The Seer's Prayer

The Seer's Prayer displayed on my home page page is taken from my 2004 quest novel The Sun Singer.

I find that it works as an invocation for silent contemplation, for Reiki healing and for journeying, as well as attunement excerises such as the Middle Piller.

As Caroline Myss notes well in her excellent book Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul, some mystic texts and practises are dangerous. They can change us forever before we're ready to be so greatly changed. I mention this because the prayer opens doors wider than the comfort level of many who have just now taken their first steps on the seeker's path.

I printed a few copies of the prayer as refrigerator magnets to give away at talks and readings. I have 25 left in this batch to give away.

If you would like a free Seer's Prayer magnet, send me your snail mail address at thesunsinger@yahoo.com. The first 25 people I hear from will get a magnet.

Of course, you don't need a magnet to use the prayer.

That time of year

Out of the clouds I hear a faint bark, as of a faraway dog. It is strange how the world cocks its ear to that sound, wondering. Soon it is louder: the honk of geese, invisible, but coming on.

The flock emerges from the low clouds, a tattered banner of birds, dipping and rising, blown up and blown down, blown together and blown apart, but advancing, the wind wrestling lovingly with each winnowing wing. When the flock is a blur in the far sky I hear the last honk, sounding taps for summer.

It is warm behind the driftwood now, for the wind has gone with the geese. So would I – if I were the wind.

—Aldo Leopold, from Sand County Almanac

After the dog days of August have come and gone, after we notice Wal*Mart has moved the summer patio furniture out of the garden shop to make room for Christmas, after the stores and catalogues swap coats and wool shirts for the tee shirts and sun dresses, we know that we've reached That time of the year.

Last winter, whether we live in a world of snow and ice or in a world of grey skies and chilly rains, we were pretty much fed up with winter.

But now, as the first signs of autumn appear in the sky and the woods, the change brings with it feelings of excitement and new energy.

I like nothing better than stepping away from the same-same world of computers and stepping outside and becoming--if only in small moments--a creature who is attuned to the changing seasons.

All that research

Now that I'm finally starting Jeff Shaara's historical novel about World War I, The Last Man, I'm impressed again by all that research.

Shaara's impeccable research, previously evident in such novels as Gods and Generals and The Glorious Cause, serves as a very strong foundation for his fictionalised (but accurately rendered) approach to the battles of the Civil War, Mexican War, and world wars I and II, and the American revolution.

I've always wondered what Shaara's notes look like, and whether he buys a room full of books to support each project or simply puts up a pup tent in the library with the best resources.

Like The Killer Angels written by his Pulitzer Prize winning father Michael Shaara about the battle of Gettysburg, Jeff Shaara's books bring battles to life through the people who fought them. I learned more about the battle of Gettysburg from Mike's The Killer Angels and more about the Mexican War from Jeff's Gone of Soldiers than I did in my high school and college history classes.

As a pacifist, I'm not fan of battles, tactics or weapons, much less long discussions about "what might have been" had one thing or another happened or not happened. With few exceptions, war novels bore me, and that includes those that are defined by reviewers as "page turners."

But Jeff and his late father have done their work so well, that I find myself drawn back in time into both the horrors of war and the humanity of the people who fought the battles that most of us now know only as footnotes in dry history books.

Each of these books began, I suppose, with a vision, a thought that perhaps a strong and vibrant story might not only be interesting, but educational and thought provoking. Early on, though, there was all of that research.

As I think of the work that supports the books' effortless prose and well told stories, I am both tired and impressed.