A Place Where Part of Me Lives

Part of me lives at Nideck Point… only I had not realized how much until I recently returned to those vast rooms.

Last year when I read THE WOLF GIFT by Anne Rice, I was pleased to find it as good as anything she has ever written. A major setting for the story is the great house and home among the redwood trees in northern California, a place called Nideck Point. The architecture is lovingly invoked and the interior is richly and comfortably furnished. This highly civilized bastion is set amid the primeval majesty of ancient redwood forests. In parallel, the main character Reuben is challenged to embrace both his civilized humanity and the animal nature of the actual Wolf Gift.

The social networking site Facebook plays a role in the novel, and I soon learned why some call Ms. Rice the Queen Of Facebook. Her page there is among the most active and interesting, full of news and discussion, and she's remarkably gracious and honest with her beloved "People of the Page." That's how I learned that THE WOLF GIFT would have a sequel; when someone asked about it, she responded, "Done." Finally we learned that the next book would be titled THE WOLVES OF MIDWINTER and that an excerpt would be added at the end of the paperback edition of the first novel.

So what other reason had I to seek out and purchase the trade paperback edition of THE WOLF GIFT, except to savor that preview?

What happened when I began to read that 18-page except is a testimony to the superb creative power of this author… without elaborate descriptions, employing the deftest touches of narrative and no need to grab for attention, the first sentence immediately swept me again into Nideck Point.

THE WOLVES OF MIDWINTER opens thus: "It was the beginning of December, deeply cold and gray, with the rain pounding as always, but the oak fires had never burned brighter in the vast rooms of Nideck Point…" When I read these words, I returned there!

I realized it's a place where part of me lives--a place as real to me as any in the material world, for such is the power of great stories. This is the magic of human imagination.

I look forward to my further return to Nideck Point on October 15th, 2013.

Thank you so much, Anne!

The Sound and Scent of Life Itself

Dear Friends and Loved Ones:

Following a severe period of drought, to hear and smell the rain falling upon the world becomes the sound and scent of life itself!

That gentle hypnotic sound on our metal roof wakes me sometime before dawn. I get up, come downstairs and begin my day with that sweet, steady sussurus for my foundation. I'm keenly aware that my spiritual practice of constant cleaning within me--using gratitude and love--has an unexpected side-effect. I directly experience the subtle behavior of cells, molecules, even atoms, and subatomic energies.

For example, heating the water for tea, I FEEL the heat swiftly conduct through metallic lattices of the kettle like express trains and how this stimulates the elegant dance of the H2O molecules into a wild kinetic frenzy.

Sometime after my first cup of tea, and reading for a while, the sky grows pale and the rainfall lets up. I go outside and wander quietly through Paradise Garden. Even such a light touch of rainfall immediately heightens the green! Plus at this time of year dozens of different things bloom in the garden. Every plant here is a great and intensely aware being! I feel deep and profound respect for their vegetative intelligence. The moist scents of soil and vegetation reaches me from every quarter. Birds embroider the morning with song and response.

My heart swells with gratitude and love for everything (no exceptions!) like a bicuit in the oven.

When I consider this, I realize that the rain has always spoken deeply to me. It speaks to something deep within, perhaps at some level of ancestral memories. Epigenetics has recently revealed that we do inherit some acquired predispositions. So did my ancestors experience drought?

It may or may not have been drought. However I do know that many times they felt immense gratitude for the simple reprieve from need and suffering that Nature can unexpectedly bestow. I can feel this  grace, not only in my cells--but also in my jeweled molecules and the ecstatic dance of my atomic stardust.

*   *   *

For the last 33 years I've studied how the elements that compose our human bodies influence what and who we are. Now I offer a service based on my awareness and on everything that I AM, a service called Ancient Egyptian Shapeshifting Oracle (or A.E.S.O.). Please SEE:http://www.9realities.com/aeso.html which also has a link to the A.E.S.O. Facebook page.

Peace & (((HUGS)))
Bruce

http://www.9realities.com/homepagebooks.html
http://www.brucepgrether.com/index.html
Blog: http://www.bruces9realitiesblog.blogspot.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/bruce.grether
Twitter: @BrucePGrether
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/BrucePGrether
_________________________
Nada Te Turbe*
       -- Theresa of Avila
*(Let Nothing Disturb You)

Mr. Porcupine in the Tree

Our friend seen eye-to-eye
Has a face like a caboose
And appears to me
To have philosophical depth --
He seems a bit shy.
Tom leaves him a snack -- a carrot and celery...

As night falls -- Mr. Porcupine begins his day --
Backs down the barky oaken branch and trunk
Backs down all the way
With old-man-in-corduroys caution --
Long tail alive feeling behind him,
Helps to find his way down.

Didn't eat his snack -- we learn next day --
And he's gone on his unknown way.

Now, as my final touches here are done --
You, me, and Mr. P.
And the live oak tree
Everything on this good green Earth
All things are no more and no less than One.

The Egypt Cards Book is a Great Resource and a Real Treasure!

Egypt Cards: Using the Sacred Hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt in Today’s World by Constance Trillich

I’ve been an amateur Egyptologist for over 50 years, since I was a very young boy, and had the privilege of visiting Egypt at age 5 with my family. Recently, all these decades later, I have discovered a remarkable resource to continue and deepen my study of the ancient Egyptian culture, language and religion, in the deceptively simple form of Constance Trillich’s Egypt Cards deck and the companion book that I obtained from Amazon. This is concentrated information, like a far bigger book!

The cards are not precisely a Tarot deck, though the creator and author now plans to add a set of “Major Arcana” so that it will correspond neatly with the structure of the Tarot, which it already does in many ways, minus those trumps. My own study of Tarot, also many decades long, though not quite as venerable as my love for Egypt, has led me to some unconventional interpretations.

I view the Tarot (and also the Egypt Cards) not only as an oracle deck that can yield profound insight from the unconscious mind into conscious awareness, but at core, as a book that depicts the grand design of the evolution of energy in formation. That may sound complex or challenging to understand, but think of how during formation from embryo to fetus to you as an adult human, your form underwent all those stages that parallel the single cell, worm-like form, fishy form, little tailed animal, then human ape, and finally domesticated primate grown-up.

 A remarkable thing that can be seen in Constance’s superb cards is that the deck also suggests “future” paths for human evolution, as our conscious awareness continues to expand and heighten. She makes Egypt relevant to today’s people and our world now.

To keep this review simple, let me mention that I still keep my copy of the deck in the numerical order that the cards are discussed in the beautiful book that explains them. To me, this is something like the “Periodic Table of Evolution,” and Constance clearly spent much time arranging the order of the cards with great care as well as creating their clear, beautiful artwork. Here you have a comprehensive inventory of key Egyptian hieroglyphs and deities, core concepts and patterns, all beautifully encoded into the deck and its imagery.

My knowledge is fairly in-depth, in that I study the language of ancient Egypt, as well as the art, culture and history, the archaeology and its interpretation, yet I still gain nuggets of new information and insight as I work with the deck and read this book.

I’ll confess that I have never before come across another contemporary interpreter of Egyptian civilization with whom I feel quite such a sympathetic alignment, in terms of Constance’s interpretations, choice of terms, spellings for many of the somewhat mysterious terms and names. She comes across as both practical and visionary. Kudos to Constance Trillich (who uses the last name Johnson on Facebook) and my gratitude to her for her creation of this book and the deck of cards, her sharing these, and her generous personal communications with me as well.

This work confirms what I feel more than ever, that in essence, Egyptian culture was not overwhelmingly complex, rather it was grounded in everyday experience and simple central patterns.

If you are interested in ancient Egypt, this is a major contribution to contemporary appreciation and understanding of that fascinating civilization to which we still owe so much of what we are today.

www.egyptcards.com

Thrills Along the Spine of the Stories!: A Review of BLOOD AND GOLD by Anne Rice

Every time I read one of Anne Rice's books I am seduced and I am pulled through irresistibly…

Not long ago I re-entered the VAMPIRE CHRONICLES via PANDORA, with its 2000-year first-person perspective on the world of Anne Rice’s beloved characters. Pandora has a bittersweet relationship with the half-Keltoi, half Roman Marius.

Despite her inability to live with Marius, it was to his story BLOOD AND GOLD that Pandora brought me, as if by the hand. “His version of things is in its own way as comprehensive as Lestat’s,” I could almost hear her telling me. In first-person terms, it is even more so because Marius is far older. In Lestat’s own accounts it is also Marius who provides much of the older history. Marius tells his own tale including how he first encountered They Who Must Be Kept so long ago and spent many centuries protecting those parents and originals of all vampires in Anne’s mythos.

I’ve so much enjoyed my reunion with Marius, whose account of his own existence forms a kind of common spine of all the CHRONICLES, much as Lestat’s do—and yet in this case from Marius’s own fantastic perspective.

One remarkable thing about Marius story is his brilliant account of the Renaissance, when he lived in Venice as a painter and discovered Amadeo—someone we know later as Armand—whom he liberates from enslavement, where he would have been sold to a brothel. Let me not provide too many SPOILERS to the delicious intricacies of the plot for the uninitiated… however I especially enjoy how the vampiric Marius clearly delights in providing the beautiful red-haired youth Amadeo with erotic pleasures in his own ways. I am moved and touched all over again as Marius bestows the Dark Gift upon Amadeo to save his life. Their involvement with the lovely Bianca is also likewise delicious and totally plausible, and something of a triad.

Towards the end of the novel, Marius himself became a bit long-winded and repetitive, even fussy, for which I would blame Marius de Romanus himself, not Anne! She writes when a story “comes to me like a swarm of bees surrounding my head,” she says, and I’ve also heard her say that at one point she had not intended to write another, but Lestat began to whisper in her ear. Like any great storyteller, her imagination is so strong that the characters come alive, and even take on a life and a distinct voice of their own!

I'm always astounded at the sensory details Anne invokes, the richness of settings and atmosphere and the depth of interaction among the characters, the total immersion in place, times, characters that this she achieves every time!

Now that I’ve finished this remarkable journey again, Marius directs to his fledgling  Amadeo, AKA Armand. I also recall that for me, THE VAMPIRE ARMAND was the most erotic of these novels, as it became even more clear that though Marius did not make love to Armand as a mortal would, he definitely pleasured the young man! Plus I recall that Armand provides his own rich and unique perspectives on everything in these realms.

Oh, what a cunning web Ms. Rice weaves!

Onward…

A Dogma-free Yeshua for Today!

Anne Rice accomplishes something quite audacious, and yet respectful to existing sources, with her two novels concerning the Life of Christ. The second, The Road to Cana, is again a first-person narrative told by Yeshua himself, and this time he's past thirty, on the verge of somewhat reluctantly entering his ministry. His voice seems to me to be his own, not Anne's! Authorial craft, I suppose? In the first book, Out of Egypt, he is a boy whose family living in exile in Alexandria returns to Nazareth upon the news that Herod the Great has died.

We know we're not in Oz as this one begins when the mature Yeshua has apparently had a wet dream about a beautiful woman in his village, wakes up a bit wet and messy and washes his robe. Though none of the specifics are really Biblical up until the marriage at Cana at the end, except for the baptism in the Jordan and a few other moments, every event, every detail and description seems plausible to me. The historical context and background are immaculate. I especially love in these books, the mention of a place on a hillside where Jesus likes to go to simply be alone in Nature.

As with the first of the two books, there are no cheesy miracles, no preaching, no blatant Christian dogma presented, though this is a traditional view that the gospels are quite accurate. Though Anne Rice does not feel quite the same on the subject now, she has not abandoned these novels, any more than she totally rejected her other supernatural creations during her venture back in the arms of Mother Church. Recently she has expressed interest in the film version of Out of Egypt. When these books came out, I remember emailing Anne and telling her that I though they contained some of her finest writing. I still feel that way.

In retrospect, Yeshua is of course, another sort of supernatural, possibly immortal being. She brings him to life in a way I've never experienced before. And yet this always happens with her characters, whether with Louis and Claudia  and Lestat in the Vampire Chronicles, or Mona and Quinn in the Lives of the Mayfair Witches as they merged with the Vampires, or dashing young Reuben of the new Man Wolf series.

Anne always provides moments that raise every hair on my body--SPOILER ALERT, I SUPPOSE--and in this case it involves Yeshua's awareness that there are two kinds so prayer for him--a rote thing learned, and a direct connection when he feels one with his heavenly Father--and he makes a command. In this case, there has been a long drought in Israel and it has to do with a sudden storm, only it's about far more than bringing rainfall…

Got me, Anne, as you always do!

THis woman's writing continues to evolve. In many ways, for example Blood Canticle was the finest wine of all the Vampire and Witch books that intertwined in the last two volumes. An actively practicing artist often only improves with age, and this is certainly the case with Anne Rice. She keeps opening another treasure-chest of literary delight for her fans, time-after-time.

It may seem unlikely, however I'd still love to see the third Christ book, which I believe was referred to as The Kingdom of Heaven. You never know…

Passionate, Exquisite Prose for Our Times

Like many of Anne Rice's long-time readers, when I first learned that she had returned to the church, I did not know what to think of it. When her first novel about the life of Christ, CHRIST THE LORD: OUT OF EGYPT was published in 2005, I was probably feeling withdrawal from the regular appearance of Anne's novels, which I had been reading regularly since 1976.

So I have an exquisite hardcover First Edition of this book, which was delivered to me on its publication date, because I paid for Second Day shipping. Though stores cannot put a book out legally before the lay-down date, mail-order book sellers can send books ahead that will ship a couple of days early.

What amazes me about Anne's Christ novels is first, the sheer audacity of depicting the Life of Christ in first-person narrations. Something else amazing here is that the novel is free of dogma, cheesy miracles, or silly special-effects. And though Anne did major amounts of research for authenticity, near the very beginning is an allusion to one of the non-canonical "Childhood Miracle" Gospels of Jesus. Let me not SPOIL any surprises, but this vivid reference near the very beginning of the book refers to clay birds.

I suppose I should post a POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT for anyone who might wish to go into the novel with no idea of things to come. Two remarkably powerful things for me were Anne's description of the animal sacrifices at the Great Temple, a virtual mist of blood, and young Jesus's reaction when he hears the story of King Herod and the male children under age 2 years. This is one of those gripping moments that Anne offers in every book, usually quite a number of them, that really grabs you.

For years I've felt that Anne's publishers honor the class, quality and elegance of her writings with the hardcover First Editions that have deckled edges, gorgeous fonts, classical art on the covers, and sometimes gold. It's the treasure chest of the stories and the language within those lovely covers, however, that really matters. Anne writes in what seems to me a white-hot inferno of activated imagination, in which as she SEES the story, it flows through her fingertips through the keyboard into the novel.

Some people complain about the simplicity of the words in this narrative, as if not recalling that Jesus at the time he tells this story is 7 or 8 years of age. His voice is that of a boy that age, who is also aware that he may be something more than an ordinary boy.

In this book and the followup three years later, Jesus was brought to life as a human person, also divine, as never before for me. I've read the New Testament and the Old, and what I love about this novel of Anne's is that it is not propaganda for a religion. It is the story of a boy talking about his life some two millennia in the past.

Anne has moved on in her personal life, and as I always said to my friends, she's highly intelligent, a good person, and she did not lose her marbles when she went back to the Catholic church. However I'm proud of her because she keeps moving.