See "Essays" in website for the 1st chapter of my newly published book, A Basket of Reeds, to be purchased in paperback (14.99) or ebook (4.99) on Amazon. 
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Note: This just in: My new book, A Basket of Reeds, is now available on Amazon, as is everything else in this world except for True Love. Thanks, FK
 
          The picture came with a tearful warning from the creator: ‘I have failed! The colors are wrong, it is garish and childish, it is not what you wanted, I’m so sorry …,’ and so on such that when I saw the pictures, I had to agree. Yes, the colors were garish; yes, the figures were primitive; and yes, it was certainly not what I had wanted.
 
            So now what to do? My book, A Basket of Reeds, had been waiting anxiously to be published. All the preliminaries before the formatting had been finished: page numbers, book cover title and synopsis front and back, copyright, ISBN, dedication, warning (This is entirely a work of fiction!), and of course, all the editing, editing, editing, none perfect but enough, now enough, finally enough. All of that waiting for the picture from the artist, what would catch the eye of the beholder and help him decide to buy this book out of the thousands of other new titles that have popped out of home computers at such an astonishing rate. All now put on hold until some other cover could be found.
 
            Except that would never be. The artist was my sister, who was doing this without pay out of the goodness of her heart. I couldn’t exactly throw her under the bus and besides, I knew she was a talented artist, among other things, and had pictured her for years doing the cover. It was not to be made from whole cloth, but to be modeled after Edward Curtis’s classic black and white photo from the early 1900’s, “At the Old Well of Acoma.” This shows two Pueblo Indian women at a pool filling clay water jugs in the desert of the American Southwest, the two in traditional dress. It is a work of stunning simplicity, etched in shadow and brightness, speaking something to us – we know not what – but something mysterious.  Her work was not like that at all.  Although some things were borrowed from the photo, it did not hold the stark simplicity of the photo that I had been looking for among its playful colors. Now what would I do?
 
            Black and white. Knowing it did not have that stark heaviness, she also sent a picture of the picture in black and white. It was still not what I had imagined, but it would do in a pinch, and I was in a pinch. So I had my brother way back east go down to a copier to send me a picture in B and W in high resolution, good enough for the cover, to save the time and expense of sending me the painting. It arrived that evening, along with the same picture in living color. The B and W, as said, was not what I had wanted but good enough.
 
            The next day was busy, the morning spent dotting the last I’s on the book text and such, and the afternoon preparing for a cook-out for the Memorial Day weekend at our house. I did not have time to send the package with the picture to the formatter because of that, and the afternoon drifted into the evening cook-out and camp fire and Tiki torches. Just when that was ending, about 10 PM, I heard my phone ringing inside the house. It was too late, I was too tired, and there were still people leaving, so I did not answer. Later, I picked it up to see who it was and immediately pressed the wrong button. Before it could even ring or I could hang up, it was picked up on the other end. It was my brother, the one who had sent the photo. He immediately began to comment on what he had sent:
 
            ‘Ya know, I had thought the color version was too comic-booky and some of the features too folksy, but I’ve looked at it again and again and I like the color version best. If you really look at it, the whole thing is really good. The colors are trippy and the folk art adds to the mix, which is really pretty wild. It’s like Van Gogh meets Grandma Moses. All those swirls and colors and the strange cliffs and landscape, something leading to somewhere weird, different, strange.’
 
            I looked at it again, this time without the negative vision of its creator, and found that my brother was shockingly right. More so – even though I had only given a summary of the story to my sister and less to my brother – the picture was far more in tune with the book than my original “Edward Curtis” vision. Although the story is told through the hindsight of a cynical, jaded graduate student, the real action takes place in the Sierra Madre Mountains of central Mexico among an Indian group that uses Peyote for religious purposes and as a lifestyle. Their now world-famous yarn-drawing art is made with the bright, garish psychedelic colors of their visions. A nearby peasant village that serves as a resource base for the Indians of the highlands is the perfect picture for primitive, or nativist art.
 
            Along with the theme and title of the book – a woman putting a basket with a baby in it in a pool of water leading to a river – the art, colors and style turned out, on second sight, to be perfect - far better and more appropriate for the book, in fact, than what I had wanted. Whereas my vision in retrospect had been somewhat pompous, this vision carried the irony, superficiality, as well as the depth of the book in impossible balance. Holy cow.
 
            Just that morning or the last, I had read that the Catholic Church was celebrating one of its many feast days, this one honoring St. Philip Neri, a priest of 16th century Europe. His religious zeal was ignited by Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, a man who had started the order to pursue missionary work in the new worlds recently discovered by Europe in the Far East and the Americas. For Neri, his desired work was not to be. Instead, he was drawn into a ministry in Rome, which at that time had become decadent to the extreme, its streets littered with starving bodies and desperate prostitutes.  The results of his work are spoken of by his elevation to sainthood. By this, we are able to see how what we want and plan for is often not what is best for our energy and gifts. The same hand of fate can be seen redirecting Ignatius of Loyola, who had been a soldier from a wealthy family. A grave combat injury led first to embitterment, and then to a stunning change of direction, such that the order he founded would literally change the course of human history. The priesthood had never been in his plans. And yet…
 
            So it is, with my new novel, the one that started this discussion. The fundamental point of the story told is exactly that: that no matter our plans or whether we believe in God or fate or not, so He appears in our lives, silently changing both the little things – that chance encounter with the person who will be our spouse – and the Big Things, the guiding principles that ultimately put our stamp on the world.
 
            We can reject this invisible force; we can swim against the tide in rebellion or pride or in principle or by tradition, but still it is there. We know it is there. We are helped to see it: we get a late call about a book cover, or receive a mortal wound, or a post in Rome, and we are left to take it up. ‘Here it is, here is why you were made, this is what I ask of you. Now it is for you to decide.’
 
             I don’t think we even have to know what this call is during this life, but rather, accept what is honestly put before us. So it is that so many on their death beds tell us that they would not change a thing in their lives. It is, I think, because they now see the big picture and where they fit in; they now see that they had correctly let it be, that they had followed the calling of their heart to be sent where the winds of the Holy Spirit had desired to send them.
 
            So it is that I am left to ponder. Life is bigger than a book cover. What will I, will we see at the end of life? Will we find that, with all the regrets that we may now harbor, we will still say, “I would not change a thing?” For this we pray.