from "Shadows ..."

... "When Robyn, Colorado was a U. S. Air Force officer assigned in the mid-'60s to a Royal Air Force station in the Midlands of England, it was only a league-and-a-half, a "stone's throw" from Warboys, where a famous witch persecution of three females was undertaken by the grandfather of "The Great Protector," Oliver Cromwell. British associates' concern with the mystical past led to a sustained interest by this latter day Robyn, who searched for family origins and their dedications in the mists of Letterfinlay and other musty byways.

... (It is) "a shadow map for the dual path of awareness and presence, with the veils of secrecy and ignorance partially lifted. It seeks to disclose a basis for individual linking with the Implausible, a guide to the experience of personal blessedness free from authoritatian cultural chains, on one path. The reader must remember shadows are only a report of reality, and a Book of Shadows is only a skeletal report of the perceptions of its author. Shadows do not define substance, but suggest a reality to be perceived."
Topics: Religions Old and New; Why be a witch?; What witches 'know' (Believe); Tools and Rites; Origins; What if it were you?
A glossary is included. ©Robyn, Colorado

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from "Once in Old Orchard ..."

"The Heirs To Heaven"© Tom Curtis

The contrails stretch across the naked blue
To paint the airman's way toward the sun:
His brush is built with lives of those who run
By now to find their gods, and seek anew
The thrills that made those building days so dear.

A pilot climbs to where the angel sings
Without the time, nor yet the urge to pray;
But in the flight that lifts beyond the way
Of sordid discontent, the price of wings
Is paid by those who flew another year.

The ones who search aboe the cloud are heir
To recent deeds with cloth, and dope, and wire:
For those who sweep the sky on tails of fire
The edge of life is near, their minds aware
That men progress in spite of pain and fear.

Now let me not forget the seat I sit
Is shared by those who rise and fly no more;
The fledgling breed who rose to fight their war
Above the binding earth and learned to spit
Against the wind, into the face of Fear.

(20 Apr 63--Abilene TX)

Tom Wheeler bought an Aeronca "Chief" in the spring of 1939 and mounted it on floats. He used it to hop passengers on weekends for three dollars a ride from Lakefront Park in Cleveland, Ohio, taking off and landing in the East Basin, where the city planned to build a new airport and a boulevard along Lake Erie. That was the year he turned fifty, and everyone said he was "too old to fly." He knew better. ...
... Tom closed his eyes, turning pages of years, trying to remember Marie. It was in Abilene, after Charlie had gone back to the Army. She had been the first one to show up at the field where he landed after circling the town. She didn't have any money, but he told her to stick around and maybe they'd make a circuit if no one else showed up. She stayed the rest of the day, and helped him get gasoline for the ship, and slept with him under the wing that night. The next night they went to a cantina and drank beer, and she danced for him, and went back again to sleep under the wing. He remembered awaking in the night to find she was gone. But she turned up before dawn wearing jodhpurs and boots obtained only God knows where, with her hair plaited so it laid like two snakes across her breasts. When it was light enough to see, he took off, and was circling the town at a thousand feet when the sun burst over the line of the road to Fort Worth, orange as a French whore's hair and climbing faster than the airplane, streaking the ground below with shortening shadows. Marie held her arms high over her head, and he felt instant apprehension when he realized she was kneeling in the seat, half out of the front cockpit. Her pigtails stretched back toward him from under the leather helmet as she embraced the wind. When they landed, she jumped out and jerked down her jodphurs, bent herself over the lower wing and shouted, "Finish me!"
She kept his leather helmet.
©Tom Curtis