PREFACE by David Sparenberg from LEAPING INTO THE UNKNOWN

ATTENTION WRITERS & LITERARY ASPIRANTS

If you have a book in progress or literary project; have gone as far with it as you can solo; and are in need of some editing, co-authoring or research assistance, I have an editing service to offer. I am an internationally published author, poet, playwright, storyteller, actor, stage director, book reviewer, editor and workshop facilitator. What I am offering is spiritually sensitive, professional, writer friendly and affordable. If your project is serious, together we can bring it to full fruition and empowerment, providing you with the optimal possible for future publication. If you are serious and interested, please contact David Sparenberg, Path Finding-Writer Friendly Editing & Research Services at EarthArtsTurtleIsland@yahoo.com.

During much of 2006 I was in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Part of that time had me involved with editing and revising LEAPING INTO THE UNKNOWN, the autobiography of Florchita Bautista. Shortly before her book was published, the author asked me to write a synopsis, which she finally used as a published preface. This preface, as a work sample of result from my editing & research services follows:

Lives come and go, many of them in silent resignation, if not ignorance; many ignored in passage. History, if we view it honestly, as the pitting of power against power, is a forever struggle between the shackles of slavery in one form or another and the resistance, rebellion and recurring dream of freedom. Unfortunately, freedom is not always victorious and too many times history is but a record of the domination of the inhuman, where the victorious are indifferent to injustice and the sanctity of life is suppressed and denied. Regardless of the means and the rational of callousness, coldness, cruelty, the result is always scandalously the same—a measurement of the degrees of betrayal and suffering.

Now and again, although obviously too rarely, one or another of us out of the multitudes of generations raises a voice of self-awareness and brings questioning against the mechanisms and institutions complicit in the status quo of oppression and exclusion. The one who speaks up in this way, even should the address be no more than a confessional whisper, bears witness to the integrity of experience and the articulation becomes narrative.

As a gift of sharing in the search for a community of recognition, the story of life, of a life, refuses to remain at the level of victimization and hence pass silently into irrevocable oblivion. But the bane and the blessing of the narrative of a witness is that the witness does not go away. To the contrary, the telling is an act on the side of conscience and in favor of redress and clarity. Inevitably such a story points a direction invested with values and inevitably it leads on into a reconciliation and even inner peace.

Florchita Bautista’s reflections tell us of a life lived in the context of the history with which we are disturbingly all too familiar. It is also the story of a life that knows another history, that of the spirit, where the forces of despair and the lures of temptation are countered by the struggles and triumphs of faith and resurgent courage. Finally, here is the story of a human life lived in the twofold recognition that none can be at peace while ignoring the plight of others and that in the stations of the cross for the sake of freedom and dignity one does not go alone, but with the presence of God whose love is more than the hatreds of those who willfully embrace the inhuman, and is ever beyond even that anger that can take up residence within one’s own heart.

Florchita (Chit to her friends) has lived through the longer part of the 20th century, a century of war and oppression, and into this new century, into the new millennium, with potentials that are unknown, now menacing yet undefined and promising. She invites her readers to travel with her in the conviction that this life is a rite of passage undertaken, even in the dark night of the soul, in the radiance of the guiding light of God. And she seeks to share with us the belief that the reward of the sojourn is the discovery of oneself as worthy of the journey and the Holy Companion who walks beside us.

David Sparenberg
27 December, 2006
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada

ps-I am currently assisting an upstate New York author with a first novel set in Guatamala & Nicaragua during the time of the Civil & Contra Wars.