http://www.lulu.com/shop/timothy-spearman/sailing-the-seven-cs/paperback/product-21402781.html Around 1990, Timothy Spearman met Tiger Ray McCendrick, a Hollywood agent living in Toronto’s Church St. gay district. There was a fundraising sale to raise money for HIV/AIDS hospices in Toronto and Tim was out to show his usual support for human rights issues. Tiger Ray was struck by Tim’s energy and charisma and being a former Hollywood agent, he was trained to spot star value. Seeing something special in Tim, he felt motivated to pass on to Tim his secret formula for living. He told Tim how how to sail the Seven C’s. “First you need Confidence,” he began. “Then you need Courage. Then you take Calculated Chances. After that, you’ll become a Champion, a Conqueror, and with any luck, a Caesar.” Tim has sailed the Seven C’s. His ship has come in. Read this story about a modern day Sindbad. As with the story “The Life of Pi,” it will make you believe in God and miracles. Tim's back cover photo shows him hugging a bust of Julius Caesar. It was taken in 1993 by an artist friend as a harbinger of the future Odds On Favorite By Timothy Spearman Odds-on Favourite is a crime thriller set in a Vegas casino called The Mangrove. The heroine is a Chinese beauty from Shanghai named Zhi Fan. She was more entrancing than the famous Chinese concubine Xishi, who drove men to offer gold coins for the privilege of catching a glimpse of her. In essence, it was no different for this Chinese casino girl of the hottest casino in the city. Men didn’t see her as a trophy date to show off at the gaming table. It was more than that. They coveted her more than their winnings. If they could play for her they would. As far as they were concerned she was the ultimate prize. Their winnings at the gaming table merely served to buy their way into her company even if it were only for a few dreamy minutes. But such beauty comes at a price and some will pay the ultimate price. http://www.lulu.com/shop/timothy-spearman/odds-on-favourite/paperback/product-21241476.html |
Butterfly Dreams This crime thriller is based loosely on the history of the Residential
School system in Canada. While the names and persons presented in the
story are fictional, the novel is based on crimes exposed by Rev. Kevin
Annett. Child trafficking and satanic ritual abuse is a serious problem
more endemic in our world than anyone realizes. This novel is unique in
that the sleuth solving the crime is an astrologer, who employs her art
to catch the killer. The author’s knowledge of the occult is profound
and the depth of research that has gone into this novel is obvious.
While the tale is grim, the heroes and heroines triumph and evil is
routed in the end. The fulfilment of Native prophecies at the triumphant
conclusion leads to newly awakened hope. A dimensional shift occurs and
our prison planet becomes a planet where hopes and dreams can at last
be achieved and where nothing can obstruct the truth from setting us
free |
History Of The Peace Train “The History of the Peace Train” documentary is based on the dream of one man, Jeremy Seligson. The story began in his youth and has carried on till old age. It all began on one of those halcyon days when the sky is completely blue and curving over green, wooded hills. Three seven-year-old boys were progressing in single file between the rails of a train track near Silver Spring, Maryland. They jumped from tarry tie to tie along the way to the unknown, for they had never gone this way before. An hour or so later, they arrived at a shanty town, a collection of shacks on either side of the tracks. None had any idea that such a place existed so close to suburbia. They had never seen poverty before. An old African-American appeared under the archway of a green hedge and said, “Boys, this place is called Toby Town. Would you like to step in here and see our wishing well?” One of the boys did venture inside with the kindly white-haired man. Some yards back and completely surrounded by tall hedges was a rectangular cistern, deep with clear sparkling water. “Throw in a coin and make a wish,” he said. The boy dug into his overalls and pulled out a shiny penny. He stood at the edge of the cistern, which was wider than he was long. For some moments of silence, he concentrated and sought out a wish. Then he tossed the coin in the air. It landed, floating momentarily, Abraham Lincoln’s face up. Then it sank in a curve until about halfway down. It curved in the opposite direction and finally settled on the clean, white bottom. What did the little boy wish for? Jeremy can’t remember now – too long ago. He does remember wishing though. Perhaps glancing up at the fine blue of that day, reflected in the water with my own image, he wished only for joy, the sweet, quiet joy and reaffirmation of the wonderful possibilities of life that, thanks to the man, he already had. He never went back to that spot, and shortly, with the expansion of the suburbs, it was wiped entirely off the map. Of course, Jeremy and family returned home following the course of the same railroad tracks. This single file pilgrimage was my first experience of belonging to a Peace Train. It would leave me an optimist for the rest of my life. Even though my mother had died a few years before, he knew that there was magic and goodness on Earth. The first job he had out of college was for Peace. In 1972, toward the end of the Vietnam War, he joined the Peace Corps and was employed in the Ministry of Land Reform for the Government of Haile Selassie. One agreement he worked on would allow nomads following the cycle of rains to cross unimpeded over the borders of Kenya and Somalia while grazing their herds. This yearly route was also a sort of Peace Train. Later, he rode a train from Bombay to Mathura, India on a pilgrimage to visit the Birthplace of Lord Krishna, as he was also seeking the source of spiritual peace. Seats were full when he got on with a ticket, then seated boys in rags beckoned to him and other standing passengers to sell them back the seats we had already paid for. He refused and sat on my bag. When the train started, the poor boys scrambled out of the windows. In Mathura, he crossed the holy Yamuna River by rowboat and returned with other pedestrians over the high railroad bridge, which was open to the air on both sides. It was single file along a narrow space beside of the tracks, through which one could see huge fish and great turtles swimming below. Hopefully a train wouldn’t be coming until each of us got over. A tricky moment came when he met a woman carrying a bundle on her head coming from the other direction. He clung to a pole while she inched around me. A year later, he would ride a train over the bridge on the way south to visit various holy sites and saints on the same search for Peace. He lay on a 3rd class sleeper bunk waiting the sun, a red ball in the sky, bouncing over the horizon, traveling along with us. Joining our compartment and bound for Madras was an Anglo-Indian couple and their children. The man Rodney Rapson was a retired, locomotive engineer. He invited me and my American girlfriend Heather to stay at their house in the Railway Compound at Washerman Pit. It was hot, so we slept outside under the stars. His son and musical group came outside to practice, and serenaded us with, “I’m sitting on top of the world, looking over all creation, and there’s nowhere in this world I’d rather be....” Heather and Jeremy separated on the train from Fremantle to Perth, Australia, after sailing from Singapore. Whereas she wept on our previous attempts at parting, this time, with seven dollars each in our pockets, and the prospect of hitching 1,000 miles north looking for work, he was the one who wept this time. She patted him on the back as he got out in the middle of nowhere. In 1975, he arrived in Japan with $100.00 in his pocket. By chance he found a Buddhist priest he had met just a week before in Washington, D.C., and the priest kindly paid for dinner and his ticket to Kyoto. One day, he found a long train tunnel on the Arashiyama side of the city that penetrated a mountain. Peering through he was suddenly grasped by an impulse and raced through toward a glimmer of light on the other side, every moment fearing the train would come. Beyond was a high trestle, without a guard rail, reaching with more track climbing through the forests and hills. Rather than risk it, he descended a cliff to a wide stream and crossed over rocks to the far side. There was nowhere to go but up. He climbed about 100 feet up but got caught on a sticker bush. There was no visible hand hold, nor was it safe to try to back down again. Perspiration dripped from his face and his glasses dropped off. A black cloud rose from the river and became a woman. She grasped him around the waist and was laughing, awaiting his fall. He knew her name was Death, and so for the first time in my life he truly prayed. Then a pure white hand of light appeared, showing him the way. In 1977, he arrived in Seoul, Korea and married his pen pal. Soon he was working at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in the English Education Department and kept that job until 2005. Often through the years he would hear of threats of war from North Korea, which was only 30 miles away, across the De-militarized Zone. Reportedly the North had enough fire power along the DMZ to destroy Seoul 10 times over. It was like a “Pill-box” for target practice. It was when a report came that they were threatening to turn Seoul into a “Sea of Fire” that he truly got nervous. By then, it was believed that they had already made an atomic bomb. By now, it is a certainty. Despite this danger, the U.S. Government under the 2nd President Bush had been refusing to negotiate with North Korea because they were deemed part of “the Axis of Evil.” Fortunately, some years later, this would change into a productive Six-party dialogue, including China and Japan, too. At the time however, it felt like they: his family, students and teachers, and all the other inhabitants Korean and foreign of Seoul were exposed to the imminent possibility of a nuclear catastrophe. On July 26, 2002, the summer before, he dreamt of riding a Peace Train through the night across America to Washington, D.C., to be greeted by the dream President Gore. From this dream came the idea of building a Children’s Peace Train. He said to his students, who were all training to become school teachers, "North Korea has threatened to turn Seoul into a Sea of Fire. If our governments are unable to talk to one another and make Peace, then how about asking the children to help by making drawings of Peace in their life, and linking them all into a Peace Train?" The students thought this was a great idea because they didn’t want to die in a war allowed to happen by negligent adults. It was at that same university that he met Tim Watson. Jeremy was struck by his intelligence and great passion for causes involving human liberties. Over the next ten years, he would become impressed by Tim’s grand visions and ceaseless ambitions. He did endorse the Children’s Peace Train and helped to bring it to India twice. He knew from reading the various books that he had written in fiction and non-fiction that he was a prodigious, undiscovered talent. What he needed was a great theme to carry him on, something of planet-wide and history-long proportions. Jeremy was reaching out to adults and children with a Children’s Peace Train project intended to save all from a planetary disaster, but he did not have the time, energy or academic background to complete in short order A History of the Peace Train, but I sensed that Tim did have the capability to handle this task. He immediately seized upon the idea that here was a story that could change the way in which people viewed one another, where they could see each other in a more positive light and so he was set to work. The History of the Peace Train, the seed of which was planted in Jeremy Seligson by the “wishing well” in Toby Town, and which burst open and grew into a seedling during my travels in Africa, India and Japan, would, following in the tracks of the precursor Children’s Peace Train, become a full grown tree, a forest of trees out of which Tim would research and lay down the ties of the tracks over which the many Peace Trains of our planet could roll one by one into our consciousness and our conscience as concerned human beings. Since The History of the Peace Train is about trains, it made sense to model this work after a train. The foreword assumes the role of the engine, the body the various boxcars, while the afterword is the caboose. The story is told in a steady rhythm and cadence that matches the rhythm of a train’s motion over the rails. The meandering narrative of this history will resemble a train’s journey around winding rivers, mountain passes, valleys and gorges. There will also be rising crescendos, climaxes and anti-climaxes resembling climbs up steep mountain grades and descents into deep mountain gorges. In short, this narrative should read like a real-life train journey, so enjoy the ride. How was The History of the Peace Train born? Like most ideas, it began with
a dream. The Children’s Peace Train movement was the dream of Jeremy Seligson,
an American professor living in South
Korea. We all dream, sometimes involuntarily
during sleep, sometimes when daydreaming, and then there are our dreams – our
aspirations and hopes. We can equivocate between these two uses of the word
‘dream’ because both express an alternative to our mundane existence, our
conscious waking reality, our now, our present. While the international peace
train initiative was spawned by the collective dreams of many individuals,
Professor Jeremy Seligson has done more to bring the next generation into the
effort. It is this key player who realized that children should be the
engineers of the Peace Train. Like many dreams, the tangible real-life dream
was preceded by a nocturnal dream. In this case, dreamer Jeremy Seligson had an
extraordinary dream one night in the wee hours of the morning. It was a vivid
dream, in which a tapestry of interconnecting rail lines wove the fabric of
different lands and cultures into an intricate design of peace and good will.
Like many other projects of The World
Dreams Peace Bridge, the Peace Train
Project began with a dream. This is the dream recorded by Jeremy Seligson
in Korea
on July 26, 2002: I am traveling with a group of friends in the countryside in the middle of nowhere. We have been in a village. I’ve wandered off on my own, but a responsible young man fetches me and says, ‘A train has come…’
I am in line with the group for lunch at the cafeteria. While in line Ada Aharoni (the founder of IFLAC – International Forum for Literature and Culture of Peace) comes over to me and smiling, says, ‘We are more successful than the other peace groups because it is not so well organized...Our group always gets together on time when it is time to move on.’
Our long black
locomotive travels all the way across the country to Washington, D.C.,
where outside the Capitol steps it is applauded by President Gore and many
other people dressed in suits. A large white banner around the smokestack
reads, Peace Train. This makes me joyful. I leap high in the air and float
partway down a hill, landing on the feet. Others around me are surprised I
could do this…[1] Since that fateful night,
Jeremy, Peace Train passengers, and crew, have been holding Peace Train
Workshops all over the world. One of the best publicized and most successful
was staged at the Association for the Study of Dreams Conference held between
June 27 and July 1 at the Radisson Hotel in Berkeley, California.
The dreams and Peace Train workshops were conducted by Jeremy Seligson, May
Tung, and Jean Campbell. The highlight was the display of Peace Trains from
around the world. Dear Mrs. Yeon,
In another of his brainchildren, Jeremy explained the purpose of the international Peace Train movement: The Peace Train is a dream on behalf of the people and other creatures of this planet, and especially for the children and future generations who will inherit the condition of life on Earth from us. It is a dream of love and prosperity, of harmony and joy, of self-confidence and personal security. It is a dream of a co-operative family, local and world community, one that creates an environment for respectful settlement of disputes. And it began with an actual dream I had on July 26th, 2002...[2]
Jeremy’s vision is brought into even sharper focus when he explains the central role that children play in the Peace Train movement:
The first trains began rolling in from children in South Korea. It
was here that the World Children’s Peace Train first began, with art works
collected by my students at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. They went out to
playgrounds, elementary and middle school classrooms, Sunday schools, art
schools, youth groups and other places to lead Peace Train workshops, collect
and construct trains together with the children. The children made Peace Trains
and at the same time received Peace Training. They learned to express their own
desires and feelings for peace, as well as to work together with others on a
project for peace, a project which was part of a greater design, involving
children around the whole world...
Jeremy is right of course. There is a real and present danger that war could break out on the Korean peninsula at any time. The Armistice Agreement that brought an end to hostilities in 1953 was only a tentative ceasefire and not a formal peace treaty. The Korean War was not a war, but a UN-sponsored police action and is more properly called the Korean Conflict. There is a more or less permanent ceasefire but no formal terms for ending the conflict were ever actually ratified. The Korean War was never officially ended. It is frightening to consider that, while hostilities have been suspended, an even more formidable military build up has taken place on both sides of the border since the terms of ceasefire were established in Panmunjom. The Six Nation Talks aimed at disarming North Korea’s nuclear capability, while securing peace on the peninsula, only adds to the uncertainty. While it is clear that Superpowers Russia and China offer diplomatic, tactical and logistical support to North Korea, America and Japan offer similar support to South Korea. In real terms, the Korean peninsula is a geopolitical chessboard, in which Russia and China could easily be drawn into a World War III scenario by advising badook (Korean chess) player North Korea, while America and Japan could enter the fray by advising their ally to the south. The rhetorical invectives and diatribes launched by Kim Jeung-il and the ruling party of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea against their perceived enemies, South Korea, America and Japan are frightening enough without the added belief that they might actually mean it. And let us not forget the stealth with which North Korea launched the last surprise invasion, when their forces marched over the border in a pre-dawn invasion on June 25, 1950. The North Korean army, Rodon-II tactical ballistic missiles, and other instruments of war make the threat of a North Korean military invasion even more formidable than the 1950 incursion. And that’s only from the free world side of the fence. I’m sure that whatever information is spoon fed to the North Korean population about the military technology of America, which is probably a century ahead in terms of technological know-how and destructive capability, the fear-factor must be even more high-pitched. I lived in South Korea for eleven years. I monitored the situation closely. I worked for both the Korea Times and the Korea Herald for a combined total of five years. I worked the graveyard shift at the Korea Herald and read the wire service stories till I was blue in the face. I moonlighted as a copy editor at the Korean Herald while maintaining my day job at the university. I even helped create headlines for the wire stories before they went to print. The rhetorical invectives, diatribes and barbed comments issued by all sides during the height of the Six Nation Talks were enough to inspire me to make out a will. It was amazing for me to consider, now that I am safely transplanted back in Toronto, that Seoul could have been turned into a sea of fire by a North Korean missile attack at anytime of the day or night while I was stationed there. I worry for those still there and wonder what the next tragic event might be in Korea’s long and often unhappy history. I have seen the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) firsthand. Running along the thirty-eighth parallel line of latitude, it covers the Korean peninsula from coast to coast. Six miles wide, it is eerie to stand there and gaze across its expanse. It was hauntingly silent the day of my visit. The DMZ is punctuated with guard posts and lookout towers and is booby trapped in several locations. It is a wavy rather than straight demarcation line dividing the two Koreas resembling the Taeguk symbol featured on the South Korean national flag. A friend of mine by the name of Marlon Suh, who ran the South Korean branch of the International Friendship Society (IFS), also ran a NGO that monitored North Korean activities closely. One of the projects of this NGO was to monitor subterranean noise pollution to guard against North Korean covert activities in the South. What the organization discovered was that indeed there were indications that drilling activities were taking place corresponding with a slow but steady advance south. The studies verified that a beehive of tunnels appeared to have been bored from the north reaching the extremities of the south, many of them offshore. When these findings were shared with the relevant South Korean and American military and political attachés, the reception was lukewarm at best and bordered on dismissal. Perhaps the authorities were merely feigning nonchalance when the reality was really quite different. I also learned that the North Korean Army had manufactured bogus South Korean military uniforms and that, if a successful subterranean invasion were launched, enabling North Korean infantry and armoured divisions to penetrate deep into the South Korean interior, the resulting confusion would throw the South Korean units and their American allies into complete confusion and disarray. Let us hope it doesn’t happen, but it is easy to see how it could. On the other side of the world in my native land of Canada, legendary Canadian journalist and author, Pierre Burton, wrote two books called The National Dream and The Last Spike, in which he captured the dream of Canada’s founding Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, to unite British North America from sea to shining sea through the construction of a national rail line. The dream as we all know came true and “the true north strong and free” better known as Canada was born.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhYLHI0KoOw |
Must I Remember Must I Remember is based on the Rostami family’s epic journey to find a new You Tube About the Book http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVlCZYgqTyQ&feature=youtu.be The Bestselling book is now available on line: http://www.amazon.com/Timothy-Spearman/e/B00AKDHV40/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1376810400&sr=1-2-ent |