Jupiter is a woman

January 3rd 2014

OMG! It's 2014, and it's going to be a good one. Call me soft in the head, but I think the movement of the planets effects our lives, and Jupiter, the biggest and most powerful of the planets, has just slid into my career sector! What's not to believe? If there is one thing you can say about our universe, it's that everything works together in one great swell of cosmic soup -  the stars and planets and the butterfly wing in China. So I am looking forward to being a particularly big bubble in the pot this year. Mercury, messenger of the gods, is also in my sign, and favors media and getting my message out.  So bring it on! This Scorpio has lived long enough under a rock and needs to take wing and fly. As a new year's game with some others I was asked to predict three things for my life by this time next year. I have never had any problem dreaming big, so here's what I said: 1) Veil of Time will be doing well; 2) The sequel will be well into pre-production; 3) My book will be optioned for a movie.
(The last of these is not something I wish for lightly. A whole host of conditions would have to be met for that to happen. I don't need creative control, but I do need to be in the loop. There are directors out there who value the input of writers - it's just a question of finding the right one.)
Anyway, that's me for 2014.
Nelson Mandela said, "There's no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living." He certainly didn't settle for anything less than he was capable of. During his twenty-seven years of imprisonment he was repeatedly offered his freedom by the South African government, but repeatedly refused to accept the conditions that that freedom rested upon. I firmly believe that it is not our dreams that fail but our resolution. Dreams that are held on to tightly, have a way of manifesting themselves. They may not happen according to our agenda, and we have to be flexible enough to ride the waves, but the key is not to lose sight of the land we're aiming for.
With my book launch coming up at 6pm on March 11th of this year, I have been busy planning. The folks at Aspen Writer's Foundation, bless their little hearts, are putting this on for me. I could have had it at the local book shop (one of the few left in the country, but, this being Aspen, it is owned by a wealthy enough concern for it to be still viable) or at the county library, in some ways an obvious venue. But I chose the community centre in Woody Creek, a sort of fringe community at the farthest reaches of Aspen where Hunter Thompson lived and where John Oates and Jimmy Ibbotson currently have houses.
Woody Creek is mostly a trailer park, a tavern of ill repute, and couple of speed bumps, but it's where I live. The community center has a garden to sit out in in the summer and a fire to huddle around in the winter, and it is a comfortable setting. I'm asking people to come in kilts or in any other ethnic dress (for instance, my Cherokee friend will come in his tribe's regalia.) I want an actor friend to come dressed in a cowl, hood up, waving incense in a censer. Book readings can be boring non-events. They can have you trying to sneak a look at your watch. So, I am aiming to have this one be a happening event. If I could afford a piper, I would, but the closest pipers are in Denver, four hours away. At very least, I might be able to bring in a few local musicians to play Celtic tunes and set the stage. Because the book is about more than just me. It has themes of ethnicity, of Christian religion against pagan. It's about being a proud Scot and celebrating a history that is uniquely Scotland's before it was taken over by a history uniquely English.
The biggest of my book's themes, I think, is that an age of domination and hierarchies, of slash and burn, should pass now, is passing now. The whole world view that that hinged upon, needs to go now - homo sapiens does not control the earth or space or time. Mine is a book about time, because that is the linch pin that this worn out world view rests upon, the piece in the puzzle that if you remove it, everything else collapses. We need a new way of looking at our universe, not one from a conquerer point of view, but one of perspective and humility. The reason my heroine flies like a witch back to 735 AD is that it might be helpful for us to look at the kind of religious perspective we had before the monkish religious perspective took hold. We can't go back to that, obviously, but the denigration of the goddess, of the female, has been disastrous for the world. Willy nilly, Christianity has been a tool used for that purpose. But the sky God has had his turn, and we need to re-embrace the sacred feminine, the earth goddess, whatever form that is going to take in the centuries to come.
At the beginning of this important year, this is my fervent wish, book signing or not, sequel or not, movie or not: that the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know that place for the first time. (Eliot.) In my book, I am trying to find a way there.