alexander pope

Soon an idea began to take shape. I could go out into the world, wherever it made sense to go, and some places that perhaps it did not, and find out what happened to our jetpacks. I mean, is this the future or is it not? And as a serious bonus, perhaps my quest would lead me to someone who could still make the dream come true. Some might not consider it on par with the stuff of Michelangelo or Mozart, but it was something I thought I could do.

alexander pope

Flying fantasies confront us at every turn. And there is evidence it’s been this way for a very long time. A recent fossil discovery revealed that the first mammals capable of gliding flight lived many millions of years ago. The fossil in question belongs to a Chinese squirrel-like creature, which possessed a stretchy membrane between its front and back legs that served as wings. Some scientists believe the animal may have lived as long ago as 164 million years, meaning that mammals were taking to the air before birds.

jet pack

Flash forward 164 million years. By the summer of my thirty-fifth year, my life was evidently half over, and I’d come to accept that I was never going to play shortstop for the Baltimore Orioles or be the next Spencer Tracey or Kurt Cobain. That’s when the question was zapped my way like a laser shot from robot eyes: Where’s my jetpack? Whatever happened to what must surely be the greatest promise never kept?

ned washington

BALLERINA DREAMS When you wish upon a star makes no difference who you are, Anything your heart desires will come to you. If your heart is in your dreams, no request is too extreme. When you wish upon a star as dreamers do … “When You Wish Upon A Star” Lyrics by Ned Washington

angie wyatt

Through dreams, Joseph was able to guide his family through a treacherous journey.  He protected Mary and Jesus from Herod’s desire to kill them.  What could be more threatening!  All along, God was with them.  He guided them to safety and provided for his people.  Today, God continues to speak to people through dreams.  He offers guidance and encouragement.  And, He helps us know and understand His true heart.

angie wyatt

In fact, Matthew 2, which chronicles part of the Christmas story, mentions four accounts of dreams.  The scene starts with King Herod who wants to kill the infant Jesus.  Herod meets the Wise Men who are following a star to find Jesus.   He tells them to bring back the news so that he can also worship Jesus.  But, the Bible says, “having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.”  The story immediately adds, “When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. ‘Get up,’ he said, ‘take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt.  Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.’”  Joseph stayed with his family in Egypt until Herod died.  Then, in another dream, an angel tells him,  “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”  So, he packed up his family and headed to Judea.  When he heard that Herod’s son was reigning there, he decided to take a new route.  The Bible tells us, “Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth.  So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that (Jesus) would be called a Nazarene.”

angie wyatt

After Mary conceived Jesus, an angel spoke to Joseph in a dream saying, “Do not be afraid to take to Mary for your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit.” Because Joseph heard God, he remained engaged to Mary despite her pregnancy and he married her shortly after Jesus’ birth.  Joseph continued to have dreams throughout Jesus’ early childhood.  These God-given dreams helped Joseph protect his family from a hostile situation that threatened their lives.

What a cruel, hard bastard of a world, Latimore thought.

He stood on a cliff overlooking supremely monotonous terrain. As far as he could see, red rock and more red rock met his view, striated into minor variations of red that did nothing to soothe the eye. It was as if the region had been painted by a cosmic artist with no imagination. Plus, the place was hot—unrelentingly, mind-numbing hot. Despite his ocular implants, the sun was daunting. It beat down as if in endless rage, determined to right some ancient wrong, or perhaps the recent indignity of his crew’s arrival.

Damn it, what had happened to the Venture’s crew? And why had Steele chosen to set down here in this godforsaken wasteland rather than in the greener, far more temperate region at the equator? The first crew’s mission had been to explore and access the planet for industrial and commercial development, not fry themselves in the desert. The only water available was spit or what he carried in his flask or onboard his hovercraft. But then, they weren’t using hovercraft anymore, were they? After his crew’s aerial search had turned up nothing, he had ordered them to scour the area on foot, root through caves and underground crevices. So far, their efforts had produced only bruises and contusions.

He pulled out his com-link and contacted the others, knowing it was a waste of time but determined to follow SOP. Gouyen Wingfield, the biologist, had discovered a small, hardy plant. No sign of the Venture’s crew, of course.

Latimore ordered each to keep searching then pocketed the link. Squinting up at the molten sun, he moved grimly on. Five hours at least till nightfall. Plenty of work time left.

steve erickson

 ’God failed us.’Trembling, sick to his stomach as something cold, foreign, coursed through his veins, Aparal Forge clenched his jaw to stifle a retort. This vengeance is older than any cause you care to invent, and no matter how often you utter those words, Son of Light, the lies and madness open like flowers beneath the sun. And before me I see nothing but lurid fields of red, stretching out on all sides.This wasn’t their battle, not their war. Who fashioned this law that said the child must pick up the father’s sword? And dear Father, did you really mean this to be? Did she not abandon her consort and take you for her own? Did you not command us to peace? Did you not say to us that we children must be as one beneath the newborn sky of your union?What crime awoke us to this?

steve erickson

Cotillion paused, half turned. He smiled a ravaged smile. ‘That doesn’t mean I have to lose, does it?’Dust lifted, twisting, in her wake. From her shoulders trailed dozens of ghastly chains: bones bent and folded into irregular links, ancient bones in a thousand shades between white and deep brown. Scores of individuals made up each chain, malformed skulls matted with hair, fused spines, long bones, clacking and clattering. They drifted out behind her like a tyrant’s legacy and left a tangled skein of furrows in the withered earth that stretched for leagues.Her pace did not slow, as steady as the sun’s own crawl to the horizon ahead, as inexorable as the darkness overtaking her. She was indifferent to notions of irony, and the bitter taste of irreverent mockery that could so sting the palate. In this there was only necessity, the hungriest of gods. She had known imprisonment. The memories remained fierce, but such recollections were not those of crypt walls and unlit tombs. Darkness, indeed, but also pressure. Terrible, unbearable pressure.Madness was a demon and it lived in a world of helpless need, a thousand desires unanswered, a world without resolution. Madness, yes, she had known that demon. They had bargained with coins of pain, and those coins came from a vault that never emptied. She’d once known such wealth.And still the darkness pursued.

steve erickson

COTILLION DREW TWO DAGGERS. HIS GAZE FELL TO THE BLADES.The blackened iron surfaces seemed to swirl, two pewter rivers oozing across pits and gouges, the edges ragged where armour and bone had slowed their thrusts. He studied the sickly sky’s lurid reflections for a moment longer, and then said, ‘I have no intention of explaining a damned thing.’ He looked up, eyes locking. ‘Do you understand me?’The figure facing him was incapable of expression. The tatters of rotted sinew and strips of skin were motionless upon the bones of temple, cheek and jaw. The eyes held nothing, nothing at all.Better, Cotillion decided, than jaded scepticism. Oh, how he was sick of that. ‘Tell me,’ he resumed, ‘what do you think you’re seeing here? Desperation? Panic? A failing of will, some inevitable decline crumbling to incompetence? Do you believe in failure, Edgewalker?’

steve erickson

 She’d been among the ones who’d come up from the south, from the husks of homes in Korbanse, Krosis and Kanros. Even the isles of Otpelas. Some, like her, had walked along the coast of the Pelasiar Sea, and then to the western edge of Stet which had once been a great forest, and there they found the wooden road, Stump Road they sometimes called it. Trees cut on end to make flat circles, pounded into rows that went on and on. Other children then arrived from Stet itself, having walked the old stream beds wending through the grey tangle of shattered tree-?fall and diseased shrubs. There were signs that Stet had once been a forest to match its old name which was Forest Stet, but Badalle was not entirely convinced—all she could see was a gouged wasteland, ruined and ravaged. There were no trees standing anywhere. They called it Stump Road, but other times it was Forest Road, and that too was a private joke.

steve erickson

 Badalle watched him for a time, watched as the others fell into his wake. She would join the ribby snake soon enough. She blew at the flies, but of course they came right back, clustering round the sores puffing her lips, hopping up to lick at the corners of her eyes. She had been a beauty once, with these green eyes and her long fair hair like tresses of gold. But beauty bought smiles for only so long. When the larder gapes empty, beauty gets smudged. ‘And the flies,’ she whispered, ‘make patterns of suffering. And suffering is ugly.’

steve erickson

THERE WAS LIGHT, AND THEN THERE WAS HEAT. He knelt, carefully taking each brittle fold in his hands, ensuring that every crease was perfect, that nothing of the baby was exposed to the sun. He drew the hood in until little more than a fist-?sized hole was left for her face, her features grey smudges in the darkness, and then he gently picked her up and settled her into the fold of his left arm. There was no hardship in this.

Bantam Press (UK)

     They’d camped near the only tree in any direction, but not under it. The tree was a gamleh tree and the gamlehs were angry with people. In the dusk of the night before, its branches had been thick with fluttering masses of grey leaves, at least until they drew closer. This morning the branches were bare.
     Facing west, Rutt stood holding the baby he had named Held. The grasses were colourless. In places they had been scoured away by the dry wind, wind that had then carved the dust out round their roots to expose the pale bulbs so the plants withered and died. After the dust and bulbs had gone, sometimes gravel was left. Other times it was just bedrock, black and gnarled. Elan Plain was losing its hair, but that was something Badalle might say, her green eyes fixed on the words in her head. There was no question she had a gift, but some gifts, Rutt knew, were curses in disguise.
     Badalle walked up to him now, her sun-charred arms thin as stork necks, the hands hanging at her sides coated in dust and looking oversized beside her skinny thighs. She blew to scatter the flies crusting her mouth and intoned

barrack obama

Almost a decade has passed since this book was first published. As I mention in the original introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went to work with the belief that the story of my family, and my efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identity-the leaps through time, the collision of cultures-that mark our modern life.

Like most first-time authors, I was filled with hope and despair upon the book’s publication-hope that the book might succeed beyond my youthful dreams, despair that I had failed to say anything worth saying. The reality fell somewhere in between. The reviews were mildly favorable. People actually showed up at the readings my publisher arranged. The sales were underwhelming. And, after a few months, I went on with the business of my life, certain that my career as an author would be short-lived, but glad to have survived the process with my dignity more or less intact.

http://www.lindahubalek.com/pioneer-swedish-immigrant-books/planting-dreams-book-series/planting-dreams-book/read-excerpt-planting-dreams/1st-page-pd-sm the link for this exerpt

another one from Flame Spirals

The Sexton was nice enough to put up an extension ladder. I climbed onto the roof of the Parish Hall, that overlooks the maze. The Sun’s going down fast. Gordon and Judy, the two priests at Grace St. Paul’s, have OK’d my shooting the Thursday Evening Labyrinth Walk. The parishioners have just arrived, about ten in all. From the roof, I tell the walkers I’m going to shoot their meditation this evening. “And don’t worry if you’re shy and don’t like your picture taken,” I say. “I’m using real long shutter speeds so everyone will be a blur. That OK?” “Sure that’s fine,” one woman says, others nodding their approval. But one woman walks to the side. “Really, you can walk the Labyrinth. No one will know who you are,” I say. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t return to the circle until much later. Judy, the facilitator of the Walk, explains to the congregation how this works. “One by one, we’ll enter the labyrinth and

begin to walk,” she says. “You can have a prayer or a question in your mind, or you can just empty your mind. You can walk it fast or slow. There is no right or wrong way. I would just suggest that you stay as much in the moment as you can. Just be in the Labyrinth. And when you reach the center, stop for as long as you like, and then walk back out. And don’t worry about bumping into each other or passing each other in the Labyrinth. It’s really easy to pass and it’s OK to touch each other.” Some people chuckle. “Also, I suggest you walk silently. All right, let’s start.” Judy presses play on a nearby boom box and

exerpt from "dreams of a dark warrior" in relation to concept

HE VOWED HE’D COME FOR HER . . .
Murdered before he could wed Regin the Radiant, warlord Aidan the Fierce seeks his beloved through eternity, reborn again and again into new identities, yet with no memory of his past lives.
SHE AWAITS HIS RETURN . . .
When Regin encounters Declan Chase, a brutal Celtic soldier, she recognizes her proud warlord reincarnated. But Declan takes her captive, intending retribution against all immortals—unaware that he belongs to their world.
TO SATE A DESIRE MORE POWERFUL THAN DEATH . . .
Yet every reincarnation comes with a price, for Aidan is doomed to die when he remembers his past. To save herself from Declan’s torments, will Regin rekindle memories of the passion they once shared—even if it means once again losing the only man she could ever love?