Coyote Vision

Epic Poem - Second book in the COYOTE SERIES

152pp + soft cover, 7x9 Perfect Bound

That moment when we realize we are awake and dreaming simultaneously, can be
one of the greatest pleasures taken for granted in what we believe is our life
but what nature calls our vision.

COYOTE VISION opens on the quiet shore of a lake, where an unnamed narrator lives among books, firewood, and the slow turning of seasons. Into this contemplative solitude arrives Coyote—trickster, teacher, keeper of an ancient and breathing journal that holds visions of time itself. What begins as an unlikely friendship, marked by riddles, tea, and gentle mockery, unfolds into something far larger: an initiation into a way of seeing the world that the narrator's shelves of philosophy and religion could never fully hold.

As winter gives way to fever, and fever gives way to clarity, the narrator is drawn deeper into Coyote's teaching. He is led through dense forest to a hidden cave, welcomed by a gathering of animals, and brought before a sacred sweat where peyote and prayer dissolve the boundary between self and world. There, under Mescalito's watchful presence, he meets mermaids who move like starlight through water, ancestors who speak in the language of bear and turtle, and a red-tailed hawk whose wings become his own. Time bends and doubles; he finds himself in two places at once, learning that consciousness is not bound to a single body or a single moment.

Yet the journey is not only rapture—it is reckoning. Coyote, ever patient but unwilling to spare the narrator his blind spots, confronts him with the stubborn arrogance of human thought: its hunger to explain rather than to feel, to categorize rather than to belong. The narrator's instinct to retreat into metaphor and intellect nearly costs him the journal itself, and with it, the deeper truth being offered. It is only in a moment of surrender—when the animals gather at his window and the mermaids open the journal's pages once more—that he glimpses, at last, the truth Coyote has been circling all along: that all things, from dahlia petal to galaxy, are woven from the same living thread.

By the book's final pages, the narrator has been changed—not into a mystic with answers, but into someone capable of sitting with mystery. On his dock at sunrise, uncertain whether he watches a fish or a mermaid's tail break the water, he embodies the very lesson Coyote set out to teach: that wonder need not be resolved to be true. COYOTE VISION moves with the cadence of myth and the intimacy of memoir, blending playful humor with profound tenderness, until the ordinary lake, the ordinary man, and the extraordinary universe become, quite simply, one and the same.

Book Review

Coyote Vision is a luminous work that dissolves the boundary between waking and dreaming, philosophy and lived experience. Dave Boles crafts a narrative where a solitary intellectual encounters Coyote—trickster, teacher, and keeper of a breathing journal that holds visions of time itself. Through encounters with animals, mermaids, blood-red dahlias, and the divine presence of Mescalito, the narrator journeys toward an understanding of universal interconnectedness, guided by psychedelic ceremony and ancient wisdom.

Boles's greatest achievement lies in his portrayal of Coyote's paradoxical nature: a figure of genuine humor and mischief who simultaneously serves as a profound spiritual guide. The trickster's playful antics—painting himself with neon-pink circles, getting stuck in trees with superglue—mask a patient determination to dismantle the narrator's intellectual certainties. The journal itself becomes more than a plot device; it functions as a living symbol of knowledge that breathes, glows, and resists easy categorization, embodying the very mystery the narrator must learn to embrace rather than explain.

What distinguishes this work is its unflinching exploration of how intellectual frameworks can obscure truth. The narrator's repeated retreat into metaphor and philosophy nearly costs him access to the journal's visions, until a moment of genuine surrender allows him to perceive the interconnectedness Coyote has been teaching all along. The book reads as both intimate memoir and surreal parable, deliberately employing dreamlike logic that asks readers to surrender conventional explanations and rational certainty.

Boles balances visionary imagery with genuine tenderness, creating a text that invites readers to question not only the nature of reality but their own capacity to perceive it. The result is a work of imaginative charm that reminds us: the most profound truths often arrive wrapped in paradox and wonder.

What I thought would be a quick reading and a few comments have
turned into several hours of wandering around "Coyote Vision" slightly
agog at the complex and fantastical building of a story that is a
treatise, allegory, and superb fable, mixed with a visionary approach to
a reasonable, logical and inspired philosophy.

As a story about a guy who talks with animals and spirits and
mermaids, while downing generous portions of natural wonders, it is
fun and amusing. As a multi-layered treatise on the human condition,
the book is serious to the point of being frightening. As an allegorical
fable that offers a solution to the arrogance so readily on display in our
fractured world, the book deserves much thought, rereading, and even
ingestion or inhalation of something herbal to slow down the heart as it
absorbs the story. And as a visionary story, it is solidly built on wonderful
characters living in a world that is captivating and always interesting.

I've read dave's Coyote work for a while now. This opus brings all the
charm and magic and intelligence of that body of work to one place.
I'm truly impressed. - James Bourey

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