Sleepy Time Travels

Links for audiobook, print and kindle editions. Russell's audiobook catalog. There was a rivalry among these three storytellers, for they came from different tribes, and the legends of their people were not the same. Tecla was from Baja, or Lower, California, where Juanita and Antonio's mother had once lived. Old Klayukat's tribal home was to the far north, at Puget Sound. He had been brought down by a king's vessel and given into the charge of the padres at the mission of San Francisco d'Assisi. There he had become a Christian and had been taught the saddler's trade. He had been employed by the children's grandfather ever since their father was a little boy. Wantasson was from Alta California, which is the California that now belongs to the United States. Before he had become Christianized at the mission, he had wandered about and so knew stories from the different tribes of the country. To Juanita and Antonio it mattered little from what places the stories came—whether from the northern Oregon Country, Baja California, or their own Alta California. All the tales were fascinating to them, and they were always eager to do any favor for Wantasson, Klayukat, or Tecla in the hope of winning a story in return.

I HAVE seen the God Pan and it was in this manner: I heard a bewildering and pervasive music moving from precision to precision within itself. Then I heard a different music, hollow and laughing. Then I looked up and saw two eyes like the eyes of a wood-creature peering at me over a brown tube of wood. Then someone said: Yes, once I was playing a fiddle in the forest and I walked into a wasp's nest. Audiobook , Kindle and print editions

This epic narrative poem focuses on the days after the end of the Civil War through the fall of 1877, describing the leaders and events of the Indian Wars, including Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Dull Knife, Spotted Tail, the Fetterman Massacre, the Wagon Box Incident, and the Battle of Little Big Horn. Audiobook, Kindle and Print Editions

An account of the Tulsa race riot of 1921 in which White people attacked and murdered Black residents in the Greenwood neighborhood burning and looting. Includes a collection of shorter witness testimonials. Audiobook, Kindle and print editions

This overlooked work of Lawrence contains both beautiful descriptions of his travels in Italy during this period as well as a thoroughly engrossing portrait of a man, M, who he meets and can't quite get away from for months until the end. This true story grabs at you on several levels. Originally published as the introduction to M's work, Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, it stands on its own. Audiobook, Kindle and print editions

I want to put before you, if I can in these three lectures, a certain view of the world, and of the way in which that world is guided and directed. As this meeting is a public meeting, there is one statement I think that I ought to make, which it would not be necessary to make, if it were composed of members of the Theosophical Society. It is important to remember that in the Theosophical Society we have no authority on matters of opinion. Every member is free to work out his own theory of life, to choose ones own line of thought, and no one has the smallest right to dictate to any member what he should choose or what he should think. In the Theosophical Society there is only one condition which binds a member, namely, the recognition of Universal Brotherhood. Outside that every member is absolutely free. He may belong to any religion, or he may belong to no religion at all. If he belongs to a religion, he is never asked to leave it, to change it, but only to try to live up to its teachings of spiritual life, recognizing the unity of all, to live in harmony with people of his own faith and people of other faiths. When we speak of Theosophy, we may take the word in one of two senses. The first, what it should be to the individual. In that sense there is no difference between Theosophy and the ancient Brahmavidya of India, the Para Vidya, and the Gnosis of the Greek - no difference at all. Audiobook, Kindle and print editions

We are face to face with this great world, and our relations to it are manifold. One of these is the necessity we have to live, to till the soil, to gather food, to clothe ourselves, to get materials from nature. We are always making things that will satisfy our needs, and we come in touch with nature in our efforts to meet these needs. Thus, we are always in touch with this great world through hunger and thirst and all our physical needs. Then, we have our mind; and our mind seeks its own food. The mind has its necessity also. It must find out reason in things. It is faced with a multiplicity of facts, and it is bewildered when it cannot find one unifying principle which simplifies the heterogeneity of things. Man's constitution is such that he must not only find facts, but also some laws which will lighten the burden of mere number and quantity. Audiobook, Kindle and print editions

Who reads philosophy books? Not many. Maybe that's why George Santayana hid the medicine in sweeter wrappers. His The Last Puritan is an example. This week's episode is a selection from another venerable literary form, the dialog. It reminds me of the show from decades ago where a group of famous people from history were in a Sunday morning talk show-like format. In his book, "Dialogues in Limbo," Santayana features a pilgrim from our time who has found his way into a place where he can have some pretty serious discusions with Socrates, and others. Audiobook, Kindle and print editions

Mysteries are, of course, perennial favorites, and come in a variety of flavors. This weeks' hundred year old sample is in the british tradition, one of a series of tales featuring armchair sleuth, The Old Man in The Corner, a curious fellow that our author, the narrator, consults whenever she's curious about some case in the news. The old man is always miles ahead of the police, who sometimes never find the answer that he has. The Mystery of the Russian Prince is from The Old Man in the Corner solves six Mysteries by Baroness Emmauska Orczy and is a very cozy yarn to snuggle up to. Audiobook, Kindle and print editions

Among the numerous sciences pursued by the well-disciplined army of earnest students of the present century, none has had less honors or more scoffing than the oldest of them—the science of sciences, the venerable mother-parent of all our modern pigmies. Anxious in their petty vanity to throw the veil of oblivion over their undoubted origin, the self-styled positive scientists, ever on the alert, present to the courageous scholar who tries to deviate from the beaten highway traced out for him by his dogmatic predecessors, a formidable range of serious obstacles. As a rule, occultism is a dangerous, double-edged weapon for one to handle who is unprepared to devote his whole life to it. The theory of it, unaided by serious practice, will ever remain in the eyes of those prejudiced against such an unpopular cause an idle, crazy speculation, fit only to charm the ears of ignorant old women. When we cast a look behind us and see how for the last 30 years modern spiritualism has been dealt with, notwithstanding the occurrence of daily, hourly proofs which speak to all our senses, stare us in the eyes, and utter their voices from "beyond the great gulf", how can we hope, I say, that occultism or magic will easily gain ground where spiritualism is scoffed at? One who rejects a priori or even doubts the immortality of man's soul can never believe in its Creator; and, blind to what is heterogeneous in his eyes, will remain still more blind to the proceeding of the latter from homogeneity. In relation to the Kabalah, or the compound mystic text-book of the great secrets of Nature, we do not know of anyone in the present century who could have commanded a sufficient dose of that moral courage which fires the heart of the true Adept with the sacred flame of propagandism, to force him into defying public opinion by displaying familiarity with that sublime work. Audible, Kindle and print editions