Echoes in the Wood
by
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It was a rainy night when the first news reports started coming in. A Thursday, if I remember right. They said there had been an accident on the Three Gorges Dam Project on the Yangsee River in China. I was playing solitaire when I first heard. As soon as I did, the radio went off and all news TV came on. First reports said that over two thousand workers had been killed. They said that the base of the dam had collapsed taking the rest of the structure down with it. It looked like what was the most ambitious dam project in the history of man was turning into one of his worst disasters. I remember thinking that the Chinese leadership already had their hands full, with China’s economic problems and so much trouble trying to bring Hong Kong into the fold. The unrest in Hong Kong had gotten to where it was becoming a fixture on the nightly news programs hard as the Chinese tried to stop it. It hadn’t been that long ago that a lot of people in Asia (at least according to friends of ours who decided to settle in Thailand instead of returning Stateside) were convinced that when China regained control of Hong Kong, all of the positive Chi in Asia moved to China. It was their explanation for all of the struggling economies in Asia I thought about the International Monetary Funds bailouts of South Korea and Indonesia and the help the States was giving to Japan. Even with the change of leadership and fulfilling the IMF requirements, things were getting worse, not better. The "War on Terrorism", as the President called it then, just seemed to make things worse. The bailout started to work in Korea, but then things headed down again. The social and political changes that were part of it had thrown Korean society into chaos. The labor unions had gone ballistic and college campuses had become combat zones. The streets of Seoul had become as dangerous as Sarievo years before. The talk of reunification with the North was completely gone. The North had been labeled a "Terrorist State". It was getting worse by the day. In North Korea, things had gotten so bad that mass funerals were becoming common place. If the positive Chi had moved to China, there was an obvious lack of it in both Koreas. Thailand was in trouble, Indonesia. The unthinkable had hit Japan with recession following recession. Even Japan, the economic miracle of the Far East! Asian stock markets seemed to drift from one crisis to another. And now an epic disaster in China. If what was happening in China was supposed to be happening under good Chi, positive Chi that had been "soaked up" by China, how bad could things get? I started listening again troubled by my thoughts, remembering what "she" had told me in a dream just two nights before. The commentator was saying that some reports said there had been an earthquake but there had been no confirmation.
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About the Book
He was haunted by a spirit in the form of a woman he shouldn’t love but did. His dreaming seemed to be telling him something, something important, but he didn’t want to know and couldn’t understand. But then it began, first with the death of his wife just when things seemed to be getting better. And a disaster of unbelievable proportions. Do we share a common consciousness? If we do, can we tap into it? Do we, as a species, make joint decisions in this common consciousness that have an impact on our physical world? Has it happened before? Is there a way that we can really know? Can we truly change our own reality, or are we victims of Karma or some incredibly sadistic god? Follow one man as he struggles to answer those questions and lives in a world that doesn’t seem real. A world that really couldn’t be real, could it?
About the Author
Ken Windisch has traveled extensively in his work as a medical device Quality Assurance and Regulatory Affairs professional. Across four continents he has seen both the good and the bad that man has to offer. He’s experienced the ugliness of war in Indochina during the 60’s and 70’s, and seen the dedicated efforts of men and women striving to improve the quality of life for people with a wide array of maladies and injuries. In his travels he came to see that we are all essentially the same, sharing the same needs and wants, hopes and desires. It’s only the variations in our ancestry that make us different today. Even in our religions, he’s found uncanny similarity in the essence of each society’s definition of God and man’s relationship to God. The differences seem not unlike the evolution of language when separated by time and space. The details and specifics change, but the essence remains the same. Those similarities spawned an interest in and extensive reading of many of the religious texts from around the world. In those readings, his belief in the common source and understanding of the nature of our being was underscored. His belief in who and what God is has changed and grown. Ken and his wife of thirty years met during the Vietnam conflict and came to the United States following a post military stint on a contract with the Defense Attaché’ Office out of the U. S. Embassy in Saigon. They left Vietnam not long before the collapse of the South. Echoes in the Wood taps into the experiences he and his wife have shared, including raising four sons. In the story he asks "what if--" based on the premise of a common human consciousness and the "oneness" of humanity reflected in our troubled and changing world. The general dissatisfaction with who and what we have become seems to be the same as that expressed by all of the great religious "masters" that have walked the earth. And as new information is continually being developed, it would seem we have been in this state before. Is it really God that judges us in a great final judgement, or do we judge ourselves?