The Gnosis of the Salmon

By Lynne Marie Rowland

Healing from a broken heart at the same time as a heart attack isn’t fun, but for Elinor Hugh-Jones it has taken an unexpected and dangerous twist. When a spirit guide arrives calling her to embark on a vision quest, Elinor must face her many demons.
What Elinor doesn’t realize is that she will battle not only with the evil Necromancer of her childhood fantasy realm, Gwennec Mor, but also must confront the deep secrets of her family, and find a way to forgive the unforgiveable.

She does not realize that Jimmy, the man who broke her heart, is absolutely essential to fulfilling her destiny.
She also does not realize that the paths of both her grandfathers and her mother who narrate the book, along with her child self, are inextricably linked across time, and that her quest is the only way that her entire family can be free.

How far will Elinor go to save herself and the people she loves?

Endorsements:

"This is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. And yes, I smiled. And, Dear God ... Yes, I wept." Gregg Tyler Milligan, internationally-renowned, award-winning author and abuse prevention advocate.

See Gregg's full recommendation at lynnemarierowland.com and at his site, GodMustBeSleeping.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lynne Marie Rowland
• Release date: Sep 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989640008

Lynne Marie Rowland

Lynne Marie Rowland is the author of two books, The Gnosis of the Salmon and A Compendium of Shaman Animals.Lynne is inspired by a wide range of mythology and spiritual practices. Her particular interest in the Gnostic Christian tradition was sparked by the groundbreaking work of Carl Jung and led her to travel to spiritual centers exploring and reading original materials from Nag Hammadi in Egypt and the Dead Sea Scrolls in Israel. She has studied the Celtic Shamanic tradition for many years. To augment these studies, she visited sites of Celtic lore and myths such as Brittany, and lands imbued with Shaman traditions from China to Chile. Her travels have ranged as far as Antarctica, India, Africa and Japan seeking spiritual growth through many varied faiths and experiences. She has also studied forgiveness extensively in both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions.Lynne still believes in magic.

Book preview

The Gnosis of the Salmon

Lynne Marie Rowland

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Lynne Marie Rowland

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

This book is dedicated to all trauma survivors who have struggled to find forgiveness.

Many thanks to my editor, Mr. Michael Denneny.

Thanks also to my parents and the small coterie of true friends who supported me in my dream - Jodie, Barry, Jen, Silvia, Belinda, Bill, Tesha, Sachin, Sandy, Julie, Christine, Chris, Nikki and Deb.

CHAPTER 1

Elinor

It happened suddenly. I was feeling ill. Feverish, weak, like all of me was drained... wrung out. My friend Ishmael was having me to his house for tea. Ishmael was a reiki master and was who I ran to talk with whenever major life events happened. I had come to his house to tell him about what happened the night before with Jimmy but now couldn’t talk about it as I felt awful. Anyway, Jimmy was now a man who meant nothing to me, just another former boyfriend.

Help me, Ishmael. I think I am about to faint, I said. Ishmael hovered about me, touched my forehead and said, Do you feel pain anywhere?

Yes, on my chest and down my arm. There’s pressure in my chest, but not like asthma pain.

Anything else? he asked, as he touched my forehead. You feel pretty clammy.

Yes and I feel sick to my stomach.

Let’s go to the emergency room.

He helped me down the twisty stairs of the house, creaking one by one, as I could scarcely stand. He bundled me into a taxi and off we went, eight blocks to the hospital. Endless insurance forms confronted me while the pain increased in my chest.

Ishmael, I plead, Please call my parents. I’m afraid I am having a heart attack. He called and passed me the phone as it rang. My mother answers. Mom, I think I am having a heart attack.

Oh Eli, you can’t be having a heart attack, it’s all in your head, she said.

Mother, it is not in my head, I retort.

Well, I guess it’s possible. After all, you have some family history.

What? Why didn’t you tell me that before? I snapped into the phone.

I just didn’t remember. I don’t know what you want from me, Elinor. Whatever I do is wrong. I can’t remember on demand, she said.

Mother, maybe just this once you can do something for me when I ask you. I’m scared that I am having a heart attack and now you tell me it’s possible!

I don’t know what you want me to do, Elinor. Maybe you should just call me back after you find out something definitive from the doctor.

Sure, Mother, that’s probably a good idea.

As she hung up the phone hurriedly, I said to Ishmael, I hate her! Won’t she just think? Why can’t I have a normal mother? She doesn’t care about me. She can’t even remember to tell me the important things?

He didn’t comment. As an exceptional reiki master, Ishmael was above such pettiness.

I met the ER doctor, and as he shoved nitroglycerin under my tongue, he noted, It may feel odd. Odd was an understatement. It coursed through my body like a shock. I felt dizzy and faint and yet felt something else course through my veins to my heart. Maybe it was blood. It was like blacking out without the loss of consciousness. You can hear your heart beat extra loud like some high volume woofer system linked only to you. The pain started to leave my arm a bit. No one really explained anything; I just kept hearing, You’ll be fine. Finally someone said, It appears to be unstable angina, a heart attack. You’ll be fine, you got here in time. Now these are not words that really drive home comfort. Efficient, white-clad people whisked me to a room and began to insert things: IV’s, clips, EKG taped wires to my chest and back... it hurt where they were pasted onto my skin.

I was moved to a room, shared with someone’s grandmother. I can’t believe that you’re old enough to have a heart attack.

Me either.

At around 3 am, she leaned over and said Baby, are you still awake?

I was awake unfortunately, rehashing in my head my conversation with Jimmy the night before, but tried to concentrate.

Yes, I’m still awake.

Have you confessed to God and our Lord Jesus?

No, I replied.

You do believe in our savior, don’t you baby?

I guess I do, I replied, but I never think of chatting with him.

Something about IV’s in you with a million things taped onto you made it seem like a prudent idea to try some one-on-one time with Jesus and God. The more the merrier. The needles were skeeving me out anyway. I needed to think about something else.

The lady kept talking with me, Are you married?

No, not yet.

A sweet thing like you? she said. You need to get yourself a good man.

I promise that as soon as I leave the hospital it will be the first thing I do, I replied. I couldn’t even begin to explain about Jimmy. Better to just pretend to sleep as best I could muster.

In this situation, you can’t truly sleep. Between all of the machine alarms going off and no one answering, you panic until a nurse would come, afraid that something bad happened, when in fact it was an empty bag that needed to be changed. Then the nurses would come and wake you to ask if you were all right, with troops of doctors, interns and residents marching through afterwards.

In the middle of the night, perhaps due to the medication or the fitfulness of my sleep, I awoke at the sound of my name, Elinor, said the voice, Elinor.

Who is it? I asked.

You know who I am, Elinor I have known you since the beginning of time.

I don’t, I stammered, pinching myself. I must be more ill than I thought, having hallucinations. Maybe my mother was right; could this be all in my head?

Elinor, it isn’t in your head. It is time, the voice intoned.

Time?

Time for you to find out the truth, isn’t that what you really want?

Of course, I said, I’ve been trying to find out the truth from my family forever. It’s not so easy to do. No one in my family wants to know the truth.

Things are now ready for the truth to be fully revealed to you.

Why now? I asked, still unsure who I was having this conversation with, but feeling oddly connected anyway. Why not all of the other times I have interrogated my family, trying to pry it out of them?

Because you were not really ready to face it yet; now you are strong enough.

Strong enough, I laughed, I am lying hooked up to machines in the hospital and talking to someone I cannot even see.

Strength has many different forms.

So even if I wanted to do so, how would I find out the truth now? I asked.

You need to face your demons, said the voice.

How will I do that?

You know how, Elinor. I am only here as you requested, to remind you of the time to set out on your vision quest.

My what?

Your vision quest. Like every other shaman of the tribe, you need to undertake a vision quest.

Now I was really confused. Tribe? I don’t belong to a tribe, and I have no interest in being a shaman. I’m a finance person.

You will continue to be sick until you agree to take on this quest.

What if I don’t want to be a shaman?

You will die if you do not fulfill your destiny.

I don’t want to be a shaman, I whispered.

No true shaman does, the voice said, you cannot shirk the truth of who you are and what you are truly meant to do.

But I don’t know who I truly am, or what I am meant to do. I replied. It’s some Indian thing, isn’t it? I’m not Indian in heritage; at least I don’t think so.

You have it all wrong, Elinor. Shamans exist in some form in all peoples. Think it over. You will need to accept your quest by nightfall tomorrow.

I don’t even know who you are, I said. Why should I listen to you?

I am one of your spirit guides. I have been with you as you incarnated into this lifetime to guide you towards your spiritual destiny.

Sorry I asked, I muttered. I fell back into a fitful sleep, hoping that the whole bad dream would be gone by morning. I had trouble sleeping though as I kept playing what happened the night before in my mind. Jimmy had this amazing ability to show up and turn my life upside down and he seemed to have done it again.

I woke still feeling sedated. My heart felt icky. It is amazing how tuned into it I was suddenly. It felt as if someone had pummeled it with a 2 X 4.

My cardiologist came by in the morning. He was a tad rigid about his rules. They continue to present the same, very unavoidable facts, You have heart disease, Ms. Hugh-Jones. Either you radically change your lifestyle or you will die. I strongly suggest that you take some time off from your job to think about it and adopt some healthier habits.

What kind of habits?

A better diet to start. A supervised exercise program, and some other lifestyle recommendations, he advised.

I can’t miss work.

You already have. A few more weeks won’t hurt you. It may save your life, or at least prevent you from being right back here in a few weeks or months.

Would I really die?

You may. Many women have a second, more severe heart attack, often fatal, if they do not change their risk factors.

Ok, I’ll take a few weeks off as you suggest and follow your advice, I said, already feeling the stress from taking time off to de-stress.

I think your job is killing you, he added. Taking a few weeks might also remind you how to live and what to live for.

On some level, I knew that I was slowly and deliberately killing myself. I worked incessantly to avoid my life. I even had some awareness of why, but did not choose to really acknowledge the reasons. It wasn’t just the bad dream of last night that was bothering me; I seemed to get messages like this all over the world, every time I consulted a non-traditional medicine practitioners or anyone with a spiritual bent.

All of these people had been telling me for years that I had these blockages, like worms, in my heart. In China, a blind man had done reflexology in my feet and talked about seeing them in my heart. Several different reiki practitioners had seen them as well. Crazy as it sounded, I realized that I needed to pay attention. Maybe my spirit guide was right and these things would kill me. My cardiologist couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there, particularly when I sat still. And if the worms were a part of the problem, now would be a good time to fix it.

The only silver lining in what had happened with my heart was that my parents said, Elinor, you can stay at the farm permanently. I had moved there temporarily in the summer when I had sold my house, moving the few possessions I still had back to the farm that my maternal grandparents, Matthias and Rebekah, had in my childhood. It was a place to confront my ghosts, to find out the truth of what had happened in my family.

Besides, and possibly more importantly, the spirit guides had a human harbinger. El Nino had blown in something unexpected the night before last. The Wild Bunch was playing at the Khyber after a five year hiatus since Jimmy Nahum, the lead guitarist, had left town for Austin and broke my heart. He had sent me a cryptic email, the first sign of life from him in these five years that read, In town for a show at the Khyber, why don’t you come?

Temptation. My curiosity was winning hands down over a small tendril of common sense. After all, Jimmy had not only left me, but had cut off all contact between us for five years. We had parted with a dual promise and I hadn’t really kept up my end of the bargain. Worse, from what I had heard from another band which had seen him soon after he left town, he hadn’t done much better. He had shown up to their show in Louisville reeking of a five day bender, on his roundabout way to Texas.

Still he had managed to release his first solo CD which I purchased. I dissected the lyrics hoping to decipher in the next Homeric epitaph some sign of an ode to me, his long lost, long suffering Penelope. But the critically acclaimed album mourned his true love, whiskey. Hope and love, if felt at all for anyone else, remained out of reach around the corner of another bender, to convince me that love was a power more to destroy than save.

The only mitigating hope was a phrase about the watchmen being gone, tucked in the middle of a remembrance of whiskeys past. Maybe he remembered and thought of that night we danced? Though I had little hope that Jimmy had made any progress on his promise to get sober, based on the lyrics. My side of our Mephistophelean deal wasn’t any more easily attainable.

Arriving at the Khyber, I felt like jumping out of my skin, as if my evil twin was poised to leap out, spewing feelings. He saw me enter and came right up to me, awkwardly reaching to half hug me with one hand, while the other dragged two stools from the bar.

Elinor, I’m so glad you came.

Me too, Jimmy. You look great. Indeed, he still managed to take my breath away. He wasn’t classically handsome, but had a strong chin and dark wavy hair that always fell in his eyes when he played. The smell of him was actually what was overpowering after all of this time, even wafting over the smoke in the room, filling my nose with the scent of clove and musk that always made me crazy to be with him. Impulsively, I threw my arms around his neck.

I’m so glad to see you too, Jimmy, I whispered.

Do you want something to drink? he asked with a half hearted return of my embrace.

A white wine, please.

A white wine and a water for me, please, he said to the barman.You see, Elinor, I managed to get sober. It’s been almost four years now.

"That’s wonderful. I