Gaia's Revenge

By Patrick Fleming

Gaia, Mother Nature herself, is secretly waging war on the human race. Her desire for revenge will not relent until we listen to her warnings. The world's press reports a series of mysterious, deadly disasters. Four unlikely heroes, a Catholic nun, a Hindu priestess, a gay Protestant minister, and

• Language: English
• Publisher: Double Rainbow Books
• Release date: Jun 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986368719

Patrick Fleming

Patrick Fleming is a former hospital chaplain, retired psychotherapist, international speaker and consultant, and award-winning writer of self-help books, including his most recent, "Soul Light for the Dark Night: Daily Meditations". He is also the author of the cli-fi thriller, "Gaia's Revenge". Pat and his wife, Sue, share ten grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, and have always enjoyed reading them children's books through the years. They live outside of St. Louis, Missouri, surrounded by forests, flowers, deer, birds, fox, turkey, a family of skunks, and great human neighbors. Every Christmas a featured part of their decorations is a lighted, metal Christmas Cow named Miriam.

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Chapter One

Furious snow squalls sweep across the Sangre de Cristo mountains above the small, funky Colorado mountain town of Crestone—ramshackle home to a couple of hundred climbers, hikers, born-again hippies, spiritual-seekers of all varieties, and at least a half-dozen medicinal pot dispensaries.

One minute you can see Crestone Peak and Crestone Needle shining in a brilliant mountain light. The next moment the mountains are fully obscured by a swirl of white and gray. The broad face of Kit Carson Peak is snow-blasted, the grey rock splattered with white as if an abstract artist flung white paint onto a dark canvas.

It is April 2nd, 2025. It feels like spring in the tiny town and in the surrounding foothills, but it is still winter in the high country, where the heaviest snow of the year actually comes in April. Spring is not an easy season in the Rockies, if it is anywhere.

Crestone lies at the base of the highest peaks of the Sangre de Cristo mountains on the east edge of the vast San Luis Valley. The valley is a nearly flat, high-altitude, cold desert ringed by several mountain ranges. It is 122 miles long and 74 miles wide. The vistas are immense.

In the clear, dry air, you can see mountains 90 to 100 miles away. The valley is so immense and desolate it was once considered as a site for the first test of the atomic bomb during WWII, the Trinity Test, which eventually was exploded to the south at the White Sand Proving Grounds in New Mexico.

The San Luis Valley was for many centuries one of the favored seasonal hunting grounds of the Ute Native Americans. It was also regularly visited by the Navajo, Apache, and Comanche. There is a legend that these indigenous tribes considered the valley a very sacred place and used the surrounding mountains and scattered hot springs to pray, and to perform vision quests and other spiritual ceremonies. All tribes were welcome and no tribal warfare was allowed in the Valley. It was a place of peace, a place to seek the Great Spirit.

But eventually Spanish explorers invaded the Valley, claiming it for the Spanish king, and making it the northern frontier of the Spanish Empire. Then the Americans came and stole the land from Mexico in the Mexican-American War. They began to settle in the Valley and drove out the Utes and the rest of the tribes from the valley, imprisoning them on reservations.

In 1979, one of the eventual owners of the Baca Grande Spanish Land Grant, Hanne Marstrand Strong, had a vision of making the Crestone area a place of universal spirituality and peace. She invited many spiritual groups to establish communities and centers, donating large grants of land for them to settle on. This enabled Crestone to attract an unusual superfluity of spiritual groups, including a Catholic Carmelite Contemplative co-ed community, three Hindu groups, three Buddhist centers, four Tibetan Buddhist temples, one highly ornate Bhutanese Buddhist temple, and one Japanese religious movement called Shumai.

There are also numerous informal groups and small communities, many of them originally in the New Age vein. The Crestone area became a virtual smorgasbord of the Spirit.

Below the towering, broad face of Kit Carson Peak and Challenger Point, several miles outside of town along a dusty back road, sits the small rustic chapel of the Catholic Carmelite monastic community of men and women called Nada. Their adobe-style chapel stands on a ridge of the monastery property overlooking the communal library, kitchen, and dining room, and the fifteen or so small wooden hermit cabins.

These are scattered in curving lines along the sides and ridges of the sandy hills that roll across the hundreds of acres of monastery property. A long adobe bridge connects the chapel to the communal central building, affording soul-stopping panoramic views of the Sangre de Cristo mountains towering above the chapel and the immensity of the San Luis Valley below.

Sr. Clare McCulloch—a seventy-two-year-old, white-haired Carmelite nun—is praying inside the darkened chapel, below a large, dramatic, dark metal Cross with a modern, yet realistic, over-sized corpus of Jesus hanging in agony, while at the same time extending his arms to embrace everyone who enters the chapel.

Surprisingly flexible for a woman her age, Sr. Clare is sitting Buddhist-style in the lotus position on a cushion on the stone floor. She is short and compact, dressed in a heavy blue sweater and jeans. Her feet are bare so she can feel the Earth, her back plum-bob straight, and her hands cupped open atop her knees in a meditative position.

In a barely audible whisper, she repeats her centering prayer over and over, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me clearing her thoughts and bringing her deeper into the Nothingness she longs for. She has been sitting, meditating like this for almost an hour, as she does daily, a palpable peace and presence slowly growing within her.

At 3:55pm, Sr. Clare’s peace is shattered by a sudden, unbidden vision of a series of horrific events. The vision seems to unspool in her mind for an hour, but only five minutes goes by when she cries out in terror and faints onto the floor. The last, most intense image of the vision has overwhelmed her mind, and her brain shuts down. She lays on the floor, breathing rapidly at first, and then gradually more slowly. She lies there for over an hour, unconscious, until Fr. David, a priest of the Nada community, comes to the chapel for his prayer hour. He tries unsuccessfully to awaken Clare, but does manage to pick her up and lay her on a cushioned pew. He runs off to knock on several hermitage doors to get help from other community members.

Five miles from the Nada chapel, further south along the rocky, dusty road of the Baca Grande Grant, past the house with a sign in the front yard advertising the Village Witch, skirting a little closer to the base of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, stands the Haidakhandi Universal Ashram and its temple of Devi, the Divine Mother Goddess.

The temple complex, with its two onion domes, looks like a small Hindu temple lifted from an Indian village, and incongruously air-dropped into the American West. There is a meditation garden surrounding the temple populated with statues of various Hindu deities and a couple of Catholic statues of the Virgin Mary.

At the center of the temple, sits the stunning statue of the divine mother goddess, her four arms holding various symbols of blessing and instruments for the battle against evil. She has an exceedingly pale, bejeweled face. She is dressed quite sexily in what looks like a sports bra, her midriff bare, and a flowing cotton peasant skirt dyed in a rainbow of colors.

Aavani Chakrabarti, the tall, thirty-five-year-old Indian-born leader of the ashram, is dressed very similarly to the goddess. She is strikingly beautiful, sitting alone, praying in the lotus position on the floor below the divine mother goddess. A pot of incense fills the temple sanctuary with fragrant smoke that sometimes swirls around the figure of Devi. Aavani is spending her Holy Hour before the divine mother goddess. She alternates between Hindu chants, songs, and quietly whispering her personal mantra over and over again.

At 3:55pm, Aavani’s devoted gaze at the divine mother is interrupted by an intrusive flood of horrendous images of death and destruction. She can no longer see the statue. The hideous video plays in her mind’s eye, filling her with intense dread. It is reaching an intense, fearsome climax, when she screams and falls over face-first onto the temple floor. She moans a brief prayer, Divine Mother, save us, before she loses consciousness.

Aavani’s scream is heard in the ashram community house, and three women and two men run over to the temple. They find her unconscious and groaning on the floor before the statue of Devi. Their attempt to waken her is not successful, so they lift her up and carry her to her room in the community house. They debate what to do and are on the verge of calling the doctor in Alamosa, when Aavani awakens.

She cannot speak, but writes, I am okay. I have been given a vision from our divine mother goddess which I cannot yet speak of.

One of the women devotees sits by Aavani’s bedside holding her hand. The rest go to the community room, and quietly discuss what has just occurred with their leader.

Six miles further up the road, sitting on a small plateau on the side of the mountain, with a view of the starkly dramatic Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve thirty miles to the south, Crestone Mountain Zen Center is an oasis of solitude and simplicity. All of the buildings and their interiors are austerely simple, devoid of anything like the almost-garish ornamentation of the Hindu temple and the Catholic symbolism and statuary of the Carmelite monastery. The meditation room is an unadorned, wood-paneled rectangular space dimly lit and windowless. There are no views of the mountains to distract from focusing on the breath and clearing the mind of every thought and image.

Rev. Mark Krummanocker—a forty-year-old gay minister from the Metropolitan Church of St. Louis, who is a little overweight and lumpy—is sitting on his meditation pillow during the afternoon meditation. He struggles to get comfortable and focus on his breathing. He keeps wondering whether Buddhists have the same kind of backs and butts as Christians do. His back hurts so much from sitting on the thin meditation pillow on the floor he can hardly stand it.

He struggles to focus on his breathing and yet his mind is mostly consumed with worry about whether he will make it to the end of the meditation hour without fainting or embarrassing himself in some way. Mark is surrounded by a few fellow retreatants and by the male and female community members. The latter are mostly German Buddhists who the American guru and founder imported, because he found his American disciples too undisciplined, in his opinion, to make good Buddhists.

Mark came to the Zen Center on the recommendation of his Jesuit psychotherapist to recover from the trauma of a mass shooting and hate crime at his church in St. Louis. Five months prior—on the first Sunday of Advent, at the 10am service—he had been winding up his sermon when a lone gunman, dressed all in black with black body armor, burst in with an AR-15-type semi-automatic rifle.

He began cursing and yelling anti-gay slogans, God hates homos! and I’m sending you faggots to hell where you belong!

Then he walked coldly and methodically down the main aisle of the church toward the sanctuary, spraying bullets left and right into the parishioners in the pews, his eyes as dark and dead as a zombie. Twelve of Mark’s parishioners were killed instantly, and twenty were wounded, six critically. Mark escaped death only because he instinctively ducked down behind the heavy wooden pulpit which shielded him.

The man was finally stopped by three large ushers who had been trained to handle such situations. They tackled the gunman from behind, pinned him to the ground, and wrestled the gun away from him, holding him there till the police arrived about five minutes later. Apparently, the homophobic attacker didn’t realize many gay men are devoted bodybuilders and were much stronger and fitter than he.

Mark spent almost every moment of the next five months trying to heal his congregation; visiting the wounded, ministering to the families of those who were killed, holding prayer and counseling meetings for the rest of the congregation who were badly shaken and traumatized. He had barely a minute to himself to handle his own horror and grief.

The parish was finally turning a corner in its grief, when Mark started to fall apart. The predicable effects of the shooting finally hit him. He had kept himself strong for his parishioners, but now he was crumbling inside, very depressed and dispirited. He could no longer pray, and was seriously questioning the rock-solid faith that usually sustained him.

His sleep became erratic, frequently disrupted by vivid nightmares in which he replayed the gunman’s attack over and over, seeing his parishioners gunned down, their blood flowing like a scarlet river out of the pews and down the main aisle. Some nights, the bullets penetrated the thickly carved wood of the pulpit, and he was killed too. Almost every day he had daytime flashbacks which flashed through his mind like unstoppable, demonic YouTube video clips of the horror he experienced that awful day.

His therapist, Fr. Patrick Phelan, S.J., diagnosed him with PTSD and Major Depression, and began intensive trauma treatment. He also suggested that Mark needed some time away and some solitude to restore himself spiritually. Fr. Phelan suggested he do a meditation retreat at the Zen Center outside of Crestone, a spiritual center where he had himself gone several times.

Mark was near the end of his second week there. He was planning to return to St. Louis in two days to go back to work. The two weeks at the Zen Center had been very healing. He was sleeping better, although he still had some nightmares, and the flashbacks had become less intense. He was finally beginning to feel hopeful again, hopeful he and his church could overcome and heal from the terror and hate they had so violently experienced.

Sitting meditation had helped him to again sense the presence of God. He was still struggling though with the question of how a loving God could have allowed such an act to afflict his people. From his theological training, he knew there was no good answer for this age-old question, but he wanted an answer anyway, and was angry he didn’t have one.

Solo hiking in the mountains above the Zen Center was, in the end, the most therapeutic for him, even more than the meditation sessions—which he often struggled to get through. He went for long hikes every day. For most of the hike he was able to clear his mind, and be fully present to the beauty all around him; the rushing, cold crystal streams tumbling down the steep slopes of the Sangre de Cristos; water ouzels dancing in and out of the frequent waterfalls; the bright yellow avalanche lilies just emerging from the patches of snow along the trail; golden eagles and falcons soaring above the ridges, and zooming across the rock faces.

He would stop and sit on a rock for hours, simply watching the play of light and shadow on the high peaks as the spring snow squalls whipped across the faces of Crestone Peak and Crestone Needle. The mountains were restoring him. As he sat there, sometimes he recited out loud the lines from one of his favorite poets, Gerald Manley Hopkins:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil,

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed…

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

With about ten minutes to go in the 3-4pm meditation hour, Mark is finally getting comfortable sitting on the meditation pillow. His back stops distracting him. He is able to focus almost entirely on his breath. He enters a state of empty-mindedness and palatable bliss. This is what he had longed for. After five minutes of near-nirvana, Mark’s mind is suddenly assaulted with a vision of unimaginable horror and disaster. He struggles to focus back on his breath, but the onslaught of images is too powerful. The same black cloud of fear that had stricken him during the shooting, and nearly every day since, engulfs him again. He feels like he must be going crazy.

Maybe this is what they mean by a nervous breakdown? he thinks. Intense fear erupts from deep within him like a super-heated pyroclastic flow of white-hot terror. He senses he is losing control of his mind, as a primal scream shoots up his throat and bursts out of his mouth before he can stop it, shattering the silence of the sitting room. Mark then faints, writhing on the floor for several minutes as if having a seizure. He screams once more and then lies silent, motionless, sprawled on the floor appearing dead.

His fellow meditators are shaken out of their silence, and rush to help him. Several of them try to restrain him while he is rolling and moaning on the floor. One leaves to call 911 and summon the Crestone ambulance. An older man continues to sit in meditation on his pillow in the corner of the sitting room, remaining as calm and detached as if this drama was an ordinary part of his daily meditation. When Mark finally lies still, one of the monks checks his pulse and breathing. He tells the others he is still alive, but unconscious.

The ambulance arrives thirty-five minutes later, staffed by local volunteer EMTs, one a tall, long-haired hippie and one a diminutive, but muscular young woman in a tie-dyed t-shirt. By this time, Mark is awake and sitting up. He can’t talk, but otherwise seems quite alert and functional.

The EMTs examine him thoroughly and ask a lot of questions. Mark can only respond in writing. They think he might have had a stroke, because of his inability to talk, but there are no other stroke symptoms. They tell him they want to take him to the nearest hospital in Alamosa, at least an hour away. Mark shakes his head. When he continues to resist, they call the town doctor to consult with him.

Mark’s meditation guide, Gisella, talks with the doctor and explains Mark revealed to her he recently experienced a mass shooting at his church. She suggests he may have experienced a traumatic flashback, not a stroke. Mark nods. So, it is decided to simply bring Mark to his room, and keep him under observation. Gisella sits with him till nightfall when he falls asleep, then checks on him several times during the night.

Chapter Two

The next morning, speech returns to all three visionaries, Pastor Mark, Sr. Clare, and Aavani. Although they refuse to talk about what happened to them, or what they saw in their visions. The Nada community and the ashram respect their silence, and assume they experienced profound spiritual ecstasy, which was beyond words to describe. Mark and the Zen community believe his experience was a PTSD episode of some kind. Gisella makes Mark promise he will call his psychotherapist when he returns home. Mark readily agrees.

After resting for a couple of days, Mark leaves the Zen Center for the long drive from Crestone to the Denver airport to catch a plane back to St. Louis. As he drives north through the wide-open, arid San Luis Valley with the procession of Sangre de Cristo peaks looming to his right, the images of his vision keep trying to intrude into his thoughts.

Fighting the intrusive pictures and rising anxiety tightening his throat and chest, he tries to focus on the scenery, and on slowing and deepening his increasingly rapid, shallow breathing. He keeps telling himself either he is going crazy, or this is a new bizarre symptom of his PTSD which he never heard of before. Neither possibility is very comforting.

After climbing out of the San Luis Valley, crossing over the long, gradual Poncha Pass, Mark descends into another mountain valley dominated by the high Collegiate Peaks, now stretched in a row to his left. The gruesome images fade away as he is caught up in the grandeur of these mountains marching like dark sentinels in a further procession up the valley toward Buena Vista.

He then winds through a range of low mountains, until he sweeps around a corner, and the vista suddenly opens up to the vast expanse of South Park, an immense prairie bowl entirely encircled by high, snow-covered peaks. He is stunned by the immense scene suddenly unfolding before him, and almost runs off the road.

He steers back onto the road, and is regaining his composure when the vast openness of South Park suddenly cracks his mind open again to the fearsome images of his Zen Center vision. They flood his mind and overwhelm him. He is afraid he will crash the car, so he quickly turns onto a gravel National Forest service road, swerving and fishtailing for a quarter of a mile until he can bring the car to a halt.

A video montage keeps swirling through his mind. The images are all he can see. South Park and the surrounding mountains become a black screen across which the bizarre and frightening PowerPoint slides maniacally play over and over in his mind in rapid succession. He cannot stop them, and feels he might pass out again with the horror and fury of what he is seeing.

Again he thinks, I must be losing my mind! Maybe the horror of the shooting finally has unhinged me? Maybe now I am wholly at the mercy of these psychotic hallucinations. He has the mordant thought, Thanks a lot, God! You certainly picked a fine place for me to have my mental breakdown. In the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cattle, antelope, a few deer, a lone coyote, and a lot of nothing. There can’t be a therapist or a psych unit for hundreds of miles.

Then a surprising thought spontaneously pops into his mind: The images really have nothing in common with what I experienced during the shooting, and are, except for the resultant rush of anxiety, very unlike previous flashbacks. So maybe this is something different?

As soon as he has this thought, the horror show stops. Peace and a tangible presence of something beyond him flows into his head and chest, just as swiftly as the images had flooded him just a few minutes ago. He begins breathing calmly and deeply again. South Park and its mountains reappear now, looking even more magnificent—the brilliant light of a Spring sun glistening on the scattered snow fields in the Park and up on the high peaks.

But what is this now? Mark wonders, How can such terror shape-shift so rapidly into awe, wonder and intense calm?

He feels a lot better, but, if anything he is even more confused.

What is happening to me? What does all of this mean? It seems like something more than PTSD, but what? Now it feels somehow holy and sacred, similar to how I’ve felt in some moments of prayer and meditation.

A powerful, but diffuse and unnamable feeling comes over him.

Maybe I am being called to do something with what I am seeing in these horrible images? He instantly questions this feeling. More likely it was all just another trick of my overwrought imagination and highly stressed brain.

He checks the signal on his cellphone. When he sees he has enough bars, he immediately calls Fr. Phelan, his psychotherapist in St. Louis, and makes an emergency appointment for the next morning.

Chapter Three

For several days, Sr. Clare stays alone in her hermit cabin resting, fasting, and praying about what to make of her vision. She has been skipping Mass and the communal Liturgy of the Hours, because she feels a deep desire to be alone. Besides, she doesn’t know what to tell her community members about what she saw. Clare also senses she is not supposed to speak to anyone about what she saw, except perhaps for one person.

Being a contemplative community of hermits, her community respects her solitude and leaves her alone. But they are puzzled and concerned. Only Fr. Paul, at fifty-one, the youngest and newest member of the community, stops by once a day for a few minutes to make sure Clare is alright.

Clare still has little idea what her vision means, only that it was very frightening. She seeks some answers in scripture. She finds herself attracted to John’s apocalyptic images in the Book of Revelation. There is an eerie resonance with what she saw just a few days ago. But what does that mean?

She knows Revelation