Manifest Destiny - Memoirs of a Dreaming Woman

By B. K. Smith

Manifest Destiny - Memoirs of a Dreaming Woman combines Spirituality, Paranormal and Magic into one romantic odyssey.

D.M. English PhD writes preventive programs for peer-review magazines and clinics. She is at the end of her career and looking for something else... She begins to hear things and to see things, as all of her hand-woven native American rugs begin to unravel. It's happy hour in her small writing cottage in the desert as the spirits begin to dance in the light and shadows on the ceiling, the branches crackle in the fire place, and the apparition of a warrior stands outside watching her, and soon disappears back into the desert.

As Dr. English (Maggie) explores the desert, she meets people, or spirits... as she never knows if she's dreaming or awake. Eventually it doesn't matter, they are the same. These spirits explain her "Dreaming Power" to her, a long way from her home on the beaches of the Long Island Sound, where she learned to read the clouds, those great galleons that bring Mr. Rain, or not.

As she begins to understand what is happening to her, what happens when we dream, travels through the Astral layer. The universe may have had a beginning, but it was so long ago, the big bangs and tiny quicken-ings, but there is no middle or end. It always was and always will be?

As a scientist, an epidemiologist, she knows that how or where it began affects directly how it will end. But confronted with spirits, angels, that travel to and from some fascinating place where there are no limits, no boundaries, she begins to understand that Science and Faith are two sides of the same coin. The Yin-and-Yang, light and dark, full moon and no moon at all.

Maggie learns to release to her destiny by manifesting it. She meets a Medicine Man with Coyote Power. He explains to her that where they are going there are no books since books have beginnings, middles, and endings. There aren't even words, since mental telepathy is used. He takes her to higher desert where they will prepare to ascend. She has found her "Twin Flame," that she knew nothing about, and together they will kayak to this amazing place until the water is so shallow that they can walk on it the rest of the way. The Ascension chakra is stimulated and she passes through it.

For readers who doubt, B. K. Smith provides the mathematical equation that cements the deal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: May 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9780979872662

Book preview

Table of Contents

Manifest Destiny

Introduction

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

PART TWO

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

PART THREE

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

PART FOUR

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

Afterword

About the Author

The Series

Dream Catchers

A Dream Come True - Billi Bear, Medicine Woman, and Spider

Laina & the Vamp

The Lipstick Mountains Memoirs #5

Manifest Destiny

Memoirs of a Dreaming Woman

B. K. Smith

Lipstick Mountains Press

Madison Avenue Publishers LLC www.MadisonAvenuePublishers.com

602-622-1078

The Lipstick Mountains Memoirs #5

MANIFEST DESTINY

Memoirs of a Dreaming Woman

B. K. Smith

Copyright © 2018 B. K. Smith

eBook ISBN: 978-0-9798726-6-2

This book is a work of fiction. People, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, except for historical events, places and figures, is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author.

The Lipstick Mountains Memoirs Series written by B. K. Smith:

#1 CHELSEA MATINEE – Memoirs of an Easy Woman

#2 SANDS POINT – Memoirs of a Money Trader

#3 RATTLE SNAKE LODGE – Memoirs of a Seeing Woman

#4 HORSENECK – The Meaning of Ordeal

#5 MANIFEST DESTINY – Memoirs of a Dreaming Woman

#6 THREADS – Memoirs of a Weaving Woman

Novellas & Novelettes

Laina & the Vamp

The Stilettos Stories:

Just Desserts

The Holding Pen

Manhattan Tryst

The Mayflower Hotel

Lipstick Mountains Press

Madison Avenue Publishers LLC

www.MadisonAvenuePublishers.com

Everything I know I learned from someone.

There are countless people, spirits, flames & butterflies that have contributed to this book.

Whether a weighted hand or a velvet-gloved one, I was touched and mostly thankful.

SKB & KGB & DC, with Love 2017

The stories people tell, reminded Honey Badger, have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That’s why we put stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves. And each other.

         --Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel

Special thanks to Buck, Catie & Len,

Four White Bears & Glenn Good Thunder.

And, to Monkey: Beware the Coyote. RIP 2016

Manifest Destiny

Memoirs of a Dreaming Woman

B. K. Smith

All I wanted was a white knight

with a warm heart,

soft touch, fast horse…

-- Faith Hill

Lipstick Mountains Press

Madison Avenue Publishers LLC

Introduction

Upon a little cloud I ascend:

thus, I Journey upward.

To a holy place I go,

changing as I pass through the air.

-- Apache medicine song --

In the southern Mazatzal Mountains where Four Peaks pokes through the clouds, just north of Apache Lake and opposite the Superstition Wilderness of Arizona, a solitary Indian climbed a grassy slope that overlooked the Rio Verde River and the valley of waving tabosa grass below. A spirit side-winded through the stems. The spirit was a snake of air. It writhed up the slope to the very spot where the young man stood. Just before it reached him, the Indian closed his eyes. The wind touched his straight black and silver hair and rustled it about his face and neck.

The Indian lay down among the rocks, his face turned to the sky. Only his eyes moved. It had been years since he came to this sacred place and pressed his back against these holy rocks. Today, he came to ask for his name. This name would be given to him by a spirit, a sort of guardian spirit, which would leave a talisman. If the spirit were a bird, it left a feather that the Indian tucked into his boot. If it was a bear, it left a claw.

In the old days, humans and animals were the same. They talked freely to one another and huddled in times of bad weather, war, and famine. Sometimes the spirit was a human, the ghost of someone who has passed on to the other place, and stays there pretty much, except to warn of impending danger, then they’ll stop in, throw a few chairs around. Listen here. Listen up. More often it was a frustrated ghost with chores undone, words unspoken or mischief yet to get into. Sometimes the spirit wandered off into the desert and never showed up for this sacred meeting, just never came at all. The Indian would never learn his name, and he would wither away and die young, bereft of the taproot of his existence and his destiny.

The searing Arizona sun climbed slowly higher.

The Indian wondered if he was out of his time—too early or too late. Perhaps the spirits have been chased away by the influx of new settlers from the Midwest and the over-caffeinated tourists from both east coast and west. He didn’t really believe that. He knew they prevailed. He knew the spirits of his ancestors were everywhere up here, always stirring the air, like a kettle of water about to give up the bubble. They were here long before the white man came onto the land five centuries ago. They lived here long before a man was nailed to a cross. Many of them live here now, today, in this place. They light and go again, fading into the desert backdrop, the lightning, and the blowing sand. They are the spirits of this place—they’ve lived here forever, all the way down to the river. And they let it be known you are trampling their gardens, the bloom of their dreams. Indeed, they let it be known.

Blooming Bird 2018

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

THE PINK TACO WAS JUST THE NAME OF A NEW RESTAURANT opening in Scottsdale, said an article above the fold in the Arizona Republic, and it was going to be on the new waterfront—a canal in the Old Town section. The Pink Taco. The mayor thought the name was obscene, as did many of the old-timers, mostly migrated mid-and-north westerners, with Evangelical values—Calvinist? Methodist? Mormon? —and many of them gun-toting, devout church-going, born-again and modest women, some with doilies on their heads and hankies up their sleeves. I know, it takes a village.

According to the article, even though there’s a same-name restaurant in Las Vegas, Nevada, off the strip, the name The Pink Taco, for the sake of political, feminist, and diplomatic delicacy, might too much describe a woman’s anatomical venue called privates for a reason.

I laughed out loud.

Because I’m a writer, or maybe it’s why I’m a writer, I find humor and wit in things that have subtle stretched meanings and clever turns that catch you unaware, resurrected from dusty tomes of the most obtuse translated literature, usually funny enough to provoke you, but sometimes bitter like a pill, to sober you, like skidding on ice around a turn. I never thought taco. Rather, I thought cooky. Fortune cookie. Good fortune. May you have many wives… Oh, wait…

I took a break—my weary eyes looked over magnified glasses at the snow-crested mountains in the distance. It was especially cold on the floor of the desert all that week, and I barely went outside. I read. I may have drifted off…

Ode to Dream Catchers:

Bring me all your

dreams, you dreamers.

Bring me all your

heart’s dreams that

I may wrap them in a

blue-cloud cloth, away

from the too-rough

fingers of the world.

In the living room, on the creamy leather sectional sofa, was where I camped on most winter days. Fresh coffee dripped dark French roast and well-water, the twigs snapped in the fireplace, and the drapes pulled wide-open across the eastern wall of the room. The sun came up and it set the room to glow with iridescent light. In the early morning I read; otherwise, I sat with my laptop writing feature articles, ten months out, for a professional magazine. I’m the health prevention Guru. I get in front of a thing. One small match can burn down a whole forest. An avalanche starts out as a rolling pebble. By D. M. English, PhD.

As the warmer days slipped into chilly nights, and eventually into late barren winter with shorter days there was more time for dreaming. Day or night—it was all the same in that light.

That might not mean much to you now, but it will.

Strike a match.

I took hot baths lighting the room with lavender candles, a gift from my neighbor, Leona, a horsewoman from Boston who lived half a mile up the washboard dirt road in the Rio Verde Foothills with her husband, Dick. I stretched out in the warm water, my eyes closed. Relaxed, the petals of my psyche unfurled. I knew it was just a matter of time now; I would be leaving this place, this sacred place, and it was breaking my heart. I bought this old writing cottage, I cleaned it up and made it mine, but that was about to change again—I could already feel it beginning, the blistering. Layers were getting ready to separate, peel away and to drift off into the atmosphere like so much biological dust and spiritual flotsam. I knew better than to fight it, that it might only serve to tear a membrane in the psyche. I had to just let go, surrender, and float, like a cloud, like in a dream, because it was, in fact, a dream. It’s the demon mind, that’s where the devil hides, in the tiny black folds, in the shadows, like smoke. The demon mind can even convince you there’s a material world and issue you a credit card, with your name embossed in it, at usury interest rates.

Ahh, but silence is where the answer is. It’s a great mystery. The Holy silence is His voice. The fruits of silence include self-control, courage, endurance, tenacity, patience, dignity, and reverence. Silence is the cornerstone of good strong character.

I REMINDED MYSELF NOT TO BE AFRAID, to be gracious, composed, aware, generous, spirited and, above all, elegant. I loved my little house, and I loved being surrounded by a citrus green belt on one side, with its lone cottonwood tree that sheds downy silver seeds like warm snow in the spring. I loved the mountains on the other side, and I loved the vast blue sky that filled the world from horizon to horizon. I even loved the rain that fell, though infrequently, in buckets. Some mornings I looked out through the sliding glass to the mountains in the east that were almost bare of snow except for patches on the most northern slopes. Beneath the sheltering canopy of juniper boughs, squinting and blinking, I viewed a winter world about to be sunburned to death as the earth will eventually rotate counter-clockwise into summer.

Consoling, even though thirty miles away by line of sight and five to six thousand feet up, the mountains cuddled me in promise—if the heat at sea-level became less endurable as during the dog days of summer, I could escape up there, to those mysterious islands in the sky that were surrounded by this sea of lavender and desert of gold—mountains that complement the desert as the desert complements the city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization. And, at that higher elevation, the mesquite trees give way to pines and evergreens, and in the canyons, the buff-bellied flycatchers breed, oxygen is thinner, lighter, and it all moves just a little bit more paced, elegantly.

The sky condensed in the form of twilight over the desert. Up here, not high desert but in the steel-gray foothills, the nights get cold, and the sky is always blue and sunny because there are no clouds, because there is a drought. There is always a drought; it is after all the desert, where the air is clean and thin, and the cold makes ordinary things look different, like the footprints of birds on the pathway to my door—or away from it—, a frozen