.
Ahh, but silence is where the answer is. It’s a great mystery. The Holy silence is His voice. The fruits of silence include self-control, courage, endurance, tenacity, patience, dignity, and reverence. Silence is the cornerstone of good strong c