Everything begins with a dream...

Hi everyone, Stefan here,

The story of The Three Feathers and Joshua Aylong's magnificent adventure is only a few weeks away from leaving its home inside this laptop; inside this safe haven of dim obscurity. The idea of a rooster searching for three feathers somewhere deep inside a mountain grew from a small seedling to something far beyond itself. During the process of writing it, I realized that I was on my own journey right along with Joshua. How it came about, the momentum it gained while it was written and where it lead me and the characters in the end, was simply astonishing. Several times throughout the process I felt very clearly that my conscious mind had absolutely nothing to do with it and that the story in itself was something that was there already, like a piece of history on a scroll that I just happened to find.  

I was deeply touched at times, moved at others, and couldn't help but weep profusely during the writing of the last 15 or so pages. In its simplest, the story is, I think, about our search for something more than what is in front of us every day; something beyond ourselves; something greater; something we cannot grasp. 

Everything begins with a dream. Everything. It might be a small one, it might be seemingly insignificant or it might seem outright crazy. But whatever it is, it sometimes propels us to go and search for it, even though we have no clue why and what it is we truly mean to find. We just have this sense that something is missing, that the picture is not complete. And on our way we find friends who are, in one way or another, with us on this journey. Without them it would be impossible for us to find what we are looking for. For there is danger on the road, there is despair and fear and a sense of futility that the quest might just be for naught in the end and that we but have set out on a senseless journey with no purpose. Who has not felt this at some point in their lives?
As Wind, one of the characters in the story, points out to Joshua: “You have begun this journey for yourself. But end it you will for everyone.” In this sense, Joshua’s journey mirrors our own. From the beginning to its end. From a fading dream through a perilous quest and on to its magnificent conclusion.

Keep your dream alive.

Publishing Schedule Update

Hi, it's Stefan. Just a brief update on what's happening. The kindle, nook and iBook versions of "The Three Feathers" should be ready by the end of the month of June 2012. Formatting is pretty much done. I just looked at the book on an iPad and it looks amazing. Waiting for some copy editing and the title page. The paperback and hard cover versions will come out roughly by September. Then the movie, of course, ideally with Peter Jackson as the director :-). How much fun would that be!!!!!!!! I will send out links once the books are 'live'. Stay in touch through this blog or via the "The Three Feathers" Facebook page.

Cheers,

Stefan

What is to come...

Hi there, it's Joshua.
If you have read "The Three Feathers", you might ask yourself what's next. Is this the end or maybe just the beginning? A lot happened during my travels through Hollow's Gate but there was one moment in particular that has importance to the continuation of our journey together. As it is with some things in life, what we might judge as insignificant may just be the small pebble that falls into a still pond, its ripples reaching far across and all the way to the other side--unbeknownst to us. The same happened when my good friend Grey and I inadvertently activated the beacon--the ancient means of traveling between the worlds. We did not know this at the time but the ripple effect of it was enormous. A whole world on the other end of the galaxy began to awaken because of it. And as the pendulum swings from one tipping point to the next, this world arose from the ashes and began to blossom and grow and reach new heights within its civilization. Hundreds of years of splendor followed. But as the midpoint was crossed, the zenith passed and the value structure changed, the darkness slowly made its way into the mind of the people. Greed became normalcy. Friends became foes, neighbors enemies. And what was once "freedom for all" now changed into "power to a few".

Almost 1000 years after the beacon was activated, the people of Nibiru--the Sky People, as they were called in the indigenous language of my world--were lost. They could not find themselves anymore and they could not find each other. But as it was in my time, each civilization has a searcher, a 'dreamer of light', if you will, who stands at the very tipping point of the pendulum, either ending what has become a path of despair or beginning a new hope or in some cases both. There is one in particular I am thinking of. She does not know it yet but it is on her to restore hope to her people, to bring the human spirit back from the brink of an abyss that is about to swallow it whole and set chaos in its place. Her name is Aries. Don't be fooled by her age. Fourteen years is young to shoulder the fate of your world but as I have learned, age, size, or any handicaps and limitations you think you might possess, have no bearing on what you can do. None at all. She is on her journey as we speak. Once it is finished--or at least once the first part of her journey is over, you will be able to read about it. After all, she is The Fourth Sage and her people's only hope.

Peaceful travels,

Your friend,
Joshua

"How Small Are You?" by Broga

Dear fellows,
Let me introduce myself first. My name is Broga. I am a peeper frog and the guardian of the Porte Des Lioness, the sealed entrance into the mountain through which Joshua and his friends, Krieg and Grey, needed to go in order to save Wind and reach the Cave of Dreams, the destination of their journey together.
I have been asked to make a contribution to this and thought what better topic to write about than to write about smallness and tallness, about height or the seeming lack thereof. Over my long life I have been asked many times why I am so small. First, there is absolutely no way I can answer that. Second, it's a paradoxical question as I am not small. You might think I am. How tall are you? Four feet? Five feet? Six feet? Seven feet? I am, stretched out, exactly 7.5 tenth of an inch tall, which is just about 2 centimeters. You might believe that your height, the height of your body, has anything to do with weather or not you are small or large, tall or tiny. I don't believe so. You must realize that you and I can not be measured in weight, in height or in anything like that. Can you measure potential? The sheer unbound potential of someone who recognizes who he or she is? Can you measure will power? Can you measure a dream or a hundred dreams? Is one dream larger than another, or more forceful? We all have them. We all have in us all of the universe; its vastness and its beauty. And let me tell you something that took me a few hundred years to realize: There is nothing small within you. Nothing at all. What you think of as small is just a belief about yourself. The belief is the only thing that is small. It's just a spec of dust with no power other than the one you give it. Be happy that you are wrong about who you are in truth. So, now go. I have things to do. BIG things. Remember always: your purpose is not small. How then can you be?


Yours truly,


Your friend, Broga

On Music (by Alda, composer, singer & turtle extraordinaire)

Have you ever felt carried by the music you were listening to? Have you ever felt transported to a distant place or time or felt close to someone even though you were a hundred miles away? That's what music can do to you. I began to sing when I was still inside an egg, just below the Porte Des Lioness where I was born. I didn't know for a while that the singing I heard was my own. It just poured out of me and it never stopped since then. Because of my age--must be close to a thousand years or more--I'm very big. And I mean VERY big. But to tell you the truth, when I sing while I walk I almost never feel my weight. It is as if there are hundreds and hundreds of balloons tied to my shell lifting me up. Of course, my singing keeps the 'Dark' away in Hollow's Gate during night time. You know, night time lasts seven days down here, right? One night on the surface is seven nights down it the Great Deep. This long time of darkness can bring out creatures that you don't want to encounter. You don't, trust me. But let me tell you something: In all those long years I have been down here, the 'Dark' which are basically creatures, scary creatures, that want to eat you alive, devour you and feed on your flesh; in all those years they never could come near me. After a while I figured it out: it was my music that held them at bay. They just didn't want to come close.


So, if you hit a dark spot, turn on the music and feel assured that someone is carrying you through it.


Yours Truly,
Alda

How the story of "The Three Feathers" began

Hi everyone,
Joshua asked me (as he has done since I met him) to write down some things. This time its the story of how the writing of "The Three Feathers" came about. It will be interesting to see this process from Joshua's point of view as I am certain it will be completely different from my own. But that for a later time. Right now let me tell you how "The Three Feathers" came about - on this side of the galaxy and in the 21st century, earth time.


It all began with my colleague Diane telling me about her friend Joyce who had computer problems. I seem to have pretty good 'computer karma' and Diane thought I could make some extra money by setting up her friend's computer at her home. When I was at Joyce's house (she is an excellent Astrologer as I found out) and sitting in front of her computer trying to figure out how to connect the printer wirelessly, she asked me my birth date and time. I gave it to her and for the next two hours, while I was trying to set up her computer, she told me all about where my sun is and in which house I was born in and the whole problem with Gemini... To be honest (sorry Joyce, you know I love you) I didn't contain much of what she said. Except for two things. First, she told me I should go back to therapy. And secondly, that I needed to stop editing myself. Interestingly enough I had been thinking about going back to Julie, my therapist, for a couple of weeks now. I had been going to her for several years and she had been extremely helpful through some rough patches. The next day, I called her and we made an appointment.


We usually do either table work which is a combination of energy work and visual journeys into my body, or what's called 'sand box work'. Julie asked me if I wanted to do the sand box that day and we did. Here is how this works: Julie has a sand box on one side of her room. Behind it is a whole wall filled with shelves on which you can find pretty much anything you need, in order to--yes--play in the sand. Small figurines, action figures, or items like little palm trees, dragons, motor cycles, cowboys, dogs, helicopters, stones, rocks, pieces of wood, train cars, etc. I would then usually randomly pick out some of the items, the task being not to think about which ones to take. So, that day, one by one I took my items from the shelf and placed them into the sand box. Here and there I pushed the sand to one side, again without much thought of anything. Once I was done, we looked at it together and as we always do, Julie asked me what I saw. It usually makes sense while I look at the landscape as to which of the figurines I am, what's going on in the box and therefore in my life at that moment, etc.


Not this time. I had no clue what I was looking at. There was a rooster, red and orange colored; there was a wolf, a large horse, a Pegasus, a frog, a dragon and three feathers on the left left side kind of stuck into the sand. That was all. I told Julie that I had no idea what it meant, what it was or what to make of it. All I said was that it sure looks like it would make a nice little fable: The rooster sets out on a journey. On his way, he picks up friends like the wolf and the horse. Then they encounter a Pegasus and a dragon. There is a frog in there somewhere. And in the end they find the three feathers. So far so good.


I left Julie, not disappointed but feeling kind of neutral with the sense that nothing really had happened in there. Sometimes a session stays with me for days. Not this one. I forgot all about it for a while. Then one morning I thought I'd better write it down before I forget. It was more out of habit as I usually write down what happens during the sessions. So I began with, "Once upon a time there was a rooster who lived on a farm on the Eastern shore..." Four chapters later I stopped. I couldn't believe the force with which the story made itself known to me. I truly felt like a scribe more than anything. None of it came from my conscious mind. It was as if I for myself discovered what had happened, like an archaeologist finding an ancient city under the dessert sand. It was there. Complete and ready to come through. My duty was only in faithfully writing it all down. There was but a minuscule and insignificant amount of thinking about plot, characters and the story itself on my part.


There will be another blog entry about the actual writing of it but let me take this opportunity to thank two more people at this point. First, Hans-Werner Sahm, a German painter whose images haunted me since I was in my early twenties. His images contributed a large amount to the locations of the story. His paintings gave me, and all of us, a glimpse into how Hollow's Gate might look like. Its astounding beauty and its law-of-nature defying landscapes opened Joshua's world to me--and many more beyond this one. Secondly, I would like to thank Sheila Wright for her painting of the lioness. It is so mesmerizing that I could not take my eyes of it for the longest time. She made me realize what Joshua's story is all about and that moment was so powerful and beautiful that I can't even describe it now. I hope while reading the story you get a glimpse of the lioness within yourself. If that is the case I have done my job as a scribe.


Cheers,


Stefan Bolz

About "The Three Feathers"

I thought I would just start with a summary of "The Three Feathers", my journey as I remember it. I had someone write it for me so it will not be in the first person. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask at the end where it says: comments. By the way, the picture above, is a quick drawing of my good friend Grey and myself after we survived the labyrinth of mirrors and as we travel toward the city of light ruins. What an amazing place that was... You should have been there. Well, hopefully while reading the book you will. But now, without any further ado, here is the synopsis of "The Three Feathers" for you.

"Propelled by a powerful dream, Joshua Aylong, a rooster, sets out on a quest to search for three feathers deep inside a mountain. On his journey he meets others – strangers at first but soon to be friends: Grey, the wolf who had lost his companion to hunters in the Ice Forests; and Krieg, a war horse and last of its kind who desires peace more than anything. Together, they face dangers beyond what they could have imagined as they enter a world of unparalleled menace and beauty. For in order to get to the mountain, they must first pass through Hollow’s Gate, a 50 mile wide, five thousand foot deep gorge where time flows differently and where the laws of nature, as they know them, are suspended. There are labyrinths where friends become foes; lakes so deep they have no bottom; and mythical creatures that have lived down there for a millennium and that are now slowly awakening. The world they enter has its own laws and will try their friendship and endurance to the utmost breaking point.

As they travel deep down at the bottom of Hollow’s Gate, entering an ancient city from which now only ruins are left, they inadvertently trigger the reactivation of a beacon that has been destroyed a thousand years passed. This “beacon” is only called that in the indigenous language of the world they are in. In truth it is one end of a singularity, a wormhole, connecting this world with another. Activating it brings a whole civilization on the other side of the galaxy back to life.  But that is not all.

As legend tells us, there are light dreamers—individuals who stand at the very tip of the pendulum of each civilization to change its direction back toward the balance point. Joshua is one of them even though he doesn’t know it at first. He just follows his dream and in doing so triggers a series of events that could either save or bring complete destruction to not only this world but all the worlds beyond. For each dreamer, by the very dream he has, awakens his dark counterpart—in this case a dead and already partially decomposed Griffon Vulture who, brought back to ‘life’, assembles an army of her own to oppose Joshua, to kill him and to eventually use the beacon to bring death and destruction to all the worlds that lie beyond it.

But there is more, as the true purpose of the dream still lies hidden from Joshua. For he has yet to meet the one he has avoided all his life—the one he is utterly afraid to find. He thought he searched for three feathers on a blackened stone. But buried deep inside him lays a power he has yet to accept as his own. It is the power of the lioness. On their quest, the three friends stumble upon evidence of her existence on several occasions. And just before they enter the final stage of their journey which leads them deep into the mountain, she tells Joshua in no uncertain terms that in order for him to survive this, in order for him to save his friends, this world and many worlds beyond this one, he must summon her; he must reach deep down and bring her to the surface. He must set her free within him—or die…"

Yours always,

Joshua