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    Home Too: Secret Springs
    Home Too: Secret Springs
    Home Too: Secret Springs
    Ebook235 pages2 hours

    Home Too: Secret Springs

    By Cristina Salat

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    About this ebook

    Following the "Home Is Where You're Happy" collection, in "Home Too: Secret Springs" author Cristina Salat further explores via stories, essays & life snippets the concepts of: friendship, spirituality, integrity, community, love, magic, race relations, sexuality, health and healing, beginnings and endings...in a continued complex celebration of all it takes to be human!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCristina Salat
    Release dateMay 20, 2017
    ISBN9781370672486
    Home Too: Secret Springs
    Author

    Cristina Salat

    As a woman of the wind, I have enjoyed years navigating the urban jungles and deep blue seas I call home.Website: https://cristinasalat.wixsite.com/website Eclectic e-store: https://livefromthevolcano.ecrater.com/

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      Book preview

      Home Too - Cristina Salat

      Home Too: Secret Springs

      Further Stories, Essays & Life Snippets

      Cristina Salat

      Green Flame Omnimedia

      Except within non-fiction essays, names, places, characters, and businesses are inventions of imagination; and within the author's personal essays, some details have been fictionalized to protect privacy. Any similarity to real people, places, or things living or dead should be considered coincidental.

      Salat, Cristina — 1st Green Flame Omnimedia edition

      Home Too: Secret Springs: Further Stories, Essays & Life Snippets/Cristina Salat

      Summary: Further explorations of life from friendship to evolution from author, editor, filmmaker, tropical artist sanctuary founder Cristina Salat

      Print edition:

      ISBN-13: 978-1544602226

      ISBN-10: 1544602227

      E-edition ISBN: 978-1370672486

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936552

      1. Home — Fiction/Non-Fiction 2. Family — Fiction/Non-Fiction

      3. Race Relations

      4. Friendship

      5. Sexuality

      6. Spirituality

      7. Love

      8. Magic

      9. Hawaii

      10. Economic & Historical Conspiracies

      11.Women & Relationships

      12. Health & Healing

      13. Evolution

      © 2017 Cristina Salat

      Contact the author: http://creativecornucopia.miiduu.com

      All Rights Reserved.

      Your support is most appreciated! No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, without prior written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews.

      Green Flame Omnimedia

      Postal Suite 783

      Volcano Hawaii 96785

      BOOKS BY CRISTINA SALAT

      Gathering The Dreamcatchers companion novels:

      (also available in combo, trilogy, + 4-book omnibus)

      Living In Secret Deluxe Edition

      The Skin of Water/Defending The Dreamcatchers

      Esoterica

      Paradise Found

      Illustrated Children's Books:

      Step-Whales

      Peanut's Emergency

      Witzel's Wish

      Frogdemona: Precious Pest

      Compilations:

      Home Is Where You're Happy

      Home Too: Secret Springs

      Community: The COMPLETE Missing Manual

      Hawaii Triptych

      Together Alone: Story Poems

      Green Flame Omnimedia Slims:

      America The Beautiful

      Community: The Missing Manual, Stage 1 onward!

      Hawaii: Heaven or Hell?

      Rabonchone

      Witch Work

      This Ship Called Earth

      Say Goodbye To Dana

      Hungry Wolf & The Three Capable Femmes

      How To Get Your Life Working When It's Really NOT?!

      Stentor

      User Friendly

      Going Home

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Title

      Copyright

      Dedication

      Introduction

      Summer Friends

      Time of The Bear

      Broken Lovers

      After Titanic

      Integrity

      Magic in Hawaii

      Sharing Richard

      Kulana: Phase III

      The Structure of Truth & Love

      The Right to Write

      The Friendship File

      Jenny: A Tale of Two Realities

      Community: The Missing Manual Stage 1

      Good Neighbors

      Snail Trails

      Excerpt: Paradise Found

      About The Author

      Dedication

      For each divine creation that appeared

      to be savored & investigated

      before being smoothed from Life's shore

      as if what once was, had never been

      INTRODUCTION

      Tibetan monks are known to spend intensely focused hours bending over the creation of sacred mandalas which they make from multi-colored sand in an intricate process that can take days, weeks, months...all aimed at calling themselves, their communities, and the world at large to a mindful awareness of something larger than ourselves.

      This meticulous, creative process is potent, transformative...and once complete, the final step is to pray over the complex image...and then release it.

      The monks move to the nearest living body of water and sweep their canvas clean, allowing the colorful grains of sand which make up the completed image to return to their rightful home, the sea.

      As do I.

      Cristina Salat

      March 2017

      SUMMER FRIENDS

      I wanted you to stay.

      You were the one and only summer friend so far I'd ever chosen who had chosen me back for more than a day.

      Oh, there were the little boys I made sand castles with on rocky Shelter Island shores when I could still fit in the child's seat on the back of the bicycle my mother peddled all over the 27.1 square miles each August, which were less than 100 miles from gray, bustling New York City where we suffered the rest of the year.

      This summer haven was acres of forest and marshland off the tip of Long Island, surrounded by bays and reached only by ferry...a community that quadrupled in the summer from two thousand inhabitants to about eight thousand yet still never felt crowded...and my young mother thought nothing of peddling all day under a hot summer sun in order to reach expanses of salt water or green nature preserves where she could at last breathe.

      Having never learned to drive, traveling with me in the narrow blue seat over her rear tire was how we got anywhere on an island where public transportation didn't exist...(until eventually I was too old to fit my lengthening limbs in the little child-seat, and old enough to have a bike of my own and ride along in front of or behind her...even though, truthfully, biking all over the place under a hot sun was never my idea of fun).

      But anyway, in the early years, my unwillingly single (but ever hopeful) mother was determined enough to bike clear across the island if it meant time collecting pretty rocks and shells in a place not yet overly developed...or being somewhere I might share company with someone my own age, a treat that was in short supply in the ramshackle boarding house (more frequently welcoming guests who were college students or lower-income retirees) where we had a small room we could afford for a month every August.

      I did love constructing elaborate turrets and moats from gritty sand, shoring a castle up with fists-full of pokey rocks and stones smoothed by the sea...even with shoreline playmates I was destined only to know for an afternoon. And we populated our creations with imaginary dragons, their antennae on slimy, rubbery heads bravely sneaking out of hard black shells of various sizes...when you put the live creatures in the castle and then left them alone and stayed very still.

      Later, when I was still grudgingly sharing a room for a month escaping New York with my mother — devouring one after another from a pile of library and secondhand-shop tales on the queen-sized bed as my own escape from being 16 and still having nothing better to do each summer than hang out with my mother! — (hello! there were other rooms at the boarding house with more than one bed, and even one other with access to the sun porch, which was a must in my mother's book...though those did all cost more...), anyway, later one day when I was escaping through the tales of other people who all had much more interesting lives than my own, a handsome college boy — clean-cut and confident — came to the door that had been left open to encourage a breeze, knocked, and asked me to dinner...and that had felt like maybe the start of something...like the start of maybe a real summer friendship...or a real life finally beginning?!

      But it wasn't.

      When the college fellow said he didn't like to dine alone, that was actually what he meant.

      I was just asked along for company to the dockside restaurant so he wouldn't need to sit having fancy braised dishes over a white tablecloth or sip wine from the bottle he ordered...alone.

      And neither my youthful curves in white jeans and a turquoise tanktop that tied at the shoulders, nor my head full of stories or long shiny curls (which behaved admirably the entire evening without once frizzing up!) tempted him into needing or wanting to ask for a second date.

      Being too nervous to eat as I rehearsed what I could now tell my friends back home about being asked out by a college guy, I didn't even get a fancy free meal out of it.

      Eventually I moved away to attend college myself, where I made friends based not just on short-lived proximity but also on interest and fun. Friends who fashioned doll heads from clay and wore purple pants to dance in country barns; friends who wrote poetry to accompany 12-string guitars.

      These too would pass, but for a good number of seasons they were savored...and by then, I was already choosing never to return for another summer spent with just my aging mother, who was still single but less hopefully so by now...a week or two together tops was the max that relationship could stand, at that point in time.

      But before heading for University, and in between building snail-populated castles with skinny strangers at the edge of wide rolling shores destined (usually sooner than later) to rise up and reclaim our elaborate sand castle constructions with a gentle wave...as if God Him/Herself were erasing our 3-D creations, re-smoothing the shore's surface with a hiss, until what had been created disappeared as if it had never been at all...

      ...in between this, and my first and only date with the tall, polite, college boy whom I nervously watched eat and then never saw again...back before all that, when I was still a tumble-haired tomboy and local thrift store (25 cents-a-bag!) connoisseur...there was you.

      The brown-haired girl.

      The brown-haired girl staying with her grandmother in the room next door at the place I regularly reluctantly summered while still too young to have any choice in the matter.

      The brown-haired girl stayed with her grandmother in the larger room at the boarding house that, unlike the one I stayed in with my mother, came with an actual kitchen.

      And more than one bed.

      And yet still had access to the sun porch with its round writing table, couch-sized porch swing (often home to stinging ants), wooden railings upon which raucous blue jays with their reflective, almost metallic, lupine-colored feathers and triangular top-combs, plus swift-footed squirrels could be enticed to pose for a mother's dime store 110mm camera as they feasted on strategically placed breadcrumbs.

      Plus there was the rickety wooden staircase that provided a back way in or out of these two second-floor rooms; perfect for escaping spies, pirates, children.

      I was aware of the new girl (the only other person in the boarding house anywhere close to my age, which was around 10 then) from the moment she arrived, but it took me a day to figure out how to befriend her.

      The following morning I wrapped a bright red ribbon my mother happened to have around an already-opened, crinkly-clear plastic bag of green action figures and left it outside her door.

      By afternoon, likely at her grandmother's urging, the brown-haired girl came over to thank me, and that led to playing together. First with the green, plastic action figures, standing them up on the sun porch table in various configurations with their rifles and bayonets at the ready...which didn't hold either of our interest for long.

      Why hadn't I chosen the code-breaking kit or a board game several people could play?! Oh yeah, because those items weren't the amount of money my mother had been willing to spend at the entirely-built-from-glass tourist shop we frequented whenever our island adventures had us heading that way, with its porcelain knickknacks, unusual kitchen utensils, profusion of nature paintings and postcards, and a whole rear wall of toys from Matchbox cars to bug farms. (Also whatever we got had to fit into bike baskets.)

      Anyway, leaving the little green figures on the table to fight their war without us, we escaped down the back staircase to climb tall trees in the backyard, hidden amidst evergreen branches that scraped our faces and skinned our knees as we shared secrets and chortled over riddle cups filled with sloshing cherry Kool Aid.

      Where do cows go on Saturday Night? To the mooo-vies!

      What kind of dog has no tail? A hot dog!

      What kind of train carries gum? A choo-choo train!

      I liked how pretty she was.

      She was the kind of girl who could wear a hand-crocheted orange and olive poncho over her tanktop and shorts and not look completely dumb.

      I liked how she would follow my lead, open to playing whatever game my wild imagination could think up. Certainly she was the type of girl I later always found myself attracted to, pretty, compliant, but with a rebel edge.

      There may have been some kissing involved.

      If we'd had more time, we might have pricked our pinkies and become blood sisters, taken an oath, formed an exclusive best-friends-only club.

      But unlike my mother and I — who were camped out for the month in our tiny room with a hot plate and an ever-growing collection of books, rocks, shells, and bird feathers — the brown-haired girl and her grandmother were there for only a few days, with the final day (already tomorrow!) suddenly reserved for the rest of her arriving family, before they would all depart en masse.

      I have to be with my family tomorrow, she said regretfully, too compliant all of a sudden, not rebellious enough.

      This, in my opinion, was out of the question.

      "Your family? You'll be seeing them for the rest of your life! But we might never see each other again!"

      Overly dramatic?

      Maybe.

      But such is the plight of most summer friends when you are 10...as I well knew (mainly from books).

      Friends at school you could pretty much count on to be around year after year after year...even long after you no longer cared for them.

      But the sparkle of summer friendship was usually a product of time and place, fading as soon as distance and absence got in the way.

      "We have to spend your last day together! I urged. Meet me at the secret place."

      We'd fastened a shallow cardboard box midway up a favorite climbing tree as a

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