"Hey," I Exclaimed, "That Was My Idea!"

I read an author on Substack who said she was tired of publishers not paying her, and she was going to begin writing a series of small books.

 "Hey," I exclaimed, "that was my idea!"

Writing small books, I mean.

Well, there is room for both of us, but isn't it odd when an idea is floating around and more than one person gets it? I heard that when Albert Lamorisse wrote The Red Balloon, to his dismay, another author was also presenting a book by the same title for publication. Both were published. (A title is one thing not copyrightable.) Lamorisse's book, made into a movie, won an Academy Award. (His young son plays the protagonist.)

Lamorisse was a filmmaker and was praised for his photography, yet while filming another movie, his helicopter crashed, killing all aboard. His grown-up son and wife completed the movie and released it posthumously. (I keep finding dead authors, darn it.)

I love novels, and I usually have one running all the time, but reading them takes time, and time is a precious commodity. You can read a short story in one sitting, and it is more fun than a bunch of real-life How-tos. Besides, I want to get to the questions and answers quickly.  People have asked these same questions for eons, and will continue to do so for eons to come, however, they are fun to ask, and the answers are as different as the person asking them. "What’s my purpose? Why am I here? Where do we go from here? What sort of spirituality rings true for me?"

I reach out tentatively and touch the questions, throw a few crumbs their way, drop a little magic, and run away.

Here are the first two books in my "WHERE" series,

10,000 words or less—fiction.

 

Two so far:

Number 1: Where Tiger's Belch, 8,791  words.

Number two: Where the Frogs Sing Café, 6,766 words.

Remember Edward Abby's quote? He gives an invocation better than I can:

"May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams wait for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls." –Edward Abby

As we go through life, not only have our bodies been bruised, but our spirits have often been as well. Yet, a few words can shine light into a dark hole, tickle our funny bone, or motivate us.

This series is my try.

"Don't try, do."—Yoda

Carry on. Do good work,

P.S. In searching for other books of this genre, (I don’t know what their genre is called) I found two authors who have written books the sort I aspire to. I’ve read two books from each. One author is John Strelecky, The Café at the End of the World, A Story About the Meaning of Life. “Over 4 million sold,” so says the cover. See, I know there are people who like these sorts of books. The other is Michael V. Ivanov. The Traveler’s Secret, Ancient Proverbs for Better Living. (Five stars.)

Yea, live authors.

Here we go with Number Two:

 Excerpt from Where The Frogs Sing Cafe: 

 

  

Copyright © 2025

ISBN: 979-8-9906076-2-0

Published by The Frog’s Song Publishing Junction City, OR 97448

 

Cover design by Joyce Davis

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the author's prior permission.

 

Chapters

 

Chapter 1 Voted the Best Café by My Mother

Chapter 2 The Green Flash

Chapter 3 Who Created This System Anyway?

Chapter 4 Underground Railroad

Chapter 5 Where is That Person?

Chapter 6 Life Beyond the Horizon

Chapter 7 I Vote for That

 

"May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles, and poet's towers into dark primeval forest where tigers belch, and monkeys howl…beyond that next turning of the canyon walls."

–Edward Abbey  

 

“Frogs sing the eternal call to life and happiness.”

 

 1

"Voted the Best Café by My Mother"

 

 

Carolyn, Freda, and I were barreling down a lava-based road in our rented Jeep while cane grass as high as the Jeep's hood slapped us on both sides. We thought a Jeep suited us, but by the end of this day, we felt beaten up from the constant wind in our hair and sun on our cheeks. And why in the heck were we on this road?

We had seen a sign tucked in alongside the highway, barely visible if you were going any speed at all: "Voted the Best Café by My Mother," it read. We laughed but kept on going until we saw the second sign: "Where the Frog's Sing Café" with an arrow pointing to the road we were now on.

The road didn't look like one that would lead to a café, but after our day of snorkeling in the ocean, sunning on the beach, and being wind-whipped to pieces in an open-air jeep, we were exhausted and starving.

And so, when the sign indicated a café ahead, we aimed toward it.

We were on summer break from college, and although it might seem that a trip to Hawaii is a luxurious holiday, our families got together to give us three girls this trip. My Aunt Mable gave us her Condo share for a week, our folks paid for our airline tickets, and we scraped together enough money to live for seven days.

We were all juniors in college and had been friends since high school, but there we were, exhausted after our junior year and worried about what to do after graduation. Our folks decided we needed a break, and so they gave us this gift, like the Twelve Days of Christmas minus eleven.

Eventually, the lava-encrusted, lumpy road through the cane grass ended at a strip of golden/white sand. And there on that beautiful sand sat a Robinson Crusoe-style shack with a sign under its thatched roof, Where the Frogs Sing Café.

When I (the designated driver) cut the motor, we heard the surf pounding off in the distance.

"Jo," Carolyn attentively asked from the passenger seat, "do you think this is safe?"

"We have only met friendly people," I said. "This looks like the sort of place poor college students would frequent, a Barefoot pub on the beach. Besides, do you think that fellow we met while snorkeling would steer us wrong? He said there was a shortcut to our condo beside a café titled Where the Frogs Sing? He seemed nice."

"Well, you were flirting with him, no wonder he was nice."

"All the more reason to trust him. He was flirting back." I opened the car door and swung my legs out. 

end of excerpt 

 

Where The Frogs Sing Cafe will be available on Kindle in a day or two. In the meantime, since you are my blog readers, and if you want to read the rest of the story, I will send you a PDf file for Free to your email. You can be my first readers. See what you think.  This offer will only be available this week. Thanks for reading.

Oh, I need your email address to send it. No worries, I never let emails creep out of my box. My dog guards it.

Go to joshappytrails at gmail.com/ You know what at means. Type it in. Whohoo! Sing with the frogs. Say YES.

 

 

 

What Fills You With Liveliness?

 

“What fills you with so much liveliness that you want to do the work yourself?”—Jane Friedman

 

This morning as I stood at the sink with my hands in soapy dishwasher, an image flashed in my head. It was another day with my hands in soapy dishwater.

I was in Hawaii and worried that we were on the verge of running out of water. It freaked me so much that I get images of it to this day—and I’m not in Hawaii. I’m in Oregon where everyone in the family would laugh when I say I conserve water, for I have left the water running more than once, but hey, that’s when I left my mind someplace else.

In Hawaii we used a water catchment system where rainwater was collected from the house’s roof, shuttled into a pipe, and carried to a storage tank in the backyard. From the tank it flowed magically into faucets in the house. We had hot water too, after we replaced the rusted-out water heater with a new on-demand Propane heater that gave us instant hot water. On the first day on our new property, though, I took a cold shower in the sunshine in the yard on the glorious green grass.  (Using plastic tubs of cold water.) I left invigorated as though I’d had a brisk swim. However, I didn’t want to do that every day, and Daughter Dear said, “One of the great pleasures of life is soaking in a hot bath.”

All this water shortage was El Nino’s fault.

El Nino is a complex weather condition related to the wind and the ocean water. During an El Nino, California gets the rain, and Hawaii gets the drought.

Hawaii has a solution:

They provide a free water fill station with enormous nozzles that will fill a tank quickly—that is if you have the capability of hauling water. We put a small tank in the back of the pickup for that purpose. See why I love our pickup truck—for moving, hauling garbage to the free dump, and for being my office on wheels. It’s a general work horse.

During the rain shortage, I heard the rattling of a gigantic water truck delivering water to the neighbors on the ten acres next to ours. They had horses and thus a great need for water. That showed that you can have water delivered by the truck load to fill your tank.

We added a second storage tank on our property which Husband Dear and a helper built. After leveling the ground, adding a sand base and a plastic liner, Husband Dear and assistant built the tank up to eight feet. Husband Dear worked from inside the tank, and with the helper outside, they built up the tank using metal panels. That left Huband Dear inside a tank with a ladder being the only way out. Or a helicopter.

The ladder worked.

I wrote about our experience on the Big Island in a small book, The Frog’s Song, published by Regal Publishing. It should have a subtitle like “Living off the grid for one year.”

No, The Frog’s Song is not a children’s book. It is the story of one husband, one daughter, one seven-month-old grandson, two dogs, and two cats, who took leave of their senses, put their house up for sale, and moved to a tropical Island.

Pila of Hawaii calls moving to the Island a “Sojourn of Rejuvenation and Discovery.” 

Pila was convinced that Hawaii is where an individual must physically connect within a kind of initiation to prepare for the turbulent years ahead.

Daughter Dear and I felt “called” to the Island, we didn’t know anything about the sojourn, it simply seemed imperative that we move there. A year later, it seemed imperative that we leave. We moved to California for two years recovering from our “Sojourn,” before moving back to Oregon. We kept questioning what we felt on the Island, why we had such energy shifts, and why some places felt good while others felt odd. And then we learned that the Island is often called the Dirty Laundry Island because your issues come up to be healed. Whoa!

 (It turned out that leaving the Island was necessary for my husband’s health—more in the book.)

At the City of Refuse—one of the most tranquil places I have ever encountered, we heard an elder tell his story. As a child an elder sat down a few children and asked them, “What lies beyond the horizon?

“The sun, the water, nothing.”

To them the Island was their entire world.

“No,” said the elder, “There is life beyond the horizon.”

 I took that as a message and another reason to leave the Island, especially with a year-old child. Don’t stay cooped up on an Island when there is life out there.

More on The City of Refuge in the book.

I wanted to use The Frog’s Song as a title for my book after drawing the frog card three times from the Medicine Cards deck and learned that “The frog’s song calls the rain that settles the dust for our journey.”

To our surprise, the Coqui frogs of Hawaii sang us to sleep at night by singing their name, “Co-Qui.” To me they sounded like birds. Others on the Island consider them to be “Noise pollution,” and I guess in large numbers they can be quite loud, but I loved ours.  And I had to laugh when we returned to Oregon where at night, we heard the booming sound of a Bullfrog. (Trumpeting our return?)

“On the Big Island,” wrote Pila, “you are on ‘new turf,’ and the comfort zone known as your ordinary world no longer applies…You are at one of the few doorways in your reality where the Earth liquefies, and nothing is as it may seem.”  That is why Pila feels it is paramount for individuals to come to the Big Island and experience the energy in person at least once.

When Captain Cook asked the natives where they lived, and they said Hawaii, he thought they were ignorant savages. What they meant was that I live in Hawaii, “The Breath of the Creator.”

“Ha” = breath

“Wai” = life force, the water

“I” = I

“I live in the supreme wellspring of the life force of creation which is within me and all I behold is Paradise.”

Some say that Hawaii is not an easy place to live, for if you go there to run away from something, that something will present itself. Yep. And I know that the “call” to Hawaii, is a call not so much to a physical place, but to home—to the breath of the creator.

 

To say “ALOHA” is to stand in the presence of the breath, spirit and light, and to acknowledge and recognize all of this in another.” Pila of Hawaii.

Aloha,

Jo

All this from washing dishes this morning. 

 

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