Here is another author's name that vanished from the manuscript in our possession. Let us know who you are, and we'll advance you to the top of our class in Bleeding Heartfulness. Clue: we know who it is dedicated to.

Not long after I started going out with my friend Meg, I decided it would be good for her to meet some friends of mine. It's an important part of the early romantic dating phase, where you bond by sharing the bounty of your cohorts, so I took her to meet a couple of guys I did time with in federal prison. You see, my parents were deceased so I couldn't take her to meet them, not that these guys were any substitute for mom and dad. I had to start somewhere and I thought this would be a good pass/fail test. So off we went to my jailbird reunion. I really didn't put much thought into this.

JaJa, is a Chinese Silkie hen, the Silkies are composed of black meat that is believed to contain medicinal powers when eaten. So Ja Ja, the hen believed to be a medicine bird, sat and sat and sat on her clutch of eggs and then she even continued to sit some more. She only got up off of her eggs once every day or two to drink some water and eat some grain. She continued to sit even when it was very cold outside for days in a row, even when being outside for just a few minutes without moving around froze a person down to their bones.

Song of Jaja, the Medicine Bird


Life and death, shadow and light, read me o' reader if you find delight for I am rarely reborn into this life. JaJa the silkie medicine bird brought an egg to life in 27 days, but it only took the cold breath of winter thirty seconds to bring it death. Winter is a long cold brutal master that is difficult to tolerate and even more difficult to please. Winter took the life of that beautiful chic and winter made me awaken once again to the fact that difficult things are hard to know. After I placed JaJa and her clutch of eggs next to the wood stove, I monitored her very closely for several days. She was not satisfied with just one chic, she kept sitting on her clutch of eggs while mothering her new chic, keeping it warm, talking to it and pointing it to the direction of the food and water.