7a. Commentary with Ms. H. / 7b. first three stories

You found yourself weeping to watch the President-elect Joe Biden with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris introducing and listening to the short speeches of each of his first six Cabinet up for Senate confirmation. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken; Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas; Chief of Staff, Ron Klain; National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, National Intelligence Director, Avril Haines; and U N Ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Your joy was inspired by each of their individual voices, unique government services, and diverse backgrounds – a new team of eight as of now. G-D bless the United States and the World to help make things more humane for the people on this planet, so says your heartansoulanmind, your human spirit. – Ms. Havisham

1646. You embarrass me. 1646.

You are humbled by observing humanity-in-its-circumstance, not embarrassed, Mr. Orndorff. Let's move on. Grandma Earth has some thoughts for consideration. – H

* * *

Grandma here. Somewhere, within these first three short stories, you will have read finishing this chapter, two families will discover genetics links. This linking will continue through the next forty-four stories. With this novel's conclusion, the two unique families will have merge at least twice; the second time when two sets of twins marry in their hometown of Alumtown, Ohio, in 1970. The purpose of these stories is to inspire readers to wonder about their own genetics. The book about family genetics is inspired by a family tree following the bloodline of a very ordinary family through its historical heritage and a reinforcing DNA background that allows for such plausibility. Of course, it helps that Grandma Earth binds the settings, characters, and conversations in place. 

Here are the first three short stories in order. The third being the newest one.

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CHAPTER ONE

"I have an old story," says Grandma Earth. A man is in worldly trouble long ago. The characters in my stories could be one of your or your friends' ancestors. Without your ancestors, you would not exist. Your genetic Mother, Mitochondrial Eve, may have lived one hundred and fifty thousand years ago. That's what science suggests in the twenty-first century. Everyone alive connects to the Y-chromosomal Adam genes of someone in East Africa who lived perhaps as recently as one hundred twenty thousand years ago. These are Mother and Father genes we all share in our mix. One recent estimate states we are each 50th cousins; another says we are each 70th cousins. In any case, we are each human cousins. These stories are a selection of some of our direct ancestors, no matter who you are. That's the sense in this book, so say I, Grandma Earth. 

* * *

It is the beginning of dawn, and my shoulders shiver, and the shivering is the way it is here. I hear the crickets and other small creatures around the swamp. I am inside a hole in the wall, and there is no way out. I am stuck. I cannot get out -- let me out. Let me out.

It is dawn, and my forearms shiver. Trembling is the way it is. I hear the crickets and the other small creatures. I am in a hole in the wall, and there is no way out. Holed in is the way it is. I cannot get out.

My fingers are full of ice. Again, it is dawn, and I am ice on the river. I am floating and cold. I am common ground with icy hands floating on the river.

I had a frigid dream last night, and it was a whopper. It was about these people who live way out among the stars and how they are stuck too. I will work on this floating block of ice and let you know how it is. I will tap out my message from here as we people who are caught in a cave do. As long as I have icy cold fingers, the Dead living in me, move. I have all the time in the world. That is how it is in my cold late dawn of almost eighteen thousand years ago. I am stuck frozen and flat across the vicious circle of stone surrounding our pond of stars in the heavens. I am here, and they are both at once. I am a shaman dancing on the board between mind and spirit. Where are you, listener?

The old shaman pointed to a not so bright star in the night sky and said, "We are from there," then he points to the soil beneath his feet, "to here." That is all he says. Nobody in the group slept that night.

One of the listeners tosses and turns, and suddenly unexpectedly, she thinks, 'How can we be here and there at the same time?'

If I remember right, says Grandma, she was the first human being who died and did not die at the same time. The woman asked others the same question in the morning.

Eventually, their small human band concluded how it is possible to be in two places at once. Later in life, the woman died and found herself waiting for her group members to join her once they died physically but did not die consciously. People then began respecting the Dead more and burying them with rites and passages to help accommodate both the Living and the Dead.

The Living were afraid the Dead were going to forget those Living. That is the way Grandma remembers it. The Living were made conscious of being in two places at once, and they hoped the Dead would remain mindful of those still living.

* * *

In the story, this particular shaman is long dead, knows you are reading his thoughts, smiles Grandma, who appears black as the richest soil on the planet. Her white teeth gleam as white paper unsoiled with ink or paint. She looks out into the eyes of her young listeners. Children, she says, "You don't have a clue on what words are when they come out of the blue. I'm going to sit on this stump and hope it won't stain my pretty blue and white dress that likes to float in a gentle breeze. You look at Grandma as you look deep down into your child self. I am in your inside nature and out. The scarf on my head is nothing but the stars in the heavens. You keep that in mind. Freedom stories aren't for everyone.

Grandma glances up beyond the dark sky above her head and out to the Reader far away. The white in her old eyes shows you her dark pupils are rolling up and disappearing within her skull. Grandma Earth closes her eyes by rolling them back within. The shaman opens his eyes to see the white in hers and thinks, I now have the parchment; I need to unfreeze the black letter-forms to dance upon the white in Grandma's eyes.

* * *  * * *

CHAPTER TWO

Grandma traces Eve's DNA through various shamans of old. Why shamans? The shaman or storyteller understood what I call trancephysics. Any reader who finds herorhimself immersed in a good book, film, or play discovers for herorhimself – engagement in an altered reality.

✶ ✶ ✶

This second story is told by a descendent of the old man mentioned in the first chapter, the shaman who told his audience they could be out in the stars and here on Earth at the same time. He traveled to the Place of the Dead too. Funny that the listener who asked the question would die first, but she did. The shaman lived another ten years after she died. The woman drowned in a then nameless river; she had been his granddaughter.

A direct female descendant of hers traveled from what is now northern Italy to Spain. This was about ten thousand years ago. Within the next thousand years of generations, she had found herself on the British Isles with people now called Basques. A few had settled on in lower Western Britain. As the families grew, some moved on to Ireland. Others to Scotland and Wales. More than five thousand years later, a shaman appeared who had some tall tales centered on Mother Earth, the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, and human nature.

This particular shaman spent a lot of time walking the woods and daydreaming north of Salisbury Plain and southeast of Scotland. The shaman dreamed of a new story. He was five when he first had the dream, but it wasn't there when he awoke. The next night he dreamed it again and thought about it for the next fifteen years. The vision settled in on a rebellion in the Place of the Dead. This is what he told the tribe:

"The cold, icy fingers of the Dead want to feel their way back home, our Mother. The Dead did not have to go to the Stars in Heaven or even to the Moon. The Dead are among us because the Dead live within our ancestors and us."

This shaman relates this to the others and says, "If you cremate the Dead, their bones will be blackened like the night. They will not have to see their bodies rotting, and the animals won't dig them up. The quicker they will be a part of Mother again, and best of all, they will have no icy cold fingers reaching out to us the Living from beyond the grave."

He continues, "You can close a burial spot with a stone. Stones don't move so easily as the spirits do."

This shaman also became interested in crystals. He found more than one cave with crystal. He surmises crystal is the skull bone of Mother Earth. This unique crystal can produce a vibration I feel can in his fingertips. A small piece of crystal in my left hand creates empathy with whom or what I touch with my right hand. With the crystal in one hand, I can sense a movement within another stone held in his other hand. No one in the clan knew this wasn't possible, so it became real when others witnessed it and tried it for themselves.

The stones never move, but people claimed that you could sense the stone moving within itself if others carry a crystal within the left hand and another stone in the right. 

The shaman then suggests that human beings carry a spirit, as do unique crystals from the cave. This was the logic. Someone in the clan indicates that eggs are fragile stones, and eggs can appear dead on the outside but be living on the inside. Thus people can be living on the outside but feel dead on the inside. Crystals and eggs have something in common with human beings, and even human bones and stones have something in common, you see.

✶ ✶ ✶

Grandma smiles and winks. The crystal works its sympathetic magic on human beings. It worked for the shaman, so he told it as a true story. Stones are like bones. You line them up just right, and they lie. That's the truth of it.

Grandma glanced beyond the dark sky above. The white in her eyes could tell you her dark pupils were disappearing inside that earthy head of hers. I have a secret, says Grandma to the Reader; I am the Consciousness on which the shaman dance to understand their nature.

* * *.  * * *

CHAPTER THREE

A middle-aged woman by the name of Qwinta stood staring at a multi-shaded Maple leaf. Orange it was, and the hue was complexed by the photosynthesis of carbohydrates using the sun's electromagnetic energy-light. She was standing within sight of the east coast of a water body that some eight thousand years later would be identified as Lake Champlain on land presently called Burlington, Vermont.

Qwinta thought the hue of orange evolves in this leaf as a canoeist's ghostly princess grows in a streamlined and artfully carved royal dugout. The maple paddle and I, the Quinta, become one in mind, but the head and paddle are two in the body. I know and understand this to be a natural circumstance. Two arms become one in mind as both drop and swirl the paddle through the water. When the paddle is lifted from the water, a ripple ensues. The rippling is like a wave of orange seen in a Maple leaf. The thinker whose mind dips like a paddle into the River of the Dead also lifts up and leaves a ripple as it passes from one side of the profound and ethereal current to the other. The swirling spirit of sculling manifests itself as the tree reflected water is swirled into this leaf as the oar rises. This is an entirely remarkable concurrence in thought. I, Qwinta, in both body and mind, am the only causal connection between the Living and the Dead, just as the Maple is the only causal connection between the color and this fallen leaf.

* * *

Grandma, wonderfully black, full-bosomed, and full hipped, is colorfully costumed in Caribbean Island dress. She sashays around and says, "there isn't a reason on this Earth for people to be touched by Perfection. Since I'm out in the universe's science and physics, I don't see any reason to be touched there either. Matter has its own rules. Reason with capital cannot exist in such rules."

Grandma sometimes settles on earthquakes as a reminder of what she is when there is a construction underneath both the Living and the Dead's feet. You get in the way, and you pay. That is a rule. Human beings are not perfect forms, but they have the Imagination for something less than Perfection. Reason plus Imagination may equal Understanding, but it is a human equation. Though Grandma rests in all human beings, Alive or Dead, old Grandma must settle in her rocker from time to time to ease the tension. "I operate within Necessity," she says, "and so do you."

Grandma beamed but did not move. Her hands were on her hips like there was work to do, and she better get to it. Always composition to do. Physics runs its course, and we all run with it. Organic chemistry is added to the road within living: you Homo sapiens and millions of other life forms run with that.

* * *  * * *

Consciousness is the awareness of who you are and what you are made of, the physical self, and the spirit that moves you. Attention is paid or not paid to self, friends, neighbors, and other citizens of the world community of humanity and the settings to live where life and learning can warm the heartansoulanmind. Have a good evening. – Ms. H.