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PREFACE
We
all struggle just to subsist in this often-crazy world of ours that is
all too recklessly full of innumerable illusions that we have simply
come to accept and too easily believe that they are all actually
established, believable and well-founded realities. This present bit of
rather intriguing and inspiring oral history has been in the most
thoughtful and critical formulation for some sixteen years before it was
ever and finally committed to the written page. This otherwise quite
extended and previously unexplained passage of time was due in large
part to the indispensable manifestation of many of the story’s more
current revelations, discoveries and events that serendipitously needed
to have ultimately and inevitably manifested themselves as well as the
perceived self-imposed necessity for the author to have conclusively
resolved his own ethical/moral struggle dealing with the possible
appearance of serious incongruence between that of relating a story with
such authoritative certainty on the one hand and at the same instance my
having no real sources of information that may have in any manner
actually substantiated or authenticated the historical elements or
characters of this intriguing tale.
One might easily suspect that there
has been entirely too much literary license employed in certain affected
portions of this story; I can only assure you that those particular
incidences that are often related so dramatically and may even appear to
have no true-life historical basis, may in fact, be far more compelling
in their essence than many of those more convincing but often totally
unsubstantiated illusions that all of us are repeatedly subjected to on
such a commanding and relentlessly consistent basis. I wish to be
extremely clear about one literary license that I have taken advantage
of and that has to do with the use of the word, “Shaman” in the title of
this book. Shaman is essentially a Russian or European word applied to
describing any sort of Witch Doctor or Medicine Man. There are NO Witch
Doctors here amongst our own revered Native American Spiritual Leaders
or Medicine Men. I took the liberty of using this term strictly for the
marketing of the book; I apologize to any Native American that I might
have offended as I am very sensitive to any and all Native Americans.
After all, what is reality? And, aren’t we all too often
guilty of simply choosing that path of least resistance just so that we
won’t remotely appear to be “rocking the boat’ or possibly disappoint some
loved one by choosing a road less traveled?
This rather poignant tale is in essence a story
that is all about the power and significance of love that may have well had
portions of its earliest development deceptively cloaked in what our Western
culture might refer to as some form of carnal lust and passion. It all
begins in the very closing years of the Eighteenth Century and had its final
and most poignant installment of inspirational and spiritual muse
dramatically manifested during the mid-Nineteenth century. The source and
inspiration for this most loving tale is, for the lack of any other rational
explanation, this earthbound disembodied soul of unprecedented spiritual
substance. This loving soul remained in spirit close to the geographic
origins of this prophetic story until the very end of the Twentieth Century,
where several conspiring and sometimes even tragic circumstances brought
together two initiated and spiritually gifted Medicine Men whose actual
lives in this living Garden of Eden were necessarily separated by the
passage of more than a hundred or so years.
Only that most poignant
expression of love has that immutable power of transcending any and all
obstacles of life if aptly yielded to in that true character of giving and
charity. Its rightful consignment in each of our individual lives has
perhaps too often and so sadly been covertly subjugated to those conspired
and grand illusions that have otherwise been deviously created only to
enslave our free-born spirits and that naturally imbued appetite for the
lust of a bountiful life that should be so naturally full of personal
contentment. These gifted Medicine Men of San Damiano dedicated most of
their modest lives to the healing of others’ spirits through that immutable
power of love, a love that was and should always remain necessarily
unconditional and always boundless.
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