John Biscello

It was what Crowfeather called the Blue Star ceremony, or Above Air ceremony. It took place on Winter Solstice 2020. It wad during the enigmatic, unsettling and ominous period of COVID, the virus that was upsetting the balance of the world as we knew it and wanted it to remain. A group of us had gathered at Crowfeather’s home, and sitting outside, around the roaring fire, we reflected on and spoke our intentions, hopes and prayers to the angels, the ascended, the star-people. At one point during the ceremony, Crowfeather came over to me and said that a spirit had come to him and told him that I was meant to write something called Chronicles. The message wasn’t altogether clear. If I were meant to write something titled Chronicles, if I were meant to write Taos Chronicles, of the times we were living in, chronicles of a spiritual journey—all or none or some of the above. Crowfeather said he was simply relaying the message as he had received it. I kept that in mind. At the time, I had nearly completed my fifth novel, The Last Furies, and had started working on my sixth, No one Dreams in Color. Fast forward to 2023, when I completed my seventh novel, None So Distant. I had finished the work during a two-week retreat at my friend’s house in Santa Fe. I sat in contemplation for some time. I began to envision an umbrella under which a specific period or phase or spell existed. The official pandemic timeline was announced as March 2020-May 2023. May 2023 marked the end of pandemic status. Within the pandemic timeline I had completed three novels. This got me thinking about these three novels reflecting, encapsulating, and exemplifying a specific field of energy—the tints, flavors, and tones of a zeitgeist—and I kept on ruminating, tracking to Samuel Beckett, and the writing of his trilogy of novels—Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable—written in Paris during a three-year span, 1947-50, following and you could say energetically hosting the trials, despair and desolation wrought by World War II. Calamity, on a profound or widespread scale, is often an incubator and catalyst for works that reflect, though not always directly or overtly or explicitly, the spirit of the times in which they were born. I then recalled Crowfeather’s ceremony, and his talk of the blue star, how we were in the time of the blue star, that the world and its paradigms were undergoing major upheavals and shifts, and that we were existing within the cradle and nucleus of a creation/destruction period. This is how I came to recognize these novels—The Last Furies, No One Dreams in Color, and None Do Distant—as the Blue Star Trilogy. They were spiritual kin, born under the blue star, or in the time of the blue star, and perhaps reflected or encapsulated the spirit of the times and the etheric womb from which they had emerged.