Day Before Launch

As fate would have it, my first published book releases tomorrow, September 1; and two days after that I fly to my next round of world explorations.

New beginnings: a book, an author website, a Facebook author page, an itinerary of locations that include possibilities both familiar (Portugal, Thailand, Bali) and unfamiliar (Croatia, Italy, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Ecuador...). Life continues to unfold as a mystery of manifestation, the past and present merging in the choice of multiple futures.

Such is the fate of the world, and such is the theme and construction of what on the surface begins as an "adventure novella," Rendezvous.

Of course the first question anyone asks is, "What is your book about?"

Given an elevator ride of, say, 7 floors, I might reply:

Rendezvous is a taut yet poetically described tale of a wilderness adventure, by a young family drawn on a romantic quest to meet in the heart of the mountains. Overcoming obstacles of logistics and physical endurance, they achieve their rendezvous at a cabin in a remote pass. During an overnight storm, through a haunted dream state, Will confronts the agonizing choices of finding a descent back to safety. The linear narrative spawns divergent scenarios of disaster, which the reader must navigate with Will in the quest for survival.

That's one way to put it. It leaves out, though, the personal, autobiographical dimension. Invite me for a coffee to say more and I would share:

The core story in Rendezvous is a real-life adventure my family and I experienced in 1987 in the Purcell Mountains of British Columbia. The successful outcome of that adventure, with its numerous challenges and pitfalls, allowed me to muse on a variety of "what-if" scenarios stemming from the actual story line - most of them disastrous. In the paranormal sense, and structurally in the novella, I conceived of these as alternative timelines or parallel realities. Somehow karmically the other characters and I "chose" the one scenario leading to our survival.
The challenge in publishing and promoting a book is to distill the entirety to a 3-page synopsis, a 1-page version, a 2-paragraph query, a back cover blurb.

Like life and this story, the task of summarizing spawns numerous possibilities to choose from. I can present you with the following finger-food, for example, as hors-d'oeuvres to give you a flavor:

• Man on one side - his woman and child on the other - battle a haunted mountain for survival.
  
  
• Seven doors: six lead to disaster, one to survival.
  
  
• A romantic quest becomes a wilderness ordeal.
  
  
• A simple tale of adventure spawns paranormal possibilities.
  
  
• Groundhog Day meets Night on Bald Mountain.
  
  
• Hero plays Russian roulette with the Canadian wilderness.

One reviewer, fellow writer Raye Rabbitfoot, offers a similar palette of tidbits from the other side of the mirror, the reader's view:

• Fabulous: tingling fear-filled apprehension.
  
  
• Waiting bristle-backed for the next avalanche of possibilities.
  
  
• Drink your carrot juice; this book will take your blood pressure off the charts.
  
  
• Suspense-filled details culminating in twists of possibilities.
  
  
• A sword swallower... it took courage to watch the next move.
  
  
• A maze of manifested fears.
  
  
• A slide show of white-knuckle catastrophe.

Now that your belly is already full with a surfeit of appetizers, and I have more packing to do before embarking on a larger new adventure, I will close here to allow a spell of digestion while we await the main course, still baking until tomorrow.

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September 1 update: You can now order Rendezvous at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle ebook editions (Kindle ebook also available from Amazon.ca).

Colonizer Meets Colonized: From the Heart

In the theatre production "From the Heart," just finished its run at the Uptown Mall, the most moving vignette was the second one, the tete a tete about the play itself and the implications of awareness of colonialism in ourselves, the colonizers. "Not about guilt, not about negativity" - but about education, awareness, acknowledgement of what really happened and how we continue to benefit. Feelings of suppressed injustice and release arose as I listened, with the realization of how pervasive is this "settler's" curse - whether in Canada, the US, South Africa, Israel, or any other land that has seen waves of conquering armies, immigrant races, or marauding corporations decimate resources, cultures, and previous populations.

After the show Cedar brought the discussion to the present, a world where 99% of the people are now united in our colonization by the 1%. In this world we no longer need to be divided by issues and identities of separation on the basis of race, nationality or territorial seniority. The predominant separation that controls and overshadows all the other issues now - environmental, political, economic, cultural - is that between the 99% and the 1%.

Lest we jump to the witch hunt and lynch mob, the 1% is not even a class of people, per se. Those handful of wealthiest on the planet are, we presume, still human at the core; just as, on the other side of this unequal division, all of us in the 99% have seeds and remnants of rapacious tendencies in our DNA. The 1% is not so much a human demographic as a fiction of privilege: a manufactured bubble of power and protection propped up by such legal machinery as Admiralty Law and the notion that corporations enjoy the rights but not the responsibilities of actual, living and breathing persons. Its occupation of the apex of the pyramid is secured, most blatantly, by a combination of brute force, fear and intimidation, bribery and blackmail; and more insidiously, by controlling education, media, information and entertainment, accepted modes and boundaries of discourse, definitions of "normal," and social pressures to conform.

In the play about reconciliation with First Nations, we are told of the nineteenth-century ploy by the US government to wrest lands from the Lakota Sioux, forcing them to sell their treaty lands or be denied food payments under those same treaties: "Sell or Starve." In Canada today, 2013, the federal government repeats the tactic by denying funds to any First Nations band who refuses to support the new omnibus legislation (Bill C-45) further stripping them of rights and resources. A young man from the Nanoose band, sipping tea with us in the lobby after the play, shares that it's more complicated than simply reviving traditional culture and language; the world is changing so fast that everyone - young and old, First Nations and settlers - must negotiate the appropriate way forward, a way that is unclear and changing by the day. Henry Giroux, writing in this morning's blogosphere on the assault on critical thought in American culture, comes to the same conclusion:

Young people increasingly have become subject to an oppressive disciplinary machine that teaches them to define citizenship through the exchange practices of the market and to follow orders and toe the line in the face of oppressive forms of authority. They are caught in a society in which almost every aspect of their lives is shaped by the dual forces of the market and a growing police state. The message is clear: Buy/ sell/ or be punished.

If the native people of Canada are the First Nations, then the youth of America, and by extension the world, are the Last Nations. "In a Maryland school," Giroux notes, "a 13-year-old girl was arrested for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance." A logical development, in a time when "the war on terror ... has morphed into war on democracy." The assault is the same, the mounting crimes against nature and humanity, and time has come to hold this universal predicament to the light.

A pyramid by its very design cannot be simply "toppled," reformed by coup or revolution. Maintaining the hierarchy of power, one form of corrupt leadership replaces another, down through the centuries. Instead it is time for humans to recognize our innate equality, to level the playing field to the horizontal ground of natural democracy on a community level. The Occupy movements recently have demonstrated a nonviolent, consensus-based approach to grassroots participation in affairs that concern us on a human level. Growing past colonizer and colonized, we need to deal now with each other as equals, and to reconcile ourselves collectively with nature which still holds us.

Humanity in the collective can be considered a living organism; and as such it can be encouraged and trusted to carry out its innate healing powers. A few months ago I had a dermatology treatment using light and a photosensitive cream to zap precancerous cells under the surface of the skin. The results were ugly for the first few days, as red spots and blotches appeared all over my face. A few days more, and the red spots began to darken and dry. In two weeks they had all flaked and fallen off. The healthy skin, with no further intervention, had simply moved the offending dead cells up and out of the system, and restored itself to a healthy condition.

Awareness and acknowledgement are the first steps. Appropriate action and healing are the natural consequences to follow, given a continued willingness to listen and learn from each other.

Critical Mass

I have the image from John Vaillant's The Tiger, of a baboon troop surrounded by lions, with no escape, giving up and sitting there, hands over their faces, waiting for the end. In a book on JFK by veteran nonviolent activist James Douglass, he writes of the "unspeakable" evil in the world (quoting the Christian mystic and poet Thomas Merton), the evil that took Kennedy's life when the president converted from a cold warrior to a leader seeking genuine peace. Now we find ourselves in a perpetual state of "citizen denial" - our hands over our faces - as the U.S. government openly admits it is waging a permanent global war, and one of its intelligence analysts has exposed the cyber-technology placing virtually every communication under surveillance.

Meanwhile for the first time in sixty years, there is a large presence of media and aggrieved public surrounding the secretive Bilderberg conference in Britain, where once it was denied and now must be admitted that 140 of the world's most wealthy and powerful are meeting to plan in secret (definition of conspiracy - no longer "theory" but speakable fact) the fate of the world's economies, governments, and, by the way, people. Another definition that still gets swept under the carpet, fascism: according to Mussolini, "the merger of corporate and state power." Sound familiar?

Orwell saw it coming, but most of the rest of us chose, consciously or not, to look the other way, our virtual hands over our heads. Totalitarianism, fascism, these spectres of the twentieth century did not go away, they just retreated behind the scenes, became more sophisticated, learned to cover tracks by smokescreens of misleading rhetoric, paper tigers, consumer gadgets and toys, bribery and blackmail, false-flag concocted "terror events," assassinations, coups by economic hit-men, mind-control both overt and covert, and the bottom line of choice, appeals to "national security."

No longer relevant in the twenty-first century, if they ever were, are the artificial divisions of left and right, liberal and conservative, socialist and fascist, christian and muslim and jewish, black and white and yellow. The relevant picture in this savannah of a world is the lion and baboon. If you have enough lions to surround the poor primates, it's game over and the hands rightly stay over the eyes. But if, as David Icke pointed out to the assembled thousands in the protesters' "corral" at Bilderberg, we are many and they are few, and we are committed to conscious, nonviolent change, there is hope. If we bother or risk taking our hands off our eyes and ears, we will notice, under the chemtrail-shredded skies, that those self-appointed lions are 140 (or 300, or 1%, pick your billionaire cutoff) and we are 7 billion. Now, maybe now, we are ready to press "reset" and play this game for real.