conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for a book with the title 'The Fifth Sacred Thing'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Fifth Sacred Thing
  Bird wasn't sure how to answer him. "They didn't break anything this time," he said finally. Except me.
  He had to say it out loud, Bird thought. He had to name it, rub my nose in the shit. But it didn't really matter.
  Bird said nothing. He could hear a stream flowing somewhere behind them, but he imagined that it would be stopped again, before long.
  There was a long silence. "You want the ration cards?" Bird asked again. "I'll be here every morning. Tell people."
  Finally Sam spoke. "We're getting nowhere here. Perhaps it's time to end this conversation. If you like, Bird, I'll take a message to Maya for you."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She slid one hand up into the vagina, slipped two fingers of the other hand behind the baby's head. It called for a turning motion, like unscrewing a bolt; she had done it fifty times but never without tension. There was so much that could go wrong. If she dislocated the child's shoulder or broke its arm, or if this proved the one impossible to move....
  Her hands caught it, her eyes noted that it was a girl, and she placed the baby on Katy's belly. There was no suction bulb to clear its nostrils and throat, but the child opened her tiny mouth and began to breathe and cry.
  Madrone laughed. "That's the vernix that covers the skin in the womb to keep it healthy. In a moment we'll rub it in. Or rub some on your skin—there's nothing better for it."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And maybe on the way they would find the old sea, the clean sea, where the dream poems of whales still resounded in the deep places, where dolphins arched and ran near the secret rendezvous grounds of the golden seal. Oh, the world was a very big place; she had traveled enough when she was young to know that anything might still hide in the vast spaces of the west. There might be islands of summer where she would find the disappearing songbirds, and schools of deep-sea salmon massing to return up great rivers and spawn in mountain streams. Oh yes. Oh yes. She would believe, she had always needed to believe, that at daybreak in some warm ocean, seahorses still rose to greet their mates with a circular dance, their spiral tails twined around spires of sea grass. She had never seen them but she would go and find them, stranger than any mythical beast, the living creatures of the ancient, unwounded earth.
  She would find them, going west, flanked by ghosts, accompanied by her beloved dead, by fallen heras and heros and villains and the ranks of the extinct, west against the wind to bring them home, west toward the moon and the evening star, west against the bright slanting rays of the sun and the turning clock of the earth, until west became east, until sunset became sunrise, until time swallowed its own tail and the day that was ending became a day that was just beginning to dawn.
  Many of the chants and songs quoted in this story are actually used in rituals. The chant "Free the heart, let it go" on this page was created in a ritual class I taught in a summer workshop in Creation Spirituality at Omega Institute, by a woman whose name I am sorry to say I've forgotten. "If we have courage" on this page was written by myself and Rose May Dance. The chant "The earth is our mother" used as a password by the Web is Native American. The chant "Silver Shining Wheel" on this page is by Sparky T. Rabbit. "Yemaya Asesu," sung by Madrone on this page, is a traditional Yoruba chant taught to me by Luisah Teish. The invocation on this page that begins: "By the earth that is her body" comes from the Faery tradition of Witchcraft and was taught me by Victor Anderson. The song to Elijah sung on this page is from the Jewish Seder.
  The quotation from Diane Di Prima on this page is from a poem I heard her read at An Evening of Music and Poetry for an End to Nuclear Testing, Dec. 5, 1990, at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco. All other chant lyrics and poems are by me.