January’s a good time for a “talk-story”. This coming Thursday evening (1/12/12) I’ll be at the Luminescence Day Spa in Boulder Creek, CA, drumming and reading from Sundagger.net and Dreamers. If I’m lucky and the stars are aligned, I’ll see a few of you book lovers there too. Perhaps some dreamy mystics or intellectual woodsmen and woodswomen will come to Luminescence from the redwoods of the Santa Cruz mountains or those wild, lonely beaches north of Santa Cruz. Whatever place you come from matters, doesn’t it?
Settings–places–are very important to me. Pittsburgh. Africa. California. For years I’ve kept a torn piece of paper on my dresser. It reads, “Wisdom resides in places–Basho.” It grounds me somehow, reminding me to honor the place where I am.
As you listen to my talk-story, you’ll be visiting: Oakland, CA; Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; Sunnyvale, Silicon Valley, CA; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and New York City.
The sun is also an important theme in my talk-story. I’m seeing a lot of mild, sunny days in Northern California so far this January. But still the sun is a terrible power, as I’ve just experienced. Unhappily, I got sunstroke a month ago after swimming in the Indian Ocean in Durban, South Africa–and it was a gray, cloudy afternoon too. I turned into a dehydrated limp vegetable for a day or two, but recovered by drinking gallons of sugar & salt water, prescribed by my sister, Mary Pat Brennan. She has been in South Africa working with the Peace Corps for over two years. Her doctoring worked. I’m better.
The sun’s a main character of Sundagger.net, a novel of one family, two worlds and many lifetimes. The title comes from an actual occurrence in Chaco Canyon where sunlight, shaped like a dagger, pierces a spiral cut in stone.
From the sun dagger phenomenon, it’s apparent that the sun was revered, and likely worshipped, by the primitive Anasazi of the Southwest. In the old world story of Sundagger.net, the Anasazi main character, RoHnaan is charged to spy on the nefarious elders to make sure they are performing the sun dagger ceremony correctly so that the drought will end and rain will come.
We post-moderns of 2012, addicted to electronic media as we are, also idolize the sun. Do we even realize that the sun drives the technology that powers the Internet?
The telecom industry of Silicon Valley, CA, is the setting for the new world story in Sundagger.net. Rowan, a driven network analyst at the telecom giant,TekGen (and a bastard reincarnation of RoHnaan), stumbles onto a vision he does not understand with a family he does not deserve but desperately tries to keep.
Check out Journey Into the Sun on YouTube for more leading edge sun technology. Sometimes it takes more than one lifetime. Now there’s a talk-story to explore. Maybe we’ll get to that too. See you soon.
