ON THE WAY TO SLEEPING GIANT

“Sleeping Giant” is the name of a brewery in Denver; a rainforest in Belize; a creative writing agency; a musician/performing arts ensemble; a series of mesas on Sibley Peninsula in Ontario Canada; it is also an aka for Nounou Mountain on Kauai in Hawaii and for the feature of the trail leading to an observation tower on the Peak of Mount Carmel in Connecticut; and it is also mentioned in the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora! in a quote by Isoroku Yamamoto referencing the attack on Pearl Harbor by the forces of Imperial Japan. Miriam-Webster defines it as “one that has great but unrealized or emerging power.” I use it to reference a portion of the Continental Divide ridgeline of the Rocky Mountains visible in the West outside Ward Colorado where my wife and I often rode horses (hence “On the Way to”); more importantly, “Sleeping Giant” is a metaphor for those giants among us whose genius, spirituality and higher consciousness were not recognized until years after their death. Think Vincent van Goth, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, and a host of others...

... Final note: my good friend, Jason Eklund, wrote the lyric, “If this story ain’t true, Lord, it should be” in his song, “Ghost Bird,” about the rumored sighting of an Ivory-billed woodpecker, a species thought to be extinct in 1944. All the stories of On the Way to SLEEPING GIANT—monologues for one man-theater productions, the fictions, the dreams, the non-fictions and historical accounts—should be true although the names have sometimes been changed to protect the guilty. Besides, we Irish would never “let the truth get in the way of a good story.”