I've been using Glacier National Park as a location for my fiction for so long, my publisher said why not write an e-book about your favorite valley. She knew, of course, that my upcoming novel SARABANDE is set in the Swiftcurrent Valley alongside the same lakes and mountains I featured in THE SUN SINGER and GARDEN OF HEAVEN.

This past winter, Glacier experienced heavy snow. Fortunately, I wasn't planning a trip to Many Glacier Hotel or Swiftcurrent Campground early in the sunmer: if so, I wouldn't have gotten there. Snow still covered the roads. As I write this, I'm not sure whether Going to the Sun road is open yet or not. The last I heard, a 60-foot snow drift still blocked it.

Weather plays an important role in the life of the park. Swiftcurrent Valley has seen a lot of snow and a lot of heavy spring run-offs. I mentioned these in my Glacier Park e-book Bears; Where They Fought:Glacier Park's Swiftcurrent Valley. The valley has a lot of interesting milestones gong back in time past floods, fires and the building of the Great Northern Railway's historic hotel. A few years before the railroad built the hotel in 1914, there was a mining boom town less than a mile away. Gold, copper and silver had been discovered, and prospectors and developers were certain the Swiftcurrent Valley would become an important mining center.

Fortunately, the boom town of Altyn didn't last. Its remains sit at the bottom of Lake Sherburne. The scenery, the hiking, the boating and fishing, the saddle trips, and the National Register listed Many Glacier Hotel attract thousands of toursists each year. There's much to see in the valley that's not immediately obvious. Take your time. Go back often. And, for a bit of the history and the memories, I invite you to look at Bears; Where They Fought. It's a bargain, I think, at only 99 cents.

“At the beginning of every spiritual realization stands death, in the form of ‘dying to the world’…At the beginning of the work the most precious material which the alchemist produces is the ash.” –Titus Burckhardt

As an author, I’m fascinated with change: what facilitates it and why people resist it. Change is the soul of storytelling. Resistance and delay are the stuff of page turners. If there aren’t any problems or dangers or intrigues, then we don’t have much of a story—or even a joke to tell in the company breakroom.

People seem to leap at change when it is external to themselves. Just witness the Internet buzz on any given day about the latest movie, computer, gadget, book, or car. Shopping is in our blood, or so it seems. Victory in shopping comes from being the first one to have something, and then bragging about it.

Victory in one’s personal life appears to come—insofar as people’s behavior is concerned—in being the last one to change and then bragging about the trials and tribulations of being ill or damaged in some way. Readers can easily identify with ill and damaged people, and even when they can’t, they’re attracted to stories about them like moths to flames.

When it comes to internal changes, people resist them, or so it seems. In so many areas of our lives, we’re rather like the man who goes to AA meetings on Mondays while continuing to meet with his buddies at the neighborhood bar on Saturdays. He says he wants to quit drinking, yet he’s not ready to give up who he is—a man who enjoys tossing down a few at the local watering hole. Somehow, he has bought into the illusion that he can QUIT and NOT QUIT simultaneously. This is a man whose not staring with ashes, that is, the remains of his old life which must die, figuratively speaking, before he can embrace his new life.

Many of us can find instances in our lives where we want to plunge ahead into something new, but we’re just not getting around to it because we keep holding onto the old for dear life. Perhaps we want an iron-glad guarantee that the new is going to work out, that there won’t be any negative side effects to it, that it really will make us happier and/or more wealthy and/or healthier. What a paradox. The man who will buy a $75,000 new car at the drop of a hat without considering the potential negatives about the purchase, will hem and haw for years about getting the sodium out of his diet or giving up his Saturday night beer drinking.

As a human, I see this with despair, but as a writer, I know it’s going to lead to another good story.

 

 

I am happy to announce that a portion of the sales of the e-book edition of my new novel "Garden of Heaven" will be donated to Glacier National Park, Montana, in support of this year's Centennial Program.

Portions of the novel are set in the park's Swiftcurrent Valley, Chief Mountain, and the surrounding area. When Ward climbs the sacred mountain Nináistuko (Chief Mountain) seeking a vision when he is 19 years old, the golden eagle of earth flings him back onto the prairie and the black horse of dreams shows him the future. Though his eyes are opened, fate hides exactly what he needs to know.

The publisher of the e-book, Vanilla Heart, is also donating a portion of the sales from the paperback and e-book editions of my novel "The Sun Singer" to the Glacier Park Centennial Committee. "The Sun Singer" is also set in the park.

I began work on my novel “Garden of Heaven” in 1993. Since then, “The Sun Singer” and “Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire” have been published. Suffice it to say, I didn’t write “Garden of Heaven” at flank speed. Not at 240,500 words.

Finally, though, I have a paperback copy of the novel sitting here on my desk. But it’s not yet listed on Amazon. That takes time. But I feel like I’m in limbo waiting for it to appear because, until it does, I’m reluctant to use such words as “book launch” and “new novel” and “go get it.”

What’s it about? As I wrote in a recent Xanga post, I need an “Elevator Pitch” for each of my novels. Something short. I don’t want people falling asleep while I answer the “what’s it about” question.

“Garden of Heaven” follows protagonist David Ward from Montana to Florida to Pakistan to the South China Sea to the Philippines to Holland to Illinois as he tries to put his shattered life back together. Who shattered it? Let’s just say that a summer romance went horribly wrong. David doesn’t know just how wrong it went because he has his hands full with a wife and child years later and a corrupt university.

But the synchronicity of the universe ensures that everyone you never want to see again will end up in your life. The reason is: they might want to kill you.

So there it is, the kinda, sorta Elevator Pitch. I don’t have it totally worked out yet, but then I don’t have to. Amazon isn’t showing the book as available, so I can continue to ponder just how to describe what I’ve been working on for the past seventeen years.

“A labyrinth, of course, is a scrambled mandala, in which you don’t know where you are. That’s the way the world is for people who don’t have a mythology. It’s a labyrinth. They are battling their way through as if no one had ever been there before.” – Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss

My clinical depression is a scrambled mandala.

The formerly clear road has twisted itself into a labyrinth. The air has become more dense than water. I can’t breathe, nor do I want to.

I once believed I was either too smart or too stupid to become clinically depressed. My journey (way, pilgrimage, path) appeared so clear to me that the next step was always apparent whether it came to me out of logic or intuition. Where I was going didn’t matter, for I was en route. Perhaps these was a certain arrogance to such certainty in spite of the fact that—Kabbalistically speaking—certainty is what each of us requires to manifest our highest dreams.

But logically, we’re easily addicted to trends, small, but negative ripples in the force, so to speak, that when they follow upon one another cause us to doubt our certainties, our passions, and even the road itself. Experience has taught me, though, that when the mandala becomes scrambled, it only becomes more scrambled if I fight it. And, depression itself is the same in this respect. What one resists, persists, we are told. When I fight those moments when the air has become more dense than water, I find myself sinking deeper into the ocean of hopelessness where the pressure and the darkness are greater.

The more scrambled the mandala becomes, the more difficult it is to find Ariadne’s linen thread that will lead me away from the dreaded Minotaur to the light-hearted safety of the world outside the labyrinth. When depression is deep, I have neither the willpower nor the energy to search for that thread, much less build wings like Daedalus, the labyrinth’s designer, and fly out of the maze of twisted roads.

Getting Above the Fray

I like the title of Kris Jackson’s 2009 novel about the Civil War era balloonist Thaddeus Lowe, “Above the Fray.” It was so apt, for it described exactly the service Professor Lowe was offering Union commanders. He showed them what they couldn’t see on the ground from what—in my perspective—might also be called the labyrinth of the battlefield.

Like both Lowe and Daedalus, there are times when I want to rise above the fray and get my bearings. Lowe was an advocate of tethered balloons, and shortly after reading Kris Jackson’s novel, I had an opportunity for a brief ride in a tethered balloon. How light the air was and how fine the view of the fields and woodlands below. What might have appeared scrambled from within, now was clear, even orderly.

Like Daedalus, I am the creator of my own labyrinth and—on days when the air is denser than water—my own scrambled mandala. I have been there many times because, I suppose, it meets a need I do not consciously know. I’m lost into the clutches of deep lunar mysteries and the dark worlds of the underworld that my subconscious mind has led me to experience. Truth be told, I’m embarrassed to be there, to have to admit that my apparently certainty about the clear road ahead as led me into the forest primeval where I wander blindly as though there is no road at all.

Once my shame passes, I see that there is much of value here in the scrambled mandala I have built and the hopelessly dense air I have placed with its clutches. I know better than to fight it. Fighting it makes me too heavy to fly above the fray and too sleepy to see Ariadne’s thread.

I have escaped from my labyrinths many times. Though there should be a fair amount of certainty in that, I never remember it while I’m staring into the Minotaur’s eyes. My goal is the goal I gave protagonist Robert Adams in my novel “The Sun Singer,” and that is to survive the journey and to return to the known world with something of value for myself and others.

The scrambled mandalas are my nightmares, the places where the road has become twisted, the places where I think I’m awake even though I’m asleep. But when I wake and see the morning sunlight, and it’s “whew, that’s over,” and for now I’m not depressed and I see my reasons again for wanting to be on the journey I have chosen to take.

--Malcolm

Copyright © 2010 by Malcolm R. Campbell

In my novel "The Sun Singer," protagonist Robert Adams is attempting to use "magic" to heal the injured Cinnabar when it occurs to him that "he needed to be nothing, hollow, what was it Grandfather’s old friend said, yes, a hollow bone, free of logic and self.”

Since "hollow bone" was a term used by the famous Sioux holy man Fools Crow, Grandfather Elliott traveled in good company! In relation to healing, Fools Crow used the term hollow bone in the same sense that others use the term "tube" to indicate that while healing, a higher power flows through them to the person being healed. Rosicrucian students refer to this hollow bone as a "channel of attunement" and often visualize it as an unobstructed pipe carrying water or a wire carrying electric power from a far-away power plant to the place where the light is needed.

In his book "Fools Crow Wisdom and Power," author Thomas E. Mails writes that prior to healing, Fools Crow first went through a ritual to remove all the stumbling blocks within himself that might impede the flow of energy. “I saw myself as a hollow bone that is all shiny on the inside and empty,” said Fools Crow. “I looked around inside me to see if any obstacles or junk were left, and there were none. I knew then that I was ready to serve Wakan-Tanka well, and I held up my hands to offer my thanksgiving and to tell him how happy I was. Immediately, I could feel the power come into me.”

This necessary absenting himself to allow the flow of energy was what Robert had to figure out how to do if he were going to call the Sun on Cinnabar’s behalf. Reiki practitioners discover early on that their own dynamic passivity rather than urgent intent is an important component in the process of allowing healing energy to flow to the point where it's needed.

The "healer's art" is called by many names in many places, but the ability of the healer to step out of the way is a universal key to success.

Jefferson, Georgia-–The City of Jefferson and the Crawford W. Long Museum Association, Inc., have announced the upcoming grand re-opening of the Crawford W. Long Museum to celebrate the completion of a two-year restoration of the facility’s three, interconnected buildings. The museum will open January 9, 2010, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Staff members and volunteers are working extra hours during the holiday season make sure everything is ready.

The museum has been closed to the public for major structural renovations and exhibit upgrades since June 2008. The renovations were paid for in part through a matching $200,000 USDA Rural Development grant.

Historic Building Restoration

The two-story, brick 1880s former doctor’s office and pharmacy used as a medical exhibits gallery, received a new roof, including larger scuppers and downspouts, restored brick work and custom windows that are exact copies of the originals which were beyond repair. The project included Interior re-plastering, painting, rewriting, updated lighting, and new upstairs flooring.

Exterior Structural Brickwork

The 1850’s Pendergrass General store building was jacked up, leveled, received new masonry piers and a new coat of paint. The interior of the re-created 1840s doctor’s office in the rear of the store was repainted and refurbished.

Craftsman Frank Resciniti at Work in Doctor's Office (Athens Banner-Herald Photo)

The smaller Stoval Building, used as the museum entrance, reception area and exhibit gallery received a new exterior sign and new interior painting.

Updated Museum Exhibits

Since the interior of the Stovall and Medical Gallery buildings had to be cleared for the restoration work, project manager Lesa Campbell and administrative manager Vicki Starnes had an opportunity to modernize the interpretive exhibits in accordance with current museum best practices.

The Crawford Long Gallery has colorful new informational panels (see detail below) and artifact displays tracing Doctor Long’s heritage, medical practice, family life and his 1842 discovery of the use of ether for painless surgery.

“A lot of the Crawford Long exhibit tries to put him in his time and place,” said Campbell. “If you don’t understand the fact that Jefferson was a frontier town in 1842, you really don’t get the full measure of how amazing it was that someone here was the first person to apply anesthesia to a patient and be able to revive them.”

The upstairs–which had previously been closed to the public–now contains a new history exhibit that traces the evolution of anesthesia from the early use of towels, sponges and drop masks to the development of machines that measure, control and monitor a uniform concentration of anesthetic gases. Fourteen machines, in use between 1913 and 1970, are be on display.

The General store displays have been reorganized with new artifacts, displays and signage.

“Jefferson is privileged to be the home of such an important international event,” said Mayor Jim Joiner. “The development of a practical surgical anesthetic is considered America’s greatest contribution to modern medicine, so it is only fitting that Jefferson maintain a museum to commemorate Dr. Long’s discovery.”

The Crawford W. Long Museum was founded in 1957 by the Georgia Historical Commission and in 1974 the Crawford W. Long Museum Association assumed ownership. In 1979 the Museum building and exhibits were renovated, accomplished partly through contributions from the members of the Medical Association of Georgia and the Georgia Society of Anesthesiologists.

In 1986-87, an expansion program was carried out, enlarging the Museum into a three-building complex. This complex was owned and operated by the not-for-profit Association until ownership was transferred to the City of Jefferson in 2007.

Detail from a New Exhibit Panel

Admission to the Museum is $5.00 for adults and $4.00 for children (6-12) and $3.00 for students/military. Children 5 and under free. Beginning January 9, the museum will be open to the public during normal operating hours of Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm. For more information about the grand opening, contact the museum at 706-367-5307.

Chapter One

Jock Stewart woke up this morning with an industrial strength hangover. An empty Scotch bottle lay on the floor next to an empty little black dress that wasn’t his. Last night, a fair amount of Monique Starnes wore it at the newspaper’s office party. Her cleavage, more out than in, was deep enough to kidnap a man’s dreams. Now, there would be hell to pay.

At first glance, he appeared to be alone in the bed. Maybe he stole the dress. Maybe he maxed out a credit card at an all-night Vera Wang shop, then came home and slung it on the floor in an ill-conceived pretense of having a life. “The second glance”—as Star-Gazer editor Marcus Cash always told him—“is always the beginning of trouble.”

Just past the far side of the bed, Monique lay face up on the floor in a 40-year-old birthday suit so worn out no Goodwill Store would take it. She looked like a corpse. Things went too far and he hadn’t bothered to conceal the murder weapon.

If more than one crime had been committed here, she was an accessory beginning with an illegal use of a little black dress—though many women contend that dresses don’t seduce people, people seduce people. When it got late enough last night for everyone to pair up with nobody cared whom—or was it “who”?—she dared him to dance with her. In spite of the chronic animosity between them she danced close enough to display her breasts in an arousing light.

The world resolved into a curious mix of limbo and dream after she said, “I like a man with a cocked weapon in his trousers.”

Now, the best approach to his future might be to draw a chalk outline around her before calling the police to report the accident. Chief Kruller would be pissed, not because he had any love for the newspaper’s gossip columnist but because coming by the house to clean up the mess would force him to give up his space at the counter of the Main Street Krispy Kreme.

Though he wasn’t being interrogated yet, Jock had to admit that Monique was a voluptuous, saucy, black-haired she-devil if there ever was one. It was her mouth and her typewriter that bothered him. No ass kicking, hard-boiled reporter he knew (including himself) could tolerate gossip columnists. They dragged the whole damn paper down to their level. While exciting in bed, that level was bad for the newspaper business.

She did have nice breasts—for a probable corpse.

Even so, newspapering didn’t need columns called Hands Under Society’s Dress with comments like: “Democracy demands that we celebrate the election process at one ball after another. Just think, in some countries, the winners aren’t allowed to have any balls.”

Her luscious brown eyes popped open like they were controlled by a zombified spirit who hadn’t “crossed over” properly.

He jumped back in fear or what looked like fear.

“Jock!”

“Monique, what have we done?”

She sat up, partially covering herself with the sheer window curtain one of his former girlfriends with a name like Bambi or Barbie hung up in the bedroom either as a civilizing influence or to allow his neighbors the dubious entertainment of watching them (Jock and whoever) having sex during blue moons.

“We did what any self-respecting man and woman do when they find themselves drunk in bed,” she said. “Did I scream much?”

“Did I hurt you?”

“You gave me what I wanted.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“Want to take another shot at it?”

She put her hands where they didn’t belong—as an incentive.

“Doesn’t either one of us need to take a leak or something?” he asked.

“Let’s do it together and be kinky.”

She stood up and stretched while running her hands through her hair in a way that made her look both wanton and innocent, an oh-God-Jock-you-caught-me-in-a-private-moment kind of way. He had seen such moments before in photography books.

“You go first,” he said.

When she flounced toward the bathroom everything shook. While she was there he got dressed. He heard the shower running, so he went out to the kitchen and made coffee and set out two cups. The midmorning light was too bright. None of the cars out on Maple Street had mufflers. The birds were chirping like they were having hot sex in the locust tree. Air molecules careened into each other as though some asshole just lit a barrel full of cherry bombs.

“If we’d known each other then, you could have had my cherry,” Monique announced. She was wearing one of his old work shirts and Irish Spring soap.

“Back where?” he asked. He appreciated the view when she leaned over to fish her cigarettes out of her purse.

“Back anywhere,” she said, smiling when she saw where he was looking. “Where were you in those days?”

“I don’t know anymore.”

“Light me?”

He took a match out of the tin on the gas stove top and struck it on the zipper of his jeans while she leaned so close he almost dropped the match down the front of her (actually, his) shirt.

“You need to get dressed,” he said.

“Let me enjoy the moment. Act like you want me here.”

He poured the coffee, adding cream to his and sugar to hers. He knew how she liked it because they had gotten drunk before and ended up at kitchen tables before on bright Sunday mornings. If he’d known her “back then,” things still would have ended up like this. Her eyes were on him as they always were on mornings after, but she would pull away if he unbuttoned the shirt and he would pull away if she grabbed his belt buckle.

“I found a Lucinda voice mail on my cell this morning,” said Monique. “I feel so lucky.”

“Some juicy tidbit for Monday’s under the dress column?”

“Jock, don’t.”

She drew out the words and he felt rather sorry for teasing her while they were sharing their faux-vulnerable morning-after coffee.

“What’s she want.”

“She wants her horse back. Sea of Fire is missing?”

“Do you have him?”

She gave him an odd look. Then she looked down the front of the shirt.

“Nope, no naughty horsey down here.”

“Have they called the police?”

“She didn’t say. I don’t know why she called me. It’s not the kind of story I do.”

“I’ll look into it,” said Jock.

Monique sipped her coffee, frowning and thinking. Whatever she wanted, he was going to say ‘no.’ She unbuttoned the shirt and raised her hands.

“Start me out with a good frisking. Then we can go back to bed with no more questions asked. May we?”

She stood close enough for him to touch.

If he did, where would it end? How easily he could visualize the lead to her next column: “My sweets, you might well ask what Maple Street reporter found himself under my little black dress last night.”

No, she did that last time and Monique had a firm rule. She never recycled old material.

“No,” he said. “I have more worries than questions.”

“What, do you think you can’t get it up again?” She pressed both hands firmly against the front of his trousers. “No, that’s not it. So what is it?”

“I forgot to use any protection last night,” he said.

She laughed and momentarily he saw the Monique he wanted her to be 24/7. Her laugh almost made him forget where things ended up when he trusted her and so he put his hand on her ass in a possessive way and she responded more the way a lover than an overnighter responds.

“I started out with a purse full of condoms last night,” she gasped. “We had enough protection for a long, slow weekend.”

“No,” he said, “that’s not what I meant.”

She heard the change in his voice, backed away and pulled the front of the shirt together.

“Protection from me, that’s what you’re saying.”

He was surprised the whole neighborhood didn’t hear it.

“You got that right.”

She grabbed the coffee cup and slung its sugary contents in his face. “You asshole. Go. Just go back to your precious job or wherever else you go when you’re like this. I’ll know how to let myself out.”

Jock pulled a dishtowel off the rack and went out to the car. The keys were still in the ignition from last night. He sat for a while and watched the house. It looked dead. He considered drawing a chalk outline around it and calling somebody.

Chapter Two

Coral Snake Smith was sitting in his favorite booth at the Purple Platter when Jock got there at 11:45 a.m. Smith, who suffered disfiguring burns as a child, ended up with a ruddy, red and yellow complexion that made him unfit for any career other than crime or psychiatry. He dabbled in psychiatry until the review board questioned why 98.6% of his male and female patients were diagnosed with an Electra complex. Subsequently, he practiced crime without conviction.

Now he described himself as a storyteller, an information handler, and an unidentified source. Those who trusted him believed his word was well worth the price of a meal, hash browns scattered and smothered and a Denver omelet. Others hypothesized that he was a stool pigeon.

To see what happens next, pick up the book on Smashwords (multiple formats) or on Kindle for $5.99. The paperback on Amazon is only $11.86.