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    Seven Days, Seven Gifts
    Seven Days, Seven Gifts
    Seven Days, Seven Gifts
    Ebook33 pages43 minutes

    Seven Days, Seven Gifts

    By Cameron Gordon

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    About this ebook

    It was a short visit out to the wilderness, just a week. But it is amazing what desert trails and skies can do to break up accumulated habits and world-views that seem real but are in fact nothing more than confining ideas. He had taken this trip to get a measure of freedom and uplift and he got it, through the simple experiences of daily living in a new place and through a series of gifts the universe offered him as he slowly opened up to reality as it is. Inspired by Henry David Thoreau's 'Walden' this is a story about what happens when one simply decides to show up to what is present rather than project into the dead past and an imaginary future.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCameron Gordon
    Release dateJan 8, 2016
    ISBN9781311615152
    Seven Days, Seven Gifts
    Author

    Cameron Gordon

    More will be revealed. My watchword. My life. Like everyone else's life. I am nothing special. Just a writer who embraced the craft, the art and the vocation relatively late in life, with later better than never. I have had two careers up to now, the first as a policy researcher, analyst and report writer in government (in the US) and the second as an academic lecturer and researcher (in the US, Australia, China, Singapore, Russia, Spain and the UK). These careers have been creative in their own way and have involved a lot of writing. But it took me a long while in that rather plush wilderness to embrace the identity that I have always known, and practised 'on the side', namely artist. That's a rather pompous term to be sure, but for me it simply is devotion to one's craft, putting it first, and giving it form on a regular and daily basis. To quote the poet W.S. Merwin, who visited Ezra Pound to get this advice: "...it was important to regard writing as not a chance or romantic or inspired (in the occasional sense) thing, but rather a kind of spontaneity which arises out of discipline and continual devotion to something." (p. 318, Good Poems for Hard Times", Keillor, Garrison (ed), Viking: 2005). That is why I have left my former work behind and embarked on the writing life full-time. I write both poetry (haiku in the beginning and now other forms as well), short stories, novellas and novels, and plays. I also write creative non-fiction. I have a play in early development with the Street Theatre in Canberra, Australia (where I now live as a former native New Yorker) and two poetry books nearing completion. I am currently also editing a collection of my short stories and am reworking a first (unpublished) novel. I blog regularly on a number of platforms. My themes seem to focus on two major things: the life of cities and the tension between humanity and mechanisation. But, of course, I cover a wide range of topics, as most people do as they live a daily life and the days accumulate into experience.

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      Book preview

      Seven Days, Seven Gifts - Cameron Gordon

      Seven days, seven gifts

      by Cameron Gordon

      FRONT MATTER

      Seven days, seven gifts

      By Cameron Gordon

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2016 Cameron Gordon

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      FIRST DAY – FIRST GIFT

      Early morning in the Greyhound Bus Terminal of Salt Lake City, residue of ice and snow and the still gray skies which the sun cannot pierce. Three days had passed and twenty inches of snow had already accumulated and more heavy snow, just fitful now but sure to build, is in the forecast.

      I was told to check in an hour and a half early with my bags and got there even earlier than that, but nothing happened, nothing at all, except that I got the second space in line. The first person in line is pacing worriedly in front of me talking to himself, sometimes breaking into a nervous grin before lapsing back into his fugue of rumination. I am strangely untroubled by such things this morning, however. Fatigue runs through me, but I know that some sort of renewal is ahead, that something new begins with this trip. At least it feels that way. Time, as always, will tell.

      Finally we board and the bus gets underway. It's a little late starting but the certainty of actually moving forward on the road is soothing. An old couple sits in the front seat, and two more old women sit in the front seat across from them. More elderly people are scattered throughout the rest of the bus, interspersed with young men in cowboy hats, young college students, bearded men with boogie boards and didgeridoos. The bus has an ultimate destination of Los Angeles, with a layover in Las Vegas and many of the younger passengers seem to be going to one of those places. I am getting off in St. George, Utah, in the corner of the state which is the southern desert.

      Although we are now moving, it turns out that this passage to the south is going to be difficult. Salt Lake itself is not a problem, but once out of the metro area, passing over and into the mountains, the snow falls more and more heavily, the roads full of slush. Cars have slid off into the median here and there. I begin to get nervous about the bus sharing the same fate. In fact I am more concerned about not making it to St. George,

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