Copyright ©2009. Turtle Heart.
Finish the book
After two years of work I have completed a book about the nature of sacred pipe and the philosophy of American Indian ritual that is best described as the shrinking path. Commentaries on the teachings of the shrinking path. That is the subtext, but not the title.
A few days before the book was finished at last, I turned 60 years.
I bought myself a $1,000 pipe lighter. Palladium. Very well made, beautiful. A little reward that I can carry around in my pocket for the next sixty years. I will use it to light the morning tobacco fire.
Here on Pantelleria Island, we are in the season of the wind. She is known as the Daughter of the Wind. When I knew that this island was known as this elegant and powerful name by the ancient ones, it brought me a lovely feeling. What better place for an old American Indian to reflect, write and prepare himself to take Sacred Pipe around this mother earth. There is so much peace, so many sweet people. It has been a revelation to me of an entire other side of my nature. I have been fighting the indian wars all my life. So it seems. Fucking indians. We are still here. I am still here. I dwell and thrive on the edge, on a crumb left behind by an old volcano. My home has volcano vapors which come up from the garden.
I wrote this book on an Apple iMac. This computer is a toy really. An accessory for your iPhone. It crashed many times, went to repairs twice and still behaves badly whenever it can. I wrote the final draft using Apple’s “Pages” program. It is a nice clean writing program. I composed it and organized it in a nice writing program called “Scrivner”, which is about the best program ever for organizing and composing a book with many chapters and parts. When I was finished I exported it to Pages to finish the writing. 54 chapters. 54 files. When it came time to put the chapters into InDesign so I could publish it in a digital format for copyright registration, I found Pages does not play well with other programs. Apple keeps making toys that work only with itself and not so well with the tools professionals use on computers these days. Apple has been a big disappointment lately. After converting the Pages chapters of 700 pages to Rich Text (RTF), I converted the RTF files to a single PDF. I then converted the collected PDF to a single RTF file and imported that into InDesign with the help of a $75 plug-in that automatically flows so much text across so many pages (fucking InDesign does not do this itself). I then had to remake all the tabs and paragraphs, add graphics and poetry. Mamma Mia.
60 original paintings. 54 original poems. 654 pages of writing. Completed February 08, 2009 at 9:21:44 pm, CET.
I will be looking for a publisher. I need to see this thing on paper. I will also offer it as a digital download soon.
Today I listen to Flamingo music, smoke, and go walking in the wind. The Great Wind is my mother.
