 
Love is the Law

BY A.L.C.

Copyright 2015

Dedicated to all the Queens that raised me and the Spirituality that changed me.

Seventeen and dreaming deep, like only seventeen your olds can. A tall, black, charming man knocks on my front door and invites me to come with him. With immediate admiration I agree to go wherever he's going. We walk in silent confidence. Suddenly he ages rapidly into a senior, kindly, crippled old man. I am horrified and frozen watching as he leans on his cane and chuckles. He tells me, "You're not ready yet". I wake up, startled and uncomfortable, unsure what I have just witnessed. I lay there for hours trying to get back to sleep with no success and spend the rest of the day contemplating what that dream meant.

Awkwardly, like a stray dog, I wander the streets until I can go home where I will pretend to my mom that I spent the day at school. How much longer can I keep this up until she realizes I have failed at another alternative learning centre. Two high schools and two alternative learning centres later and I still cannot commit to sitting in a classroom environment. I want to finish high school. Every day I wake up and tell myself I have to do this. I can do this. I MUST do this. Then I get dressed, brush my excessively long dirty blond hair, put on my jeans and catch a city bus to school. Sitting in the bus seat willing myself to make it to the school bus stop I know I won't make it. Just like yesterday. Just like the day before. What is wrong with me! Why can't I make myself do this! I have no answers. I only know that I can't go.

Everyone around me looks the same. Different shades of grey with the same non-expressive face. Rushing, pushing, stressing, doing what they think and "know" they should. And I would if I could, rush and push and stress and do what they do. I would climb that ladder if my feet would ever lift off the ground. But they're dug in deep, sucking me deeper down every day like slow progressing quick sand. This can't end well. The only answer I can reach is down. I regularly contemplate suicide. There is no hope for me. No light. I'm not built like others. They can withstand the climb even if it looks like they are on auto pilot. If only I wasn't an only child. Then my mom would survive my death. I stay alive because I can't hurt her like that even though I wonder how much longer I can hurt myself like this. Eventually I foresee my pain will outgrow my concern for her, unless I can get to school. God please make me go! Push me through those doors. Make me sit down in class. I am trying to sit porcelain still on the bus so no one can see I'm jumping out of my skin. The bus doors open. I can't breathe. I jump off the bus at a random downtown stop and start my day of random walking.

As a very young child I had carefree moments when I was light and happy, the way young children should be. I have pictures of me running through fields in flowy dresses with sun in my hair and a laugh on my face. I don't remember most of those moments, but the pictures exist, it must have happened. The majority of the memories I have of my young childhood are of my parents fighting before their divorce. My father was a pastor turned atheist and an extremist of sorts, a mad scientist, a detached genius. My mother would send him to the store for groceries with the meager money they had and he would come home with rare books he'd found at a road side stand instead. He would argue how practical his purchase was and that the books were too good an investment to pass up. My mom would argue that there was no food to feed me. Any decent parent understands the clear winner in this argument. There is no contest. In so many ways my father is a genius, his intellect compares to few, but his heart is so buried by his mind.

Eventually my mother got tired of not being able to provide a stable environment for us and we left. She had dropped out of college to get married and had no trade or career. Her resume consisted of a few part time jobs in high school and college. That said she was determined to support me somehow. My father's visits were sporadic as were his child support payments for the brief period of time he actually paid them. Money was tight. One month we lived off a case of bran flakes she'd been given by her work. Today I still hate bran flakes. We couldn't afford a car so she would take a bus or ride her bike to work, even in our Canadian winters. She went to night school at a college an hour away in Toronto by bus after working three part time cooking jobs. I didn't see her much, but understand she was bettering herself and providing for us as best she could. She enjoyed her work and was good at. I believe she would have been good at anything with her Mother Theresa heart, but she wouldn't have been satisfied with any job. She found her calling as a chef.

Her destiny is to feed people, to heal with food. She cooks and bakes professionally, but also for family, friends, the community at large. Whenever someone she loves is sick or in need she feeds them, delivering homemade bread, apple sauce and soup to sick family and poor friends. She's been known to randomly drop off locally grown produce she's bought from the local coop grocery store or her farmer friends in bulk at people's homes to lift their spirits when she thinks they might be down. Often I'll find a loaf of banana bread or quart of peaches in my mail box in the morning that she dropped off on her way to work. When my father was diagnosed with cancer 15 years after they divorced she dropped off cases of raw carrots and apples for him to juice himself back to health. A couple days after September 11, 2001 she bravely took the train down to New York City and cooked at a local NYC church for families who were missing or had lost loved ones. Few people truly know the full extent of her kindness. Her father calls her a saint. I say she's the closest I've seen to one. All my friends for all my life have become her friends too, many calling her a second mother. I could write a book exclusively about her generosity, most of which she has done discreetly. She excels at her destiny because she loves it.

While food is her primary passion, her generousity and goodwill have no bounds. A little girl at a local school a couple years ago never wore a snow suit on snowy days and would get wet and complain to the teacher that she was cold. It's hard to find a snow suit halfway through winter, most places sell out earlier in the season. When my mother heard about this little girl she went to no less than eight stores in our region, finally finding one the right size at a retailer 80kms away from home. She dropped it off anonymously at the school for the little girl who wore it the next day with a warm smile.

My mother is a faithful woman devoted to her family and kind to everyone she meets. She was born with a beautiful heart. She was raised Anglican and briefly converted to another denomination of Christianity while my father was a pastor. She reverted back to Anglican not long after their divorce, but has always been open minded and respectful of all other religions, philosophies and belief systems believing all people to be equal and entitled to live their lives their own way.

At seventeen I was not in a good place. My father had been as reliable a father as he had been a husband. He showed up briefly when it was convenient for him with excuses for his absence that he thought were as reasonable as him buying books with our grocery money. I was also in denial about having been raped as a teenager. I never sought counseling or confided in family, especially my mother. I didn't want to hurt them and it never occurred to me they could help me. I was extremely independent, an only child who had spent a lot of time alone, and thought I could handle everything without help. I was failing. I had no idea how to change or heal or hope. All I could do was pray. I prayed for guidance.

The Dalai Lama says we have grounds for optimism. People's view of spirituality is expanding. Awareness is spreading. Whether it's the Dalai Lama giving speeches in India or Oprah meditating with Deepak Chopra, the world's consciousness is growing. We are learning more about our Spirits, our Souls, our Hearts. We are learning new definitions of what exists and what is possible.

My great grama died when I was ten. I was very close to her. Everyone in the family was very close to her. She took care of all of us, giving of herself in every way. She was love incarnate. At the viewing prior to her funeral a bible was open to Psalms and I read and reread them over and over again. I reached in the casket and held her dead hand, feeling no fear, no sadness, just peace. I imagine it's the peace she felt after a year of sickness to be free of her tired body and reunited with her long lost, much loved predeceased husband and two babies in heaven. Her presence at her funeral was strong. She was an apparition comforting us all.

Six months after her death I was watching General Hospital. Along with Wheel of Fortune, General Hospital was the show we watched every day the two years my mom and I lived with my great grama. We moved in with her when we couldn't afford our apartment anymore. Characters named Luke and Laura had returned to the show and I didn't know who they were. I immediately ran into my bedroom picked up the phone and started to call my great grama to find out more about their characters. The phone started to ring before I realized what I was doing. She wasn't there. I hung up and started to cry. It was the longest, most heart wrenching cry I'd had at that point in my young life. When I stopped I looked down at my bed and saw her white silk scarf. I hadn't seen that scarf since she passed. Her smell filled the room. I could feel her hugging me. I picked up the scarf and knew she put it there.

I've always felt Spirits around. From as early as I can remember I've had prophetic dreams too. I'd dream about some small minor moment in a day and it would happen a few days later. It would happen exactly, same place, same people wearing the same clothes, saying the same words, the exact moment. These dreams confirmed for me that there is something bigger then myself in this world, something beyond what we see day to day. There are many religions and belief systems. Most people that I know are familiar with Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hindu and other major religions. Some are familiar with Folk, Tribal, Pagan and Aboriginal Beliefs. One similarity between all these faiths is an understanding that Spirit is alive. Spirit is not far off in some distant space hopefully hearing prayers, but truly interactive and alive. Angels, Saints, Buddhas, Deities of sorts are more than statues and symbols, they are powerful, helpful, healing, able beings.

My prayers for guidance when I was seventeen were answered in the form of people. I met a group of people practicing alternative forms of spirituality. They would become lifelong friends and family without whom I wouldn't be half the person I am today. One of them was a man who sucked me in like a bee to pollen. He had an energy to him that was so magnetic I could barely breathe. I was irresistibly drawn to him. He was slender and blond like a young Leonardo DiCaprio, but with a mischievous Jim Carrey grin. He was seven years older than me, super adventurous, wild and crazy. None of that was what drew me to him. It was his Spirit and the Spirits around him. He saw and felt things differently. He believed things differently. He felt Spirit differently.

We crashed into a wild three year on and off again affair. It was primitive and uninhibited. He was crazy and I was crazy for him. He found us underground art galleries where they would read modern poetry and drink wine upstairs and jammed music and smoked pot in the basement. We partied at raves and clubs and casinos. He surprised me and flew me out with a pilot friend over Niagara Falls and dropped the plane like a roller coaster ride. It was terrifying and exhilarating. I felt high with him and often was high with him. He was also, self centered, unreliable and arrogant. The adventures were fun, but the main draw to him was a spiritual connection. As his adventures got wilder he pulled away from Spirit and I pulled away from him. By the time I was twenty years old his purpose in my life ended. He was my first love and gave me my first broken heart from a lover, but mostly he was the man who contributed to introducing me to a new beautiful, raw view of spirituality I didn't know existed.

Despite the parties and chaos I somehow found myself. In between the raves and parties I had spent time hiking in the woods, meditating by waterfalls, drumming rhythms on African drums. It was powerfully healing. I had found a true connection to nature, to Spirit and myself. It took a lot of work to get from suicidal to excited for life and it certainly wasn't all celebration and laughter. There were tons of tears shed, anxiety to move past and nightmares to sort through. I trained hard at different spiritual paths and studied a number of world religions through the process finding tools and faith that made me stronger day by day. It was amazing how easy it was for me to focus on studying spirituality and religion given my repeated failed attempts at school. It came so easily to me. It built me up and pulled my feet out of the ground. I could breathe and concentrate and my skin felt fabulous instead of jumpy. I got a part time job and I went back to school part time at a local University as a mature student to study English and creative writing. I'd realized that my heart belonged to the arts and Spirit. Creativity ran through my blood. I felt joy. I'd found my niche. I'd found myself.

My mother was relieved. She never knew the full extent I had been suffering, but she knew I wasn't suffering anymore. Early on I had introduced her to my new group of friends. She was never thrilled with my boyfriend, though she was always kind to him. I was well aware that he was wilder than she wanted, but the rest of the group were tamer, more conservative and established in their lives. She enjoyed their company and respected their beliefs. The first time she met them she was as cautious as a mother should be. She also brought my very Catholic, very Irish, very psychic nana as back up. My nana's father, a war veteran from East Coast Canada, spent a large part of his life reading tea leaves for family and friends. As my nana grew up she intuitively learned to read the energy from people's jewelry. My friends always used to get a kick out of it when she would do it for them, but they were also secretly afraid of her. Rightfully so, she was a fierce and unyielding woman. It took me totally by surprise that my nana fell in love with all my new friends. My protective mother and ferocious nana spent hours talking and laughing with them. One of the most meaningful comments my mother took away that day was that people with big pain needed big healing. The honesty of that statement struck us both. Bells went off. So simple, but so true. Big pain needs big healing. And nothing is bigger than Spirit. There is nothing Spirit cannot overcome.

While my mother had no personal interest in learning about the spiritual practices I was incorporating into my life, she could see I needed something to believe in beyond what I already knew and was very supportive of my efforts to learn. She could see the purpose was healing. For her support I will always be grateful. That approval and encouragement started me on a journey more beautiful and fulfilling than I knew could exist. It guided me out of a very dark place. It started me on a path of compassion and understanding. And it led me to the greatest gifts I've ever received, to my husband and daughter and a deep respect for life.

My husband is a genuinely noble human being and most importantly to me a genuinely noble father. It was one of my main draws to him when we first started dating. He has a son from his first marriage, a wonderful son that I love very much. My husband's first wife had an affair that broke up their marriage. It devastated him. All he ever wanted was a family. His own father took off when he was twelve never to be heard from since. All he had for close family after his father left was his sister and mother. To them and anyone he has let in his heart since he is loyalty and love incarnate. I knew he was the kind of man that would never abandon his family, his wife or his children.

He used to live a few hours north of where we are now. He worked at a municipal housing centre for physically disabled individuals. The centre focused on developing the independence and life skills of the residents. He was very good at his job and worked full time hours even though he only had a part time classification. This is where he met his first wife. She was whimsically tall and classically beautiful. They started their family young. He was only twenty one when they married and twenty two when they had their beautiful son. When the centre they worked at closed to amalgamate with other locations all full time employees were transferred to different positions in different cities. His wife had her full time classification and was transferred to our city hours from their home. They left their family, friends and hometown to support her career in this new city. Somewhere along the way she started to have the affair that led to their divorce.

When I met him he was not in a good place. We met working together. It was not love at first site, although it did feel familiar and there were strong elements of lust. He was my handsome boss, the manager of the restaurant we worked at. Over a year we developed a friendship. That time built the base for a truly honest relationship. His divorce had been final for a couple years and he was still heartbroken living in a city he was angry at, but couldn't leave because he wouldn't leave his son. He adored his son and their Sundays together. He had dated a multitude of women, but none of the relationships lasted since he didn't really trust any of them.

That first year we told each other things we wouldn't have if we'd been dating. We joked about the people we were dating and admitted deep fears and boundaries about ourselves and our past relationships that we might not have so readily admitted to someone we would have expected to date in the future. I told him what parts of a man's body were most essential for me. He confessed what he considered cheating gray areas with girlfriends versus his no tolerance policy once both parties had said, "I love you". It was humourous when I first heard his "limits". After we started dating it was really comforting to know where I stood.

One day after seeing how lonely he was after breaking up with yet another girlfriend I took him out to the movies in efforts to distract him. We had a magnetic chemistry from early on. We'd never acted on it for many reasons, the main of which were he was my boss and he was ten years older than me. We had outrageously flirted and talked in depth, but never with any expectation it would go anywhere. The energy between us sitting through that movie was powerful. He sat a seat away from me out of respect. He didn't want to break any friendship boundaries and neither did I. We started to hang out more frequently outside of work and flirt more shamelessly on the job. Eventually I reached a point where I couldn't stand next to him without wanting to touch him and be touched by him. On the rare occasion we let each other stand close enough I could feel his pulse through his clothes. I would get short of breath if he would brush past me. One day our flirtation took on new heat. He was teaching me to roll out pizza dough. He pressed his body up behind me and wrapped his arms around mine. He held my hands and moved them slowly in the motions he wanted me to make with the dough. I was hypnotized by the eroticism.

A few nights later I agreed to go to his apartment to hang out and watch a movie. It was my first time to his apartment. I was so nervous to go over it felt like the first day at a new school. Repeatedly I thought of cancelling, scared we would break bigger boundaries we shouldn't. We both were openly insistent on not wanting a relationship. I was only twenty one years old and not looking for anything serious. He had a son and an ex-wife and emotional baggage. I didn't want things to get awkward at work and I didn't want to lose or give up my job. I decided to go over, but didn't shave my legs. That surely would keep me from making any grave mistakes. Lust won over. We couldn't control it. He tried to be a gentleman, but ultimately surrendered to acting very ungentlemanly. We were so lost in each other we didn't notice my unshaven legs or that we'd knocked the mattress off the bed until the next morning.

The next day at work was regretfully awkward. We took a break together to talk about what it had meant to us. We both agreed we only wanted to be friends. We really had nothing in common to start a relationship and weren't looking for one. He made me laugh when he joked that if we could build a relationship on sex we would be married forever. I never would have thought it would be prophetic. We agreed to friendship only, to act like it never happened and to never do it again. Until it happened again. And then again. It's hard to build that wall up once it's been blown to bits. We changed our plan. We would discreetly be friends that slept together for as long as it made sense for both of us. It made sense at the time. We got along great. We had fun together. We trusted each other. And we had the best sex anyone had ever had in the history of sex. No inhibitions, no commitment, just fun. For awhile. I saw how much he cared for his son and his niece and nephews. He saw that I was not normally the type of person to sleep with someone I didn't have feelings for. It took a few months, but eventually stories of each other's exploits started to make each other jealous. We gradually stopped dating other people. We started seeing each other every day. We didn't say it formally for a long time, but we had become a couple. We'd started sleeping together in February. By July I realized I was in love.

September 10, 2001 I met his mother. She worked for the government in Canada's capital city Ottawa. We'd finally confessed to family and friends and to ourselves that we were a casual couple. We went to Ottawa for a vacation more than a meet the parents' event. The vacation part didn't last long. September 11, 2001 I woke up in our hotel suite to my "boyfriend" telling me to look at the television. The first thing I saw as I opened my eyes was the second plane fly into the twin towers and then the towers collapsed. I will never forget that. The sheer terror in the broadcasters voice, the flip of my heart, the look of shock on my boyfriends face as he watched. The whole world shut down. Ottawa went into precautionary mode. All government buildings including the one his mother worked at were closed and everyone was sent home. We spent the rest of our time at his mother's apartment watching the news and crying over the devastation that followed the attacks. It was an extraordinarily bonding experience for all of us.

That is when he knew he was in love with me. He chose not to tell me then. He wouldn't commit to something as serious as love without being fully sure of himself and the other party. I knew from our time as friends that out of all the many women he had dated he had only said and meant those words to one other person, his first wife. As much as my heart wanted to hear him say it to me, my mind was in no rush. The age difference bothered both of us. My mother liked him much more than my previous wild card boyfriend, but was a little concerned with the age difference. Hearing those words would mean that we were more serious than either of us had ever intended. A couple more months passed and I was starting to think they would never come. I never pressured him. I was afraid of his response either way. If he didn't love me we should probably break up and move on, better to break my heart early than drag it out. If he was in love with me I had no idea how on earth we could make it work long term.

It was three months after our trip to Ottawa that he chose to tell me he loved me. It was my twenty second birthday, just before Christmas. He took me out for a romantic dinner and then back to his place. On the bed was an elaborate bouquet of my favourite roses and a card. The card was signed "Love". I read and reread it a few times before kissing and thanking him. I didn't mention the signature and walked out of the room. I wasn't sure if he meant it that way or if he didn't know how else to sign the card. He didn't say anything about it either. We spent the rest of the evening together quietly and then he took me home. When he dropped me off he touched my face and looked me in the eyes. His eyes were serious and teary as he said, "I do love you". Then he kissed me hard. I was so relieved I laughed. I fell into a fit of giggles. Amen! I had no idea how we were going to figure it all out, but I had every intention to try. A couple weeks later, just before his thirty second birthday he asked me to move in with him. We've been living and loving together ever since.

My great grama in heaven loves him, though she died long before he could meet her. I keep her white silk scarf on my Ancestor shrine with a picture of her smiling. Most days when I walk by the shrine I can feel her smiling at me. Some days she's more reprimanding. She sympathizes with my husband when I am grouchy or stubborn. During a rough patch early in our relationship when I considered breaking up with him she stopped me. She told me not to be hasty and that he would make a good husband. She doesn't speak so clearly that often, but when she does it is serious and I have learned to act accordingly. I am especially grateful for listening to that advice. It took awhile to open, but once it did I discovered my husband's heart to be the world's biggest and wisest.

My husband and I took our time getting married, five and a half years. We are careful people with sensitive hearts by nature. Neither of us wanted to rush into marriage. Our engagement was spontaneous. I proposed to him. Over the phone. While he was at work. He very happily said of course. He was ready before I was.

The proposal was inspired by a dream I'd had that if I didn't start trying to have a baby soon I would never be able to. I trusted my dream. I was only twenty six years old, but could feel it was true. It was my preference to be married when we had a baby so we planned our wedding in less than two months and started trying to get pregnant. Shortly after we were married I found out I had Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. I'd always had irregular periods, but this diagnosis scared me. I rarely ovulated and when I did my eggs were questionable. I remembered my dream, but wondered if I was too late. I worried about never being able to have a baby. The energy and emotion that goes into trying to have a baby is exhausting, especially when you don't succeed. A year of trying to stay positive was failing. I've experienced no feeling of failure as deep as failing to get pregnant. Every month felt like a death. I questioned everything including my faith. I'd started a career a few years prior in banking and been offered a new job at a new company and accepted the position. We decided to take a break for a few months from our fertility efforts while I settled into my new role.

Despite deciding to take a break from trying to get pregnant I decided to keep my first appointment at a new fertility clinic to review options and treatments. It had taken some time to get the appointment and I didn't want to miss out on the information they could provide me. It was in the west end of my town, around the corner from my grama and nana's graveyard. Before the appointment I went to their graves and lost all my composure. It was an ugly cry, the kind where you use an entire box of tissue to blow your nose and you don't look recognizable when you are done. I cried for the baby I might never have. I cried for failing as a woman. I cried thinking I'd caused my problems by never getting my irregular periods checked out or experimenting too much as a teenager or eating too many carbs. I cried for not knowing. I cried for not being able to control my thoughts and feelings. When it was over I felt empty, solemn. And I prayed. I prayed for a healthy baby. I prayed for a healthy baby that would live a long healthy life. I prayed that there was still hope. I prayed to Spirit and my grama and nana who had experienced tragically losing their babies to have mercy on me. Later that day I found out I was pregnant.

I went to my fertility appointment, filled out mountains of paperwork, answered all their questions, complied with all the invasive testing, let them take vials of blood and left. My last home pregnancy test had been negative, we hadn't tried since and we were planning a family vacation with my in laws at a cottage up north. I headed for the liquor store. It had been a year since I'd been in one and I knew that this was a very brief window to relax and have a few drinks before going back to a clean, sober, healthy lifestyle. I spent a fortune buying bottles of wine, packs of my favourite coolers and bottles of liquor for our week away and went to meet a friend for a drink at my house.

When I got home I unpacked all the bottles, put on my comfy clothes, grabbed a vodka cooler for my friend and I and went to sit on the couch with her. As I walked past my answering machine I saw the machine light flashing. I pressed play on the machine as I uncorked my drink. The bottle was touching my lips about to pour into my mouth when I heard the voice of the nurse from the fertility clinic. I paused and listened. She thanked me for coming in to the appointment and said that there was nothing they could help me with(my heart sank) because I was already pregnant. I dropped my drink. My friend screamed! I screamed! Pure delirium. Six weeks pregnant and I was completely oblivious.

I'd had a dream a few days before this that I was pregnant with a little girl. I'd shrugged off the dream not thinking it was possible, writing it off as wishful thinking, at best hoping it was prophetic for something in the future. In the dream a beautiful Mother Deity of the Ocean, told me that I was pregnant with a little girl and that I should name her after my mother and sister in law, two of the strongest women I know. She told me what her full name should be and told me what her nick name would be. After learning I was pregnant there was no doubt in my mind of the baby's gender or what her name should be. My husband agreed. The ultrasound technician that later would confirm the gender was unnerved at how calm and sure I already was. There was no surprised reaction when she told me. I'd already known.

It was a very difficult pregnancy with a high risk of miscarriage and many complications. The first of which happened a week after finding out I was pregnant. While we were on vacation at the cottage up north with my in laws I started cramping and bleeding heavily. I went to the hospital and they told me there was nothing I could do because I was so early into the pregnancy. I was scared, but could feel it would be okay. More complications followed accompanied by extreme nausea and violent vomiting for seven months. After thirty six hours of labour, two and half hours of wasted pushing, eventually by caesarean section my sweet baby girl was born a healthy 7 pounds, 10 ounces.

Not all women are as lucky as I was. Many people have advice for couples going through fertility treatments and women especially are often told to relax or stop trying and it will just happen. That did happen to me, but it's not always true. I know lots of incredible women that would have been wonderful mothers that have been unable to have babies no matter what they did. They are in no way failures or less deserving. I was in no way more deserving. I only know that being a mother is a huge part of my destiny and that Spirit has helped me work towards my destiny every step of the way.

Destiny is a tricky word. It has many definitions. Every ounce of my being tells me we all have a purpose. To me destiny in its highest meaning is purpose. All purposes are meaningful. It's how we contribute to society. Some people are here to entertain, some are here to teach, some to heal, some to inspire, some to create. There are so many ways that we give. The closer we get to this purpose the more fulfilled we are. The trickiest part is finding out what it is. The process can be long and difficult, but I believe it's worth the effort. Our minds, our societies, our families and our financial situations often blind us to what we really want to do. It is especially difficult to follow what you love, what you are passionate about and what your highest aspirations are when you are suffering from depression, poverty or other hardships.

The job I had accepted just before I found out I was pregnant was not my most purposeful. It was part of a series of lessons to get me on the right track. It was part of the road I took to get where I am now and it taught me many things I am grateful for, but it was not what I was meant to do forever. I tried desperately to make it what I was supposed to do because it was easy and it was what I was already doing. No matter how hard I tried my heart wasn't in it. I told myself it paid the bills, it was clean work, decent hours, good benefits, respectable. I was so unhappy. I was discouraged and I continued to be discouraged about it for years. I took variations of the job in the same field, different locations, increases in pay, but my job felt hallow and meaningless. I helped people in some ways, but not in the way that I felt I was supposed to. I took on every extra charitable function the company offered and it helped eased some of the anxiety, but not enough. Some days I could barely breathe. It didn't help that I took too much pride in being good at my job and was overly loyal to my coworkers and clients, not all of whom deserved the loyalty. There were lots of logical reasons to stay where I was and keep doing what I was doing. Routinely I tried to talk myself into loving my job, but my mind lost the battle to my heart. I couldn't continue doing something my heart wasn't in. I maintained strong faith in Spirit and in wanting to do good in the world. I knew I had to make a change, but had no idea how or to what. Prayer guided me.

It's easy to pray. Anyone can pray for anything. What's not easy is listening for the answer. Praying about an issue you are stubborn about and not willing to make any real changes on is especially difficult to experience the results of. I believe in prayer. I believe God in the highest, guardian angels, Spirit by any name will assist whenever asked. I believe praying opens the door to let them in. Recognizing their answer to your prayer is hard.

I had always wanted to write. When I was a young child I made up my own secret language and wrote it on every piece of paper I could find. I wanted to tell stories and write poetry. I stopped nurturing that dream and as time passed I forgot about it. It seemed impractical, silly, impossible. I had studied English and Creative Writing for a year at University. Regularly I received positive feedback from professors, all but one who was particularly harsh and whose comments I found disheartening. I lost faith in the idea of doing anything that wasn't conservative, fearing failure or maybe fearing success. After I got my first decent paying reliable job I decided to put off school and writing indefinitely. How could I go back to something that seemed so dream like? I had still written poetry occasionally over the years, still read inspiring books and dreamed of writing one myself, but could I really write one and what would I write about. So much to consider and worry about.

Sometimes when bad things happen there is a reason. There is an opportunity for change. It doesn't mean we are being punished. Sometimes we are getting exactly what we asked for, exactly what we need. I couldn't get away from where I was because I was too comfortable and scared to change. Spirit brought me a controversy that forced me to make a change. At first it looked daunting and hateful and I raged at the injustice. Then I saw it for what it was. They brought me a situation that forced me to be brave and move away from what I no longer wanted to be doing. It pushed me to take care of myself and start over. It pushed me to look further inwards.

I have a face and it is mine. I will never see it the way others do. I don't look at it from the outside. When I look at myself I see my Spirit. Others glancing briefly or looking without depth only see my skin. To them I look different. I am not preoccupied with beauty. I had external beauty for awhile. It was a pleasantry and a power, the power of seduction. Sometimes I chose to enjoy it or take advantage of it. Sometimes it was a hindrance and an irritation to not be taken seriously or treated equally. It never made me happy. It didn't feed my Spirit or my purpose. I feel sorry for very beautiful people, people that enjoy their beauty too much or people that enjoy others beauty too much. Some see it as a reflection of who they are and spend too much time trying to maintain it or feel bad about themselves because they don't have enough of it. It is not who they are. It is pleasant to look at something that is surface beautiful. It is much more pleasant to look in depth, to see all the colours. Quickly glancing at a painting will never give you the full feel of the artists' vision. The vision requires more time. We are the art of nature, of Spirit. Looking deeper shows the Spirit and the Spirit is always beautiful.

Beauty was a very important lesson for me to learn. I still learn new levels of it all the time. I saw a new side of it when I started to lose superficial beauty to age and weight gain and I saw another new side of it when I had my daughter. Her face and body are beautiful and always will be in the most meaningful of ways. It carries her Spirit. We all hear and politely may say beauty is only skin deep and then the main compliment we give little girls is they are pretty. Our society often glorifies beauty above compassion, intelligence and ability. We are so much more than beautiful.

I try not to judge others or label them. I try to enjoy their eccentricities, their spiritual expression, purpose and art. This too is a lifelong lesson. Peoples' moods and attitudes are fluid, temporary, reflecting their experiences. Their souls go deeper. Kanye West is sometimes controversial, but the art and expression of his song "Only One" is hauntingly magical. A lovely blend of colour. The song tells a story of his mother talking to him from heaven, telling him to believe in himself and tell his daughter about her. It's so hard not to feel moved listening to it. It makes my eyes water picturing my mother in law speaking to my husband. While my relationship with my mother in law started well it was not without difficulty. That said my husband adored his mother and was devastated by her unexpected death. I dread the day I lose my mother. Knowing death is an inevitable part of life hasn't made it less sad for me. I'm not wise about the expectant death of my loved ones. It's a lesson I struggle with. I am no Jesus, no Buddha, no Muhammad, no Saint. I am an average person equal to every other person on earth, equally a part of humanity, equally a part of Spirit, with many short comings. One of my many short comings may be how poorly I handle death. I fight it with every ounce of energy I have often leaving myself exhausted for other parts of my life.

My psychic Irish nana and Scottish and English papa decided to move their retirement to the East Coast of Canada when I was in my early twenties. They chose Cape Bretan Island, possibly the friendliest place on earth. It didn't hurt that home prices were dirt cheap, close to the sea and they had great extended family there. I knew they would be happier with more to do than being stuck in the city waiting for one of our intermittent visits, but it didn't make them leaving any easier. Finding out she was diagnosed with lung cancer a year after they moved made it even less easy. To this day I wonder if she knew she was sick before she moved away. With all her fierceness she insisted she was recovering well and wanted no one to come out to see her. She hid the severity of her situation until the very end. A few months later we got a call that her doctors had given her three months to live, six weeks prior. The cancer had moved to her liver and treatment wasn't working. My mom begged her to let us come out, but she adamantly refused to have anyone over, saying she didn't want to see anyone and that her normally immaculate house was a mess.

I called my papa. I lied to him for the first time in my life and told him I had already bought a plane ticket. I said it was nonrefundable and that I was coming even if I had to stay at a hotel and sit on their porch. Nana begrudgingly surrendered and agreed to let me stay there. Then I called my travel agent and booked a ticket. At work the next day I told them I needed to take a leave of absence starting immediately. The assistant manager argued on my behalf to the manager, but the manager was a very detached woman nicknamed the ice queen and declined my request. I told them I would have to quit my job if I couldn't get the leave. The ice queen reluctantly relented and approved a week off. Had I not been one of their top sales reps I don't think she would have given into my threat, not that it would have mattered to me. I was prepared for her to say no.

My papa picked me up from the airport the next day. He was and always has been positivity incarnate. He was happy to see me, gave me a hug and a mini tour of the town on our way to their house. Everything moved slow, peaceful, calm. Vehicles crawled then paused in the middle of main streets to accommodate pedestrians crossing. People would stop jogging to talk to another person. They were extremely courteous and kind to each other. When they asked how you were they expected you to tell them about your family and your day, not just give a "fine" auto response. It was very much like the "nice" Canadian stereotype. I live closer to Toronto where that stereotype comes to die. I could see why they had moved there, it felt like a gracious foreign country.

By the time we got to their house I was so distracted by the pleasantries that it made me even less prepared for the sight of my much beloved nana. She had always dressed lovely, decorated with fine jewelry, worn every hair in place. She'd taken a lot of pride in her appearance, was always polished and clean. In her prime she'd won beauty pageants. This time was very different. Her skin was yellow. The whites of her eyes were yellow. Her body was badly swollen, her stomach four times it's normally slender size. Her hair hadn't been washed in weeks because she couldn't bathe herself properly anymore. She was strung out on morphine and a host of other pain meds. She was barely recognizable. I hugged her too hard, I probably hurt her, but she let me anyhow without complaining. She smiled at me. I wanted to break into sobs, but I smiled back.

It was obvious that the cancer had a very strong hold on her and that her time was limited, but I wasn't willing to let go. I had added her to the prayer lists of every church I could find, was praying and willing her better with as much love and positive energy as I could muster, doing conjures, giving it my all in every way I'd ever heard of to try and bring her back to health. I made my papa drive me to the grocery store so I could restock their house with fresh organic fruits and vegetables. My pa was supportive, I could see he didn't want to discourage me. In fact he wanted to believe my efforts would make a difference. I realized he had been watching her deteriorate helplessly by himself for a long time and was now waiting for her to die. It wasn't a new experience for him. He'd watched his first wife die, my mother's blood mother. She died from breast cancer when their four babies were young. I got his hopes up about my nana with my running on about the power of prayer and herbology. I had brought with me some Essiac and other herbs. Essiac is named after a nurse from Muskoka Ontario last named Caisse. Miss Caisse came up with a formula of strong herbs used in traditional European healing and Native American healing to treat severe cancer patients that doctors had otherwise given up on with some success several decades before my exposure to them. My father and other friends and family had their own successful experiences using Essiac along with juicing and vegan diets to fight cancer.

When I first arrived my nana had only been able to wake up for ten minutes twice a day to take her pills and have a cigarette. She had quit smoking when she was first diagnosed with cancer, but when the doctors told her it was terminal she started again. I started giving her Essiac right away and within two days of treatments she was able to stay up for four consecutive hours. She'd only been drinking small sips of fortified meal replacements and it took all my effort to get her to eat a few bites every day. I remember watching her take small bites of peach. It took so much effort. I had her wash it down with Holy Water which made her laugh. She said her pain was better with the Essiac and her energy improved. After a couple days she had colour in her cheeks again. I was sure she would get better. I told her I would come back for Christmas in a few months and she seemed so happy. The week I spent with her we talked and hugged as much as she could handle. When she would sleep I would spend time with my pa touring around or we would go to mass at her church.

I had called my mom the day after I got there and told her to come no matter what nana said. She called her siblings and told them the same. My mom was arriving the day after I was to leave. The rest were scheduled to come together the day after that. My last day came too quickly. While I had some optimism about seeing her at Christmas I considered that these might be my last words to her. As much as I tried to think up something wondrously important to say, I couldn't think of anything. The only thing that mattered was that I knew she knew I loved her and that she knew I knew she loved me. We said it over and over again while we hugged each other good bye.

Somehow I had seriously gotten it into my head that because I believed in an afterlife that it wouldn't hurt as much when she died. That was very disillusioned. They are still with us after they die, but nothing replaces the interaction you have while they are living. Hug the living as much as you can. I miss her hugs. A few days after my mom arrived out East she called to let me know my nana had passed. A wonderful cousin and neighbour to my nana was a nurse. She had generously come and stayed with them for her last days. She had enough pain medicines that she died comfortably in her own home, her husband and her adopted kids with her. She died on her belated daughters' birthday. Her sweet daughter was the only blood child her and my papa ever had together. Tragically, from complications with diabetes at the tender age of one she went home to heaven. Her birthday was always a day of great grieving for my nana. She couldn't live through another one. They were together again, her and her baby girl.

Immediately after her death I was wrought with grief and guilt, believing I failed her. Had I gone to see her earlier maybe she would still be alive. Maybe the spiritual work and herbs would have saved her had they been given more time to work. Over time I came to see that she went at the exact time she was meant to. It didn't make it hurt any less, but I no longer felt responsible. It broke my heart for a long time, but strengthened my commitment to Spirit and the Spirit world that she is a part of.

I am not a medical doctor or a naturopathic doctor and cannot make recommendations for anyone's health. Please consult a doctor if you have ailments. Modern medicine has had great achievements and serves many purposes. That said my own family and many friends, in addition to using modern medicine, also largely use herbs and spices and fruits and vegetables for health and wellness, physically, mentally and spiritually. One of the friends I made when I was seventeen was an extremely well versed botanist and herbologist. He has one of the most pure and charitable Spirits I've seen and it is evident in all his crafts. He is incredibly talented in many ways, but very little compares to his natural talent with herbs. With herbs he dazzles. He shines. I was blessed to be able to spend a year studying herbs under his tutelage and their wide array of uses. He gave me weekly lessons and assignments. While identifying plants is still not my strong suit, I thoroughly enjoy using them. Perhaps that joy is inherited as one of the rare things my parents have in common is a love of herbology.

One of my fathers' many brief jobs over the years was a teacher. While he was still married to my mother in the early 1980's and while he was still a Pastor he was also the teacher of a one room religious school. One day one of his students came to school with a massively swollen eye. The eye was so swollen he could barely open it and it looked like he was having some kind of severe allergic reaction. My father notified the child's parents and rushed him to the nearest hospital. The doctors tried to help him, but didn't know the cause and in the end sent him away with a prescription for antibiotics. My father, also an herbalist, asked the parents' permission to treat the eye with herbs. The parents were desperate for a solution and agreed. My father can no longer remember the herbs he used, but within minutes of applying sachets of mixed herbs to the child's eye it started to revert back to normal. Less than an hour later his eye was the picture of health. Ever the smart ass he took the child back to the hospital to show the doctors how he had fixed what they couldn't. Despite his persistent arguing they refused to admit that what he had done had corrected the eye. The parents and child were relieved and grateful no matter who believed how it happened.

My own daughter is allergic to chemicals in some makeup. Most kids makeup, brand name or otherwise makes her eyes swell out of her head. Not just eye makeup, but lipstick on its own, blush and everything in between. We found out for the first time when she was very young on Christmas day. She'd been playing with makeup she'd received as a gift in the afternoon and by dinner time it was evident something was wrong. We washed her face and debated whether we should go wait for hours at emergency on Christmas day. First I decided to try applying warm chamomile tea bags on her eyes. She looked human again within ten minutes. There would be no trip to emergency. AMEN.

My personal experience with medical professionals regarding the use of herbs, diet, naturopathic medicine and spiritual medicine has been received more amicably than my father's experience. This is likely for two reasons, my attitude with people is less hostile than his and more and more doctors and other medical professionals are receptive to alternative healing. Some people refer to it as new age medicine even though many of the practices date back hundreds and thousands of years.

Spiritual medicine has many genres from many cultures. Basically anything spiritual you do to heal falls under spiritual medicine. One of the most common and simple forms is meditation. It's a healing exercise that calms the mind, nerves and body. Used frequently to combat anxiety and depression, meditation is also used to listen to your inner voice, to connect to your spirit and to align your life energy with the energy of the world. This can create improved health, balance, abundance, a feeling of unity. It makes you conscious of the divine within yourself.

Divination means divine signs, to foresee, to be inspired by God. Divination is an instrument to listen to Spirit, to let them guide you. It is something many people strive for in innumerable forms. My herbology teacher and his husband are master diviners. His husband is a compassionate, vibrant soul and true humanitarian and I was blessed to be able to train with him for a year when I was around eighteen years old. Divination is something I have continued to learn and relearn independently ever since. While there are many types of instruments to use, the biggest lesson I've found is that, like shrines, they are all focal points. Whether it be tarot or tea leaves, they are ways to focus and distract the mind much like meditation so Spirit can guide you.

The Dalai Lama is one of the most highly respected Spiritual leaders in the world. He is well known for his wisdom, peacefulness and compassion yet not everyone knows how he came to be the Dalai Lama. He is a reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. A search party was sent to find him when he was a toddler. They followed divine signs that led them to him. These signs were communicated in different ways and were specific to the town and house and the child itself. They kept secret their purpose when they first met the child and his family, but later came back to formally test him. They presented him with numerous objects that had belonged to the previous Dalai Lama mixed with others that did not. They tested him thoroughly and each time the child recognized and selected the items that belonged to the previous Dalai Lama saying, "It's mine!". This is how they found him. This is what they know is possible. Many cultures and religions respect these divine signs. They know that Spirit, God, nature, the divine by all names and faces speaks to us.

To find love and faith in the moon and sun, the sea and trees, the owl and the bear, is so natural. Dancing to the rhythm of drums around a fire is one of the oldest ancestral traditions of humanity. Even simpler than that is walking in the woods. It's hard not to feel connected to the earth while walking in the forest. My mom calls it forest therapy. It's the simplest meditation, to walk among the trees, to watch leaves falling from trees, flying, landing on rocks and in streams. Seeing Spirit in the wind, water and ground, that to me is divination profound.

For all my saintly mother's strengths, she is still as flawed as the rest of us. She is an excessive worrier. She is a sensitive, compassionate soul and has a hard time separating herself from other people stresses, especially those of close loved ones. She carries their worries like they are her own. The eldest of four siblings, she lost her own mother to breast cancer when she was only twelve years old. She's been everyone's mother hen ever since. She is somewhat conscious of this and works hard to combat it with regular meditation, nature walks and a healthy primarily plant based diet. These efforts help calm her hyperactive mind and every opportunity she gets she encourages others to do the same.

Setting an example for her siblings, her only daughter and only grandchild around healthy lifestyle and responsible choices is her chosen duty. Connecting to nature and living life as naturally as possible is a big part of that. She's joked about it, but has yet to move to a cabin in the woods to live off the land with her wood stove and ice auger. She has converted her backyard into a bountiful organic garden. She jars her own tomato sauce, pears, olives and grape juice. Her favourite Saturday morning activity is to pick up my daughter and head to the local farmers market to buy produce in abundance, bring it back to her house and cook up a feast or work in the garden. These excursions have head started my daughter towards being a well versed horticulturist, herbologist and chef. I support the teachings and traditions she has started, though somewhere along the line I missed the chef gene myself. My husband loves joking to people about how I always put the burnt side of his grilled cheese down on the plate so he can't see it.

There are some traditions I have to support, whether I want to or not. I love my mother and know she will kick my butt if I don't follow one tradition in particular and I know she'll be watching me from the Spirit world one day, a lot. I can barely control her visits while she's alive. When she passes I fully expect to I have no say in the matter. My great grama came to Canada as a little girl on a boat from England during world war one with her parents and siblings. Her family brought with them their minimal belongings, among them her mothers' fruit cake pans. Every year her mother would make fruit cake in these pans, a tradition carried on by my great grama and now by my mother. The recipe written in my great grama's original hand writing is still in use. I am expected to continue the tradition. It costs about two hundred dollars for the supplies and takes all day to mix the ingredients, soak them in rum, butter and line the pans with four layers of brown paper that have to be cut to size, bake the cakes slowly for hours, soak them in more rum, let them cool, then wrap them. This has been done in my family for over 100 years. It must be done two months before Christmas, because apparently that is the right age to eat the cake. God Bless English cooking. My mom, a master chef, enjoys this process. I hope she lives forever. Everyone in the family then gets a cake. If they live far away it is shipped to them. No one in my house likes fruit cake. I've tried desperately to get my daughter to like it in hopes she might one day want to make it and the tradition can skip me, but so far it's not happening. When my mom gives me my cake I wait until Christmas, eat a small sliver in memory of my ancestors and put the rest as an offering on my ancestor shrine.

My mothers' side of the family I know well, my fathers' side a little less. They are not all like him. From what I know of his sibling's children, my cousins, they are all wonderful people. I remember meeting a great uncle in Buffalo once when I was young. He and his wife were very sweet and humble, not much like my dad. They spent that day talking about family history I'd never heard before, in particular relatives that were part of the Underground Railroad, family that helped sneak people into Canada. They talked about my Aboriginal great great grama and her tribe. They talked about how our last name was altered by a Norwegian great, great, grandfather who was a ship Captain when he immigrated to Canada. The story has a couple versions, but he was trying to hide from someone, it's undecided who or why, but sounded shady. I suspect he was a pirate and my father takes after him. Then they spoke about my father's mother's death. Both my parents lost their mothers early in life. His mother was Finnish, just like my mother's mother. It's another one of the rare things they had in common. My father's mother died while babysitting her friend's children by falling down a flight of stairs. In my father's grand tradition of likely exaggeration he insists she was murdered. There is no evidence of this, but his version is that they came to kill the owners of the home and killed her instead. My father was a teenager when his mother died. He became a more selfish person from the experience. My mother became a more selfless person when her mother died. I like to think my father would have been a better person if his mother hadn't died so young. I sympathize with people's faults and sensitivities, recognizing that I have many, many of my own, surely many that I don't even recognize. We are all equally human. Our environments and our experiences greatly impact us. I likely would have been someone very different if I had been raised primarily by my father instead of my mother, someone much more selfish. Another part of me knows that no matter what we go through we have to try and do better for our children and their children, for our communities and ourselves.

Recently my grandfather passed away, my father's father. I have mixed feelings about him. He could be quite stern and controlling in many frustrating ways that reminded me of my father, but he made attempts at humour. He would tell family friendly jokes and cheesy riddles that my adored cousins referred to as "grampaisms". They spent much more time with him growing up then I did. My cousins tell fabulous stories of wagon rides and sleepovers. I am not in any of the pictures. I never saw that side of him. When my father left his position as pastor and abandoned their church his father was livid and unforgiving for a very long time. They had paid for his education and now not only considered their investment a waste, but perceived my father as the devil which in turn made me the devil's daughter.

My father rarely took me to see his family and my mother was too busy as a working single mother without a vehicle to be able to. Some years around Christmas my grampa and grama, my father's step mother of forty years, would come see me on their own at my mother's home. In my mother's typical saintly fashion she only ever spoke kindly to and of them and with great affection. She told me stories of a tree swing he built in our backyard for me when I was a toddler and of how he brought her a single rose on her first Mother's Day. For that reason I gave them the benefit of the doubt and sought as an adult to develop a deeper relationship with them.

My sweet grama is easy to love and appreciate. My grampa was harder. My father's rejection made me standoffish, but my grampa's occasional snide comments about my weight over the years made me more so. All of my cousins on my father's side are naturally slender, some very tiny. They seem to be able eat big meals and carbs with no side effects. I am the only one that has struggled with weight issues going up and down and up and down and up and up in size. Still I wanted to know my grampa better and pushed past the comments even telling him every time I left him that I loved him. A couple weeks before his death he said it back to me for the first time. He was almost ninety years old and his memory was failing. A man who had run a successful business until he was eighty years old was now easily confused by basic banking paper work. I took an afternoon to come over and help them sort through years of boxes and cabinets of old bill receipts and banking statements so they could complete their income tax. When I was done my grampa thanked me with the most gratitude and humility I'd ever seen in him. He was almost tearful. As I told him I loved him when I was leaving he said it back with complete sincerity for the first time in my life. I cried the whole way home. Two weeks later I got an emergency call to come to the hospital. Later that same day he died.

Thank God I have a mother who religiously encourages me to forgive and accept others. Had I not I may have avoided my grampa as an adult and possibly been resentful of him even in his death. Thank God I didn't allow anger and resentment to keep me from having that experience with my grampa. Forgiveness is a tricky word. My grampa never apologized to me for his comments or his lack of affection. It wasn't in his nature. Whether he was sorry or not I forgave him for my sake. "You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them," said the brave Dr. Maya Angelou. I forgave him for my own healing, my own sanity, because I deserved it.

My grama, step grama in title, full grama in heart, needed no forgiveness. Her heart is open and heroic. When my grampa died she had to move to a nursing home. Her loss must have been the hardest. She has severe parkinson's and needs full time care. In a matter of days she lost her beloved husband and her beloved home. Her husband, best friend, the man she spent all day every day with was gone and she had to select her most treasured belongings, mostly pictures, and to move to a single room home. The house that she'd lived in with him was to be sold. My first visit the week she moved into the nursing home was so poignant. I asked my grama what I could do to help her. Her response was to pray with her. I imagined she was going to ask God for something, blessings, healing, comfort, something. She said a prayer of thanks. She thanked God for the time she'd been given with my grampa. She thanked God for his painless death. She thanked him for her new home until she was at home in the arms of her Lord. She said thanks for time with family and friends and for the many blessings we receive every day. She asked for nothing. It was the wisest and most inspiring prayer I'd ever heard.

My grama was born and raised by missionaries in Malawi and other parts of Africa, before going to school in Cape Town, South Africa. After that she and her parents moved to South America and the Caribbean before ending up in the United States then Canada. She went on to obtain a University degree in Home Economics, became a vegan chef teaching vegan cooking schools through her church worldwide, wrote two vegan cook books and one book on natural healing. She is an avid supporter of natural medicine, diet and prayer for healing the mind, body and spirit and is one of the most faithful servants of God on earth that I have witnessed. My grama reminds me of both my mother and of the late great Maya Angelou. They all seem to have a similar purpose, to be healers in their respective trades, to be diamond examples of strong women and most of all to promote love.

Dr. Maya Angelou wrote in Mom & Me & Mom, "Love heals. Heals and liberates. I use the word love, not meaning sentimentality, but a condition so strong that it may be that which holds the stars in their heavenly positions and that which causes the blood to flow orderly in our veins.". Underneath what may sometimes appears as chaos is this foundation of love. It is sometimes hidden by pain and animousity, but it is our deepest morality and greatest common sense. We are all born of love. We are all born to mothers. We are all supported by the chain of life provided by the sea. Love is in us, it's instinctual. Our blood carries the same ratio of salt as the ocean. We are the oceans love incarnate. We have a responsibility to act out of this love. In love we can feel our truth. "Continue to love deeply and risk everything for the good thing." Dr. Maya Angelou.

No matter our talents, our differences, our individual identities, we all share the same ultimate purpose, to love. Love is the law. We need to grow our love for Humanity, Mother Earth, Spirit in whatever form we believe in. We need to grow our love for family. We all come to be from different heritages, different ancestry, yet we all come from the same great earth, the same great Spirit. That makes us all family.

On my mother's side my great, great, great grandfather lived in jazzy New Orleans for a few years before and into the American Civil War. He was there during the reign of the famous Voudou Queen Marie Laveau. He was an immigrant from Scotland whose family line can be traced back all the way to the 1400's. He and his family immigrated to North America to start a better life for themselves in the 1800's. He moved to New Orleans to follow his dream of becoming a carpenter and cabinet maker. While he was out fishing one night someone called him in from the shore and told him a war had started. At work the next day a confederate soldier approached his boss and asked how many men worked for him. The boss said six men and the soldier replied that three of those men were joining the army. They put the six names of the men in a wheel, spun it and randomly pulled out three names. My grandfather won an unlucky lottery. He was immediately sent off to war.

Early into the war he was badly injured. A knife wound gashed open the full length of one arm and his heal on one foot was blown off. He lost a lot of blood. His body along with many other soldiers were brought to a farm. Everyone received was tagged with the date they were brought in. People they thought were a lost cause were put in the barn. Anyone with a chance was brought to the main house. They left him in the barn. Three days later a stunned soldier found him crawling out of the barn. They couldn't believe he'd lived in his condition for three days without food, water or treatment and immediately brought him to the main house. He had a strong will to live. As soon as he could he headed to Canada to meet up with the rest of his family, his siblings and parents. There he met a woman, fell in love and started a family. While giving him his eighth child his much loved wife died and he was left to raise the children on his own. Walking with a special shoe to compensate for his missing heal he was still an able labourer. Still working in his seventies, he accidently fell off a roof he was renovating and died instantly.

His eldest son and his namesake, my great great grandfather continued the tradition of passing their name onto his first born son, my great grandfather. The stories I hear of my great grandfather are my favourite. He was a rough and tough fighter when needed, but was incredibly gentle and loving to everyone that knew him well. His son, my mother's father who I call pa or papa, is candy kid proud of the stories of his father's funeral procession being so long it nearly shut down our city. He was a labourer and eventually supervisor in a steel mill and one of the founding members of its union. He spent time as a Master Mason and was a priest at the Mormon Church. He came from very humble beginnings, growing up poor and living through the depression during which he lost his first job. He went out every day looking for work, but couldn't find anything. Eventually my great grandparents and my pa were evicted from their apartment and went to live on a farm outside the city. The farmer agreed to let them stay in a small tent like trailer on the property and hired my great grandfather to work on the farm under the premise that he be paid in vegetables. Whatever small basket he was awarded for his long days work would be their food for the next day. Ever the optimist my pa remembers this summer camping and playing on the farm as one of the most fun of his childhood.

After a couple months at the farm my great grandfather got a job at the steel mill in the city. He biked an hour and half every day to work and an hour and half home. After some time they were able to move back to the city and buy a small farm hands house close to the steel mill. This is where my great grandparents would live for the rest of their lives.

Not long after they bought their house my great grandfather was home alone and saw a dangerously thin, obviously homeless man walking across a field towards him. The man apologized for interrupting him, but he hadn't eaten in a couple days and would be so grateful for any small amount of food he could spare. My great grandfather went into the kitchen, cut two jumbo slices of bread, opened the meager ice box and took out the only meat in it, a thick slice of ham. He placed the ham between the bread with some mustard and brought it to the guy who was overjoyed and ate it with passion and appreciation. My pa told me when his mom got home and heard the story about why their ham was missing she was upset saying that he had given away their supper. She asked why he couldn't have given the man a peanut butter sandwich. They ate peanut butter sandwiches for supper instead.

My great grandfather maintained his generousity and compassion for people for the remainder of his life, always helping anyone in need. He understood struggles and hardship. First hand he had experienced poverty, hunger and pain and it made him a greater person.

The chief pain my great grandparents experienced was losing their children. Prior to my great grama giving birth to my pa she lost two babies. Both died as toddlers from pneumonia. My papa was their third born, their golden son, the only survivor. My great grama used to say that no child was loved the way he was. They loved their grandchildren with vigor too, so enthralled with every moment they got to spend with them.

My great grandfather died before I was born and my great grama lived without him for thirty years. She never stopped missing him. She went on one date about twenty five years after he died. We were all sitting anxiously waiting in her living room to see how it went when she came home. She walked in full of annoyance at the man she'd been out with saying she would never do that again. I remember my mom and aunt laughing hysterically about it. I remember being a little girl sitting in the living room outside her bedroom early in the morning watching cartoons and hearing her say my great grampa's name in her sleep. He visited her dreams often.

She lived a full life spending lots of time with friends, her grandkids and myself. She was very social and travelled frequently. When I was nine years old my mother took us away for spring vacation. She'd received a generous income tax return and wanted to thank my great grama for letting us live with her. It wasn't long after the movie Cocktail had come out and everyone was singing Kokomo by the Beach Boys. She took us to a true paradise, Montego Bay Jamaica. It was my first time out of Canada and it was a very new cultural experience. Coconuts, braided hair, reggae music, being so close to a warm ocean, I was in awe. We travelled the country climbing waterfalls, buying shell necklaces, swimming in the sea. Everything was happy. Later that same year we went with her to Switzerland to visit my uncle, my mom's brother, and his new enigmatic Swiss wife. They toured us through the alps and valleys of Switzerland, France, Austria and Germany. It was a joyous whirlwind of a vacation. She died happily in the hospital a year later, fulfilled from her travels and the knowing that all her grandchildren were successfully employed and married off. My great grama had made a death bed promise to her grandkids birth mother to look after them. She kept her promise in full.

One of the hospital nurses swears by this story, that she came to check on her and saw her pass. She said that my great grama, who had been bed ridden, sat up fully with a wide smile on her face, opened her arms high and wide and fell back to the bed dead. I know she saw them, the husband and babies that she'd never stopped missing were waiting for her. She left her body happy to be with them again.

I once had a reading done where I was told I came from a long line of strong woman. I hope to honour that tradition and pass it on to my daughter. My mother's younger sister, my beautiful aunt and godmother is an awesome example of this too. We are very similar, so much so my mom frequently mistakenly calls us by the others name. Other family members make the same mistake. We are both passionate, adventurous Sagittarius' with similar senses of humour, lovers of nature, loyal to our families. We both have fertility issues and were miraculously each able to have a child. Being compared to her is pure compliment to me. When she was younger she was a wilder version of my mother, being the younger sister allowed her to be. She spent a lot of time with me when I was little, living with my mom and I when we first moved into an apartment after my mom's divorce or taking me out for full day shopping adventures or sleepovers when she lived on her own. I remember smiling a lot with her.

Recently my aunt overcame her second bout with cancer. The first was ovarian cancer in her thirties. The second was breast cancer in her fifties. My family showed a united front of support and positivity, all while being secretly terrified. They caught it early thanks to her regular mammograms and her doctors being as cautious as possible with treatments, but no matter the odds the process riddled our hearts with anxiety. It was my aunt's attitude that impressed everyone most and pulled us through. She refused to back down from the challenge of survival. Even her doctor was shocked by her demeanor when he told her the diagnosis. She immediately went into planning mode, expressing only frustration that this was interrupting her busy schedule. It was like an unpleasant event on her calendar that required her attendance. A powerful woman, she fought through it and came out victorious. Amen! Both her mother and her mother's mother lost their battles with breast cancer. My great grama lost a breast to the wicked disease. For all my appreciation for people that pray only in thanks this is where I differ. I'm not as evolved as they are. I pray against death. I pray with all my heart and will against disease. We've all lost loved ones too early. Missed, but never forgotten. It's to them I pray, the ancestors, my family in heaven. They know firsthand the struggles and attachments of the physical world.

When life gets lonely or overwhelming my ancestors come to mind. Always under our feet, in our blood and at our backs, we are never alone. A thing veil separates us from them. If we close our eyes and open our hearts that veil lifts and we can see them united, smiling, cheering us on in our endeavors, holding us steady through our pains and losses, laughing at our cheesy jokes and even occasionally waking us up when the alarm clock is accidently set for pm instead of am. They've woken me up many other much more serious times too. My husband is a diabetic. Not long after we first started living together he caught the flu. Given our close quarters and how often we had our tongues down each other's throats I fully expected to get it too.

Steadily his flu got worse and I didn't feel run down at all. The only rotten feeling in my stomach was a nagging sensation that something was seriously wrong with him. I could feel the Spirits around me pressuring me to get him help. Ever the tough jock he refused to go to the doctors and teased me for being so silly about a common flu. After three days of him not being able to hold down food I insisted he go to the hospital, threatening that I would move out if he didn't go. While he's not prone to giving into my threats he was too tired to argue and got in the car. Canadian health care is funded by the government, but does have a price, the wait time in waiting rooms, except this time. They examined him quickly and admitted him to ICU, the Intensive Care Unit. He was immediately put on a heart monitor and IV. The doctor told us later that he didn't have the flu, he had DKA, Diabetic Ketone Acidosis and wouldn't have survived another night at home.

My husband and I made a pact when we moved in together. I could decorate and change our apartment however I wanted, have the total run of the show and do almost anything I wanted on one condition, no cats. As much as I loved, loved cats I'd known his stance on cats, could see there was no changing his mind and thought I may as well get as many perks out of the deal as I could. I tossed in a couple more rules and the pact was made. While he was still in ICU he called his younger sister to come and see him and asked her a secret favour. Ever so stylish she showed up with a rocking purse. It was like a magic trick when she pulled out a kitten. My husband looked at me with teary eyes and said, "Thank you". We all started to laugh and cry and giggle until we caught the nurse's attention. Now I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to bring kittens into the hospital and especially not into ICU so his crazy awesome sister and I high tailed it out of the hospital and brought the kitty to its new home. When we got home I called my step son to give him an update on his dad and tell him about the kitty. He was so excited I asked him if he wanted to come over and help me name it. He came over and we stayed up all night playing floor hockey and looking up cat names online. Literally we went through every letter of the alphabet from A to Z, finally naming him Ziggy.

That was the first time Spirit helped me save my husband's life. I'm hoping his softening to cats has given him at least nine lives as it certainly was not the last time. Another time in our apartment they woke me up from a deep sleep. I rolled over to see my husband shaking a little and then a lot. He was having a seizure in his sleep. It wasn't easy to wake him and when I did the shaking didn't stop and he couldn't speak. Instinctively, without knowing what was wrong, I went and grabbed a bottle of soda from the fridge and force fed it to him. Within a minute his shaking stopped and he talked to me. His sugar had dropped dangerously low in his sleep. I called 911 and they took him to the hospital to get examined. No treatment was needed, but doctors said it was another lucky close call. Other times when his sugar had gotten low in his sleep he would wake up and eat or drink something. This was the first time he hadn't woken up on his own.

The idea of losing him made me a little paranoid. It drove us both a little crazy, or rather I drove us both a little crazy. I worried constantly about him. I'm sure he needed that extra push to get better at managing his blood sugar. He probably improved just to keep me from nagging. That still wouldn't be the last time he didn't wake up from low blood sugar. I was managing my worry about him better until one night Spirit woke me up loudly and told me to go wake him up. It was the middle of the night and he had fallen asleep on the couch watching sports. I told myself I was being paranoid and tried to go back to sleep. They told me that if I went back to sleep he would die. My heart skipped a beat and I jumped to my feet. As I walked into the living room I could see him laying on the couch, beads of sweat pouring down his forehead, a clear sign his sugar was low. At once I woke him and gave him some juice. I brought him his monitor and he checked his sugar. It was dangerously low. I thanked Spirit over and over again fully aware that if it hadn't been for them I would have lost him.

Every day I am so thankful Spirit is alive in my house, my life, my heart. I make room for them. I give them space in my life. Anyone can do this. Opening your heart opens the door. Love is the key, the first step. They are alive and bold and beautiful whether we are gloriously lucky to witness it or not. Love opens the door to witnessing them. "The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart." Buddha

Love opens all doors, all doors that are meant to be opened. A closed door can be an equal blessing to an open door. Like my grama in the nursing home said to me not long ago, "God is not Santa Claus". Would winning the lottery make you a better person? Would it give you better character? Would it make your heart open more? Would it make you less materialistic? Some denials are obvious, others less so. I've been hired on the spot at every job interview I've ever had, all but one. It took me six months to say thank you to Spirit for not giving me that job. As punished as my ego was for not getting it, I got a job instead that lead me to even better opportunities and experiences with incredible people. It led me to want to lead a better life, a life of service.

"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others." Ghandi. I've worked hard to service others in every job I ever had. Serving food in a restaurant I would befriend the lonely ones and try to make the sad ones laugh. Serving people in financial institutions for fifteen years I did the same. I would also give honest advice even if it meant it wasn't the most profitable for the institution. It always did come back financially too. People would bring their business to me because they trusted me. An example of this was a couple who had received a large settlement and were advised by another financial institution to invest it all. They had come in to discuss our investment rate promotions, a deal their institution couldn't match. I could have easily accepted their investment and made a quick sale. Instead I ran the numbers with them and showed them how much interest they would save if they paid off their mortgage and invested the difference. It would mean only minimal business for us, but it meant they saved tens of thousands of dollars. They were so grateful they came back and transferred all their existing business to us plus a new home equity line of credit. They referred their daughter to me for her first mortgage and started an investment plan. I hadn't done it for this reason, but we ended up with double the business we would have had if we'd only taken the initial investment. Honesty in service does pay off in the long run and it feels so much better.

Not everyone in the banking world or any sales or corporate world is this honest. It is predominantly a cold, selfish, greedy environment focused solely on profits. Local cooperatives often are a better choice, but they too have a political side and are often run by small circles that need monitoring to prevent them from acting on their own selfish interests, lining their own pockets and protecting their own power. Executive management at cooperatives may answer to a board of directors, but what professional sales people are best at selling is themselves. Whenever there is someone at the top making loads of money there is a risk of power play in effect. This is one of the world's greatest inequalities, people who act selfishly for power over others instead of power over themselves. This is where mercy, compassion and a sense of responsibility for other human beings has its greatest challenge. In the face of this we need to unite and rise up together as equals in service to each other.

"People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are honest people may cheat you. Be honest anyway. If you find happiness people may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway. For you see, in the end, it was between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway." Mother Theresa

My daughter, as young children naturally are, is blessed and attune to the energies around her. She is naturally kind and forgiving. When a kid at school is hurt she comforts them. When she sees a friend she hugs them. If one of her friends doesn't have enough snacks she shares hers. Her automatic nature is to give. There are elements of society that slowly break this down and detach children from these natural instincts. Superficial values, distance from nature and excess electronics can do it. The typical adult life style is another root cause of children detaching from their natural spiritual attunement. There is so much rushing and pushing and driving and trying to fit everything we need to do into one day that people lose touch with their instincts. A simple meal like breakfast can become stressful instead of calm and nourishing. Success is often evaluated by good grades and finances instead of good character and compassion. Children grow into adults who are encouraged to win against each other more than to cooperate with each other, to be better than others instead of equal. People buy new products not because their old one is broken, but because they want the newest, biggest, best model. So many people want material things more than peace of mind, or perhaps some believe material things will bring them peace of mind.

When I was younger I wrote an article about a man walking into a mall. A homeless veteran asks a man in a three piece suit for some spare change. The man refuses him money then walks into an expensive coffee shop and spends twelve dollars on a double espresso shot latte and a gourmet muffin. He does it without hesitation and with no evidence of guilt. How can one person have so much and not give to someone that has so little. Perhaps he gives heartily to charity or volunteers with orphans or is a busy lawyer working pro bono on a human rights case. Sadly that's likely not the case. "When a poor person dies of hunger it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed." **Mother Teresa.** We need to revert back to our wise, youthful selves, the selves that want to take care of each other.

An inspiring quote from the Dalai Lama, "Everyone wants to be happy; happiness is a right. And while on a secondary level differences exist of nationality, faith, family background, social status and so on, more important is that on a human level we are the same. None of us wants to face problems, and yet we create them by stressing our differences. If we see each other just as fellow human beings, there'll be no basis for fighting or conflict between us." How perfectly said. How perfectly wise. That is what I would want to teach my daughter if she didn't naturally know it already. Children are born accepting one another and loving each other unconditionally. Instead of working so hard to teach our children, maybe we are supposed to learn from them instead.

Though I appreciate the love in all religion and have a few specific practices myself, we do not like to label ourselves as part of any specific denomination. That said I do send my daughter to Catholic School and she is highly influenced by her schools teachings. They teach beautiful prayers to children. Her first and my favourite goes, "Thank you for the food we eat, thank you for the world so sweet, thank you for the birds that sing, thank you God for everything". Simple and perfect. Part of me didn't want her to go to Catholic School. I was afraid that it would become too dominant or make her closed minded to other spiritualities and philosophies. I changed my mind after two things. One, an interview with a very grounded principal telling me they raise not just students, but people. The school has proudly kept true to this through the years teaching compassion and kindness and showing an acceptance of things like gay marriage and other religions. The second was a dream I had where Spirit was telling me they wanted her to go to Catholic School saying, "It's not about religion, it's about faith".

I support the fundamental goodness centered in all faiths including the Catholic faith. What I don't support is when and where it disagrees with human rights, especially those of women, other cultures, religions and homosexuality. All people should be allowed to decide for themselves. We are all equally human. The Catholic Church, as I've been exposed to it, has had a small overhaul and is more open minded than it has ever been. It is at least progressing in the right direction. Pope Francis named himself after Saint Francis of Assisi, my Irish Catholic nana's favourite saint. Pope Francis is also a wise Sagittarius who shares my birthday. He now famously said in July 2014, "If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?" This was a giant step for humanity. He also said, "It is not necessary to believe in God to be a good person. In a way, the traditional notion of God is outdated. One can be spiritual and not religious. It is not necessary to go to church and give money – for many, nature can be a church. Some of the best people in history did not believe in God, while some of the worst deeds were done in His name." Amen!

The Dalai Lama, the Pope and other world leaders are united on the most noble and notable points. Peace, love, compassion, saving the environment, ending poverty. Princess Diana repeatedly spoke about kindness and doing what your heart tells you. Oprah says we can't become what we need by remaining who we are. "The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds." Dalai Lama. John Lennon was a dreamer, but he's not the only one. We as the human family need to find and follow our divine purpose.

When I was younger I regularly enjoyed many glasses wine and many other party favours. This hasn't been my lifestyle for a long time. Occasionally I partake in alcohol. Normally a half glass of wine for a special celebration is sufficient. I sip it slowly and let it linger under my tongue, let my body absorb its energy. Half a glass is plenty for the effect I'm looking for. During extreme anxiety it does not calm me. I drink in celebration, not to overcome stress or sadness or sleep deprivation. It would do the opposite for me if I tried. Typically when I open a bottle I pour myself a small glass and serve the rest to Spirit. I know a lot of wine lovers that would shake their heads to know this. It is not wasted. It is offered up for a higher purpose. My husband occasionally complains when he sees drinks and meals on shrines that look better than his. I've yet to catch him trading, but I wouldn't put it past him to swipe back his beer one day. Just kidding. He complains, but he complains in respectful jest. I can't really blame him, especially since we eat vegetarian more often than not. His suppers of rice and beans and salad don't look as tempting as the roasted chicken and sweet treats on surrounding shrines.

My daughter is a vegetarian. She even successfully converted my mother back to being vegetarian. I hover on the border. It is for health reasons, not the loves of animals that my mother no longer eats meat. It is for the love of animals not for health reasons that my daughter no longer eats meat. My mother was vegan in her teens and early twenties and raised me as vegan then vegetarian for the first few years of my life. I reverted back to vegetarianism for a few years in my teens. I do currently eat some meat, but often experience guilt for health reasons and for the love of animals. The worst guilt was Christmas a few years ago when my daughter and I had a tug of war over a turkey in the grocery store. She won the war with her fury and heartbroken tears. We ended up with a tofu turkey. This was not my husband's favourite Christmas meal.

My husband comes from a long line of seriously meat loving carnivores. His younger sister is famous for her gracious hostess skills, beating the men in drinking games and cooking meat. Her ribs and burgers are so well praised she would be an incredibly successful chef were she to ever take it up professionally. She is also famous for her beautiful, generous heart. It is one of the few things she has in common with my husband. My daughter's middle name is after her. She is a fiercely strong and unconquerable woman who has survived repeated tragedies and rare disease. While our preferences for food and lifestyle differ wildly she is an inspiration to those that are blessed to know her well.

My husband was twelve when his father left, his sister was only nine. It is my belief that their mother lost her mind and never fully recovered from losing her husband, loving him until the day she died despite his physical abuse. She was a tortured woman who sadly tortured others in return. Her daughter received the brunt of that torture. Not long after her father deserted their family my sister in law was given up by her mother. She was disowned becoming a ward of the court and sent into foster care. Supposedly her mother did this because she was too naughty a child. I've always been curious about how naughty a child so young could be that would warrant giving her away. There is nothing my own daughter could do that would ever make me do so. My sister in law would call her mother crying begging to come home and her mother would hang up on her. This and many other heart breaking experiences went on for years until eventually my sister in law ran away to Toronto, living on the streets. Her mother once reprimanded her for not calling one Christmas. She didn't seem concerned to know her daughter had spent that Christmas in a stairwell trying to keep warm.

Surviving unimaginable near death experiences similar to most homeless teenage girls in big cities, she was eventually able and old enough to move back to her home town up north and live independently. She got pregnant shortly after and unfortunately fell in love with a man that abused her as badly as her father had abused her mother. Her determination and unbreakable spirit saw her through a decade of pain and abuse. She came out of it like a glowing star, shining and bright leading the way for others blessed enough to see her. It is truly a miracle that she and my husband have turned out as sane as they are. They both are very faithful, respectful people full of love. The experiences they've had made them more compassionate and they've strived to be better parents.

It's not easy raising a child and no one does it perfectly. I do my best not to judge knowing we are all just doing the best we can and sure that I am making my share of mistakes. There is so much to teach another human being and we can only teach what we know. It's unnerving to think of all the things we don't know that we can't teach them. If we're lucky they manage to survive with the life skills we give them and learn the rest on their own. What I am most adamant about teaching my daughter is respect, love and faith, for herself, Spirit, other people and the planet. If you are respectful, loving and faithful there is a natural course of action and thought that follows no matter the situation. Her heart will get broken. Her life will not always go as planned. She will face difficult choices. If she lives a life of respect, love and faith she will pull through all of it.

There is no one I have more respect for, love for or faith in than my daughter. It is truly an honour to be her mother. The love and joy she has brought to my life is beyond anything I could have imagined was possible. She is a pure delight. When she was a baby everything seemed to happen so quickly. She outgrew everything so fast, her clothes, her toys, her playpen. She has remained since she was a couple weeks old in the ninetieth percentile for growth in weight and height. Watching her grow has been a tornado like whirlwind of elation. Seeing her live in and enjoy the moment and knowing the raw potential she has to be whatever her little girl heart can dream of inspires me to want to do more with my own life, to live by example for her, for myself and in service to Spirit. No matter how crazy and far off my dreams may seem, she is teaching me to believe anything is possible.

Growing up poor as a young child was a very good thing for me, very humbling. I was blessed that I was never so poor that I went hungry or was without clean clothes, my mother was able to see to that, but there were no extras, no frivolities. I did not have much for toys, we didn't have cable and I spent most of my time outdoors. My favourite activities were singing church songs like Jesus Loves Me or searching the woods with my mom for wild raspberries to pick. I loved sunshine, water and snow. For my third birthday I asked for a single red rose. It was all I wanted and all I got. When I was seven I was asked what I wanted for my birthday. I asked for world peace. It's still my dream gift.

One winter when I was five years old there was a wild snow storm. We lived on the seventh floor of an apartment building and I asked my mom if I could go outside to play in the snow in the playground behind our building. She agreed, bundled me up and sent me outside. These were the days when children were still commonly allowed to play outside in their neighbourhood unsupervised. I went out by myself and was surprised to find there were no other kids around. It was bitter cold. I ran around to warm up and played for awhile, then laid down on a giant bed of snow. I sank into the ground and looked up at the sky. Snow was falling heavily on top of me and the cold had snuck in deep below my snow suit. I was freezing and wet and exhausted. I knew I should go inside, but was so tired I didn't want to get up from the soft snow bed. It felt good to close my eyes. I started to fall asleep. This is the first memory I have of hearing Spirit out loud. Someone with a gentle voice called my name. I ignored it the first time, enjoying my slumber. The second time it spoke was still gentle, but firm. Then it said I needed to get up. I didn't want to listen, but felt a sudden urgency to stand. I dragged myself up and went inside, grateful to the voice that had spoken when I finally felt the warmth of the building. Looking back on the incident, which I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday, I know that had that voice not spoken I would have slept in that cold forever.

There have been so many occasions that Spirit has loudly spoken to me. Unfortunately, I haven't always listened. Freewill has its benefits and its downfalls. Many incidents of my own making I was warned about. A fender bender while distractedly driving my mother's car and a broken ankle rushing to drop my daughter off at school were both forewarned and ignored in haste. Life is not meant to be perfect and we are meant to make mistakes, how else would we learn. Some incidents were lessons that taught me so much, others I am still learning from.

One particularly scary incident when I was eighteen years old happened after partying at a local club with one of my favourite friends from high school. We had stayed at the club until closing and stopped by the hotel next door. There we met a guy who offered us a ride to an all night rave in Toronto. I didn't feel good about it, but seeing as we were drunkenly stupid and eager to party some more we agreed to go, thinking that because there were two of us it would be safe enough. We got there and he paid for us to get in and bought us some club drugs which we willingly took. This story could have gone much worse than it did. After dancing past dawn he tried to get us to go back to his place. We politely and adamantly declined saying we had to go home and get ready for work and got him to agree to drive us home on the sweet promise that we would go out with him the next night. He dropped us off at a Tim Horton's coffee shop a block away from where I lived and when he drove away we high tailed it home, jumping fences and sneaking around people's backyards to ensure he wouldn't see which direction we had gone. Something had felt really wrong and really pushy towards the end of the night. As we started to come down from our high the full stupidity of our actions hit us. Later that week I was watching America's Most Wanted and saw a full profile on this guy. He picked up girls, got them high at clubs then took them home and did unspeakable things to them. I almost fainted.

You'd think we'd have learned from our actions, but with the same daredevil friend I would walk home from clubs after closing, more than a two hour walk in high heels. We always brought cab money with us, but would frequently agree to blow it on shots at the bar instead. One night as we were halfway home a car of screaming drunken men drove by us hooting and hollering obscenities and catcalls. We turned down a side street to avoid them. They spun their jeep around and pulled off the road just behind where we were walking, jumped out of their vehicle and started to chase us full speed. We bolted across a nearby school yard hopping a high fence, shredding our clothes and skin in the process. They fell behind and we winded our way through the back roads to get home adding another hour to our walk.

After this scare we thought we'd learned our lesson and our treks alone became a little less wild and closer to home. One bored Sunday night we walked down to a Tim Horton's a half an hour away from us for coffee. There was no bus service as far out as we were so we walked back around eleven, thinking it was a safe neighbourhood to be walking in. Apparently we hadn't learned the full lesson and the world was telling us to be even more cautious. As we were walking home a black van with tinted windows drove by us below the speed limit and pulled into the parking lot of a closed Variety Store a block ahead of us. We kept walking towards it for a minute waiting to see who would get out. No one did. We nervously turned and started walking in another direction. After a minute the van pulled out and drove past us the other way and parked in an empty McDonald's parking lot straight ahead of our new direction. Without thinking or talking we bolted across the lawn of the nearest house, through their backyard and hid in the bushes waiting to see what the van would do.

I was fighting a panic attack. My legs felt numb and heavy like two sacks of potatoes and I didn't know if I would be able to run if I had to. Flashes of previous walks and earlier assaults were running through my mind. My daredevil friend was fighting the history of her own demons. The van pulled back out of the McDonalds lot and crawled back down the street to the Variety Store parking lot and stopped. We slid out of the bushes onto a side street and began another terrified long journey home. We wondered so far around and back on unfamiliar side roads that we got lost. We were both manic and teary not knowing how to get home when a black cat crossed our path. Whoever said black cats were bad luck is crazy. The cat looked at us and meowed and I sensed it was there to guide us. At that point it seemed as logical as anything else to follow it so we did. It took us back to the main road not far from my house and then disappeared. The van was not in sight. We ran across the main street, down my street and made it home safely. That was our last late night walk alone.

Women should be able to walk alone anywhere we choose without fear of assault, but the reality is our physical safety is in jeopardy much more often than men. Women deal with much more adversity than men. We are not paid the same. We are held to higher expectations on so many levels, to look a certain way and act a certain way. There is significant pressure on women and mothers to be perfect. Men don't have the same level of expectation and we are quicker to forgive them their flaws. My own mother expects more from me than from my husband as did his mother.

My daredevil walking buddy is an excellent example of this too. To highlight her history she grew up in an idyllic family, lots of money, beautiful parents, stay at home mom. Her brothers were local hockey stars. She was a pretty, perky, popular cheerleader. One day her dad got very sick. In a short period of time he lost his million dollar business. All of their wealthy Torontonian family and friends turned their backs on them. Soon they found themselves in poverty living off the good graces of the governments meager generousity. The marriage and family fell apart. Her brothers kept living their lives, gave up nothing, contributed nothing. She delayed her plans to go to college to work multiple jobs to help her family financially. Along the way she got pregnant and had a son who was diagnosed with autism. A few years later her mom, who had been her sons primary care giver while she was at work, died unexpectedly. Less than a year after that her dad's disease killed him too. She once had the world at her feet with dreams of becoming a nurse, marrying a doctor and having lots of babies. Now she is an uneducated single mom to an autistic child living in poverty with no parents to support her.

As especially difficult as things have been she hasn't given up. She's a fighter. She works incredibly hard to help herself and her son and utilizes every resource available to make their lives better. She is already a remarkable woman and mother, but so many people expect more. They don't know her story and judge the surface of what they see. They think her life should be different, that she should be better. Some call her trash.

In comparison I knew a single dad raising two young girls. He had a large family to support him, no major tragedies other than divorce. As soon as strangers, teachers and neighbours found out that he was a single dad people became sympathetic, started making them meals, offering to babysit, giving him emotional support. He could do no wrong and if he did they would excuse it, saying he's only a man with lots on his plate. The injustice makes me cringe. I wish we could all give that same compassion and acceptance to single mothers and all women.

Man or woman, bad things happen to good people. We should not blame people for being a victim of circumstance. We should not punish them or judge them, we should support them. Some things in life happen unfairly, some things are unjust. For those not so sure certainly we can at least agree that innocent children in third world countries don't deserve starvation and illness. Farmers dependent on their crops cannot control when they get hit by hail. New Orleans didn't deserve to get hit by Katrina. My friend with her autistic son didn't deserve to lose her parents. I don't deserve to have an absentee father, to have been raped or other injustices I've experienced and neither does anyone else. It's the hands we are dealt. I believe our freewill actions and attitude deeply affect our lives and will make situations more positive or negative, but so much is out of our hands. No matter how respectful, loving and faithful we are, we will all still have bad days and hard experiences including death.

I don't know what heaven looks like, but there are some things I know exist. I know the soul survives the death of our physical bodies. I know it like I know my own name. To me it's an undeniable fact. "There is no religion in heaven." One of my grandfathers said to me from heaven. Religion is an earthly concept developed by followers of great leaders and teachers. There are valuable, holy lessons to be learned from those teachers. That said it's important to remember that the followers of those teachers interpreted the teachings and passed them on. Sometimes this reminds me of the telephone game I used to play in school where the teacher whispers a sentence to a student and they pass it on to the next student until the whole class has a turn. By the time the last student passes it back to the teacher the sentence has lost much, if not all, of its original meaning. Wherever I see a lack of love in a religion, a lack of equality I think of this. If there is no love than it is not the true teaching. If it is not inclusive of everyone then it's been lost in translation. "Buddha was not a Buddhist. Jesus was not a Christian. Muhammad was not a Muslim. They were all teachers who taught love. Love was their religion." Unknown.

Any wisdom I have Spirit has taught me. Any goodness I have Spirit has brought me. If it wasn't for them I would probably be an alcoholic mess or not alive at all. My mom always believed in me too. I remember during the depth of my deepest despair her saying to me that she was praying for me and that in her prayers she could feel that I was going to do something great in this world. She said she could feel it with her deepest intuition. I held tightly to that during the dark, tired days when I didn't believe in myself. I needed someone to believe in me. It's taught me to believe in everyone else no matter their circumstances. I have faith in the capabilities of all people to do good on earth. No matter how lost or lonely or devoid of hope we may get as people, as a society, as a world, we are never alone and we must believe in each other. There is a little Mary Magdalene in all of us. No one is without sin, but we are all worthy of love.

It's hard to get momentum going when people are stuck in their routines. It takes a leap of faith. Rallying up the troops when everyone feels unarmed is a challenge. We need to get people up in arms at the injustices in the world. People are so accustomed to hearing about poverty, disease, tragedy and war that we change the channel thinking there is nothing we can do, put on a sitcom and numb ourselves out. Believing there is nothing we can do is the first change we need to make in order to make a difference in this world. Of course we can! We have to. "Be the change you wish to see in the world." Ghandi.

I want my daughter to grow up in a world where people believe in themselves and each other. I want her to live in a world where people respect themselves and each other no matter their differences. I want her to grow up in an era of peace and prosperity and love. Why shouldn't she? Who says that's an impossible dream! Martin Luther King fulfilled his dream! Why shouldn't we? It's an insult to all leaders like him when we stand down against adversity instead of standing up against it. We can become the best possible versions of ourselves and we can inspire others to do the same.

We all have variations of ideas and philosophy, religion or thought. We all believe differently, but we are all people. We all want happiness. That is one huge common denomination and there are many more. We all live and love and laugh. We all aspire to something. We are all similar in the most meaningful and thoughtful ways. We all want safety and good health. We all want to be loved. We all have needs. We all dream. We all bleed. We all feel and hurt and suffer. We all feel joy and pleasure. We all need to breathe and eat and drink and sleep and stay warm. We are the human race. We are humanity. We are united in that similarity without effort. Borders don't change that. Skin colour doesn't change that. Religion doesn't change that. We are the human family.

We all are inescapably, connected to the planet and each other. We all use the earth, air, water and plants to support our lives. We all are part of communities, fed by farmers, taught by teachers, driven by drivers, led by leaders. We all are interconnected. We all influence each other. We all prosper better together than apart. We all are driven by our needs and our desires. We all need the planet and each other to achieve our goals, meet our needs and to live harmoniously.

We are all inescapably uniquely human. We all have a unique set of experiences. We have all been in unique circumstances. We are all born with individual minds and hearts and lives. We feel pleasure and joy and disorder and malcontent with different experiences. We prefer certain colours, music, foods and occasions uniquely. We view the world with our eyes and our perceptions. We are all gifted with unique understandings and abilities. We are all talented and charmed in some unique way. We all have our own way to give. We all have our own way to give that is unique and special and has a valued place in this world.

Through our many differences, our charms and humour, our quarks and oddities, our beliefs and notions, let us not forget the similarities that tie us together. Let us be open minded to our differences and non judgmental. Let us listen with open hearts and love, remembering that we are all humans doing the best we can with what we know and feel. Let us appreciate our cultures and experiences like we wish to be appreciated. Let us not forget that for better or for worse we are all in this together. Let's stand up together. Wherever you feel there is an injustice rise up against it. Raise your families and your neighbours with you. Let love dominate and rule your life. How could that not spread? Slowly and surely it will and it must.

The world is in dire need of change at a rapid pace. We can no longer sit back and wait for someone else to do it. We must do it ourselves. In whatever way is feasible we must spread love. Whether it be through random or deliberate acts of kindness, volunteering our time to a cause close to our hearts or starting petitions to save our environment we must act now with force. If you have a dream you need to do your best to follow it. Surrender to your heart's desire. Surrender to the child in you that wanted to save the world. Surrender to the painter in you that wanted to paint the sky purple. Surrender to what you want the world to look like. Throwing money at a problem is not a long term solution. We need to throw love at it. Big love.

We will not fail if we unite. If we all take steps to spread love where we are in the world eventually the world will reflect this love and shine it back at us. It's how Jesus saved us. It's how Buddha taught us. It's how the Kabbalah trains us. It's how we must live every day.

Writing a book is something I have dreamed of since I was a little girl. At difference stages in my life I planned on writing one, but it was never the right time. The true life story of my strong willed great grama or a children's book about strong princesses that save themselves instead of being saved by a prince, the theme always centered on human strength through adversity. So does this one.

I had a dream awhile ago where Spirit told me I was supposed to write a book. At first I felt inspired. Then I felt nervous. Then I decided it was too big a dream for me to fulfill. Then I had another dream and they told me I didn't have to write a book, but that if I didn't it would be a shame. When I woke up I reflected on what they said and realized we all have a choice. We can choose not to fulfill our dreams. We can choose to stay on the same road we've always been on and not look back. We can choose to put our nose to the grindstone for someone else's dream while never realizing our own and it would be entirely our choice to do so. We have freewill. We can choose not to be inspired by something deeper than what we allow ourselves to feel. We can choose to be unfulfilled. We can chose to not find the love in our purpose or the purpose in our love, but what a shame.

Recently I watched a documentary called "Inequality For All" starring U.C. Berkeley Professor and former US Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich. I almost wrote the honourable Robert Reich as he surprisingly struck me, like politicians rarely do, as both honest and profoundly honourable. In it he clearly demonstrates how unions benefitted the middle class and closed the gap on income inequality. I felt from him a desire similar to mine, to unite people, to inspire them to speak up, to act and to bridge the gaps that divide us. Perhaps we need a union for humanity, a local that will unite us all as sisters and brothers, that will speak out for our benefits and safety against anyone who would try to offer us less than what we deserve.

My Scottish great grandfather helped start the local union at the steel mill he worked for. He thought workers should be paid fairly, have decent benefits and work in safe conditions. Not unreasonable requests. Several times workers had fought to bring in a union to stand up against the conditions they were forced into, but they lacked unity and direction and all plans eventually fell short. In 1946 they tried again. Many people complained about holding out without wages during the strike. My great grandfather knew they would have to temporarily push through scarcity and starvation in order to reach mutual prosperity. His charisma was encouraging to inspire enough men to revolt. He and many other men were fervent for the cause that would support their families and their communities and they proudly stood up for what they believed in. He felt inspired by God to follow through until they succeeded. They blocked the entrances from the few men who wouldn't support the cause or who felt excessive financial pressure to go to work anyway. Desperate workers that would dare try to climb over the fence would be pulled to the ground and beaten into compliance. After much starvation and a relentless refusal to surrender without what was rightfully theirs, the union demands were met and everyone returned to an improved work environment with a fair wage to support their families.

Today we can't pull people back from the fences and block entrances, but we can still speak out in truth. We can still peacefully and respectfully protest for what we believe in. We can still act passionately. My great grandfather is a kindred Spirit to me. He practiced actively living his faith. He was compassionate and refused to back down in the face of controversy and, with a temporary exception of a few men who tried to climb over the fence, he valued and was inclusive of people from all walks of life. Everyone was welcome at his table and everyone was served the same food.

My Scandinavian heritage has made me seek out information about their culture and values. One of my great aunts was not an accurate representation of current Scandinavia. She was a coffee loving Fin, but she clearly preferred male children and fed them accordingly. The boys were fed bacon and eggs. The girls were fed porridge. No individual and no country is without its imperfections, but current culture is a celebration of equality and models values of equal access to education, healthcare and social programs. They have some of the lowest poverty rates in the European Union and some of the highest happiness rates in the world. They have impressively humane rehabilitating prisons and are committed to climate change research and development. People there, as I've experienced them, are more in touch with nature, natural foods, have deep routed senses of community and are truly hospitable and welcoming of outsiders. It's a place where government and citizens alike insist people are respected and treated fairly.

John Adams, one of the founding fathers of Canada's closest southern neighbour, the United States of America said, "Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant." The word "democracy" has become so twisted that some people forget what the founding fathers actually stood for. People are so afraid of the term socialists that they suffer repression. You can be a democratic nation and not allow people to suffer. The founding fathers had a dream for America, a dream that is dying in the face of greed and detachment. Everyone deserves to find their purpose and no one should be left behind no matter class, culture or beliefs. Education breeds tolerance.

Growing up in Canada I've been exposed to many cultures and religions. The owner of the restaurant I met my husband at has a home in India made partly of gold. His Canadian residence is also expensively golden. His family has always been prosperous, owning many properties and successful businesses in India and Canada. He is distinctly well dressed, obsessively clean and university educated. He has paid his fair share of tax dollars, benefitted our society and provided jobs for other Canadians within his growing businesses.

He was one of the best people to work for, full of energy and light humour. Some of my favourite memories with him are of the nights he would take my husband and I and sometimes our other friends to one of the Casinos in Niagara Falls. He and my husband could play poker for hours. I love games, especially poker, but would sometimes get bored playing the same one and leave the table to roam the slots or play Roulette. Though I've been known to have a potty mouth from time to time, in front of me the men from work were always well spoken and polite. As I headed back to the tables once after roaming I overheard some lengthy obscenities coming out of my boss's mouth after losing a hand. I started laughing loudly. I knew he had it in him, but he'd never have shown me if he'd known I was watching. He looked horrified when he saw me laughing and was humbly apologetic for the rest of the night despite my attempts to reassure him it was fine. He and his family have always been deeply concerned, thoughtful and generous. Once when he returned from a family trip to India he and his lovely wife brought me a traditional Indian dress fully accessorized with gold jewelry.

He and his family lead by example at defeating every nasty stereotype that exists, yet people still place their labels on him. His family was born and raised Sikh, though due to the bigotry he has experienced he and his son no longer where turbans. His father hasn't succumbed to the pressure and still wears his. I find it fascinating to hear about what the different colours mean and where the different styles are from. It astonishes me that others could be ignorant to them about something so beautiful.

Canada is one of if not the most multicultural country in the world. Only Native Americans are not immigrants here. We have progressed significantly in our acceptance of other cultures and beliefs. Everyone's kids go to school together and play together. We all work together and play together there too. How can it be that there are still some people that criticize another for what they look like, what they wear or what they believe in? How can we still have racial or religious or any kind of intolerance in this day and age? I'm sure if those people that judged knew more about what they were judging they would find the beauty in it.

From birth I've been raised in a multicultural environment by a mother who lacks the capacity to be prejudiced. I was eight years old in grade three before I had any idea what being prejudiced was and that it exists. I was in the playground and my older best friend in grade five was teasing another new friend, calling her a brownie and telling me to do the same. As far as I was concerned we may as well have been playfully calling her a cookie or cupcake. I had no idea that it was a reference to the colour of her African skin and that it was meant to be derogatory until her African mother came out to rightfully defend her daughter.

I remember being terrified of this mother asking us questions about what we'd done and why we'd done it. The other little girl was so desperate for our approval that she stood up to her mother in defense of us. Thinking about that now I can't imagine how much grief that mother must have felt, first to have needed to defend her daughter and secondly that her daughter's desperation to fit in was so great that she defended our actions. If someone dared do that to my daughter I would immediately be on the hunt. And if she dared to defend her abuser I would feel devastated and question my own ability as a mother to teach her to stand up for herself. Obviously there is no fault to this mother. Even the strongest mother can't always succeed when the opposition is so strongly integrated.

It was devastating to learn the context of calling someone a "brownie" referred to their skin. I couldn't understand why my best friend, who I loved and looked up to, would make fun of someone for such a nominal reason. Despite this the three of us remained friends until I moved away the following year. I sadly found out during that last year before I moved that her parents were bigots that encouraged a host of other negative beliefs in her. I knew then and had always known, from my own sense of the world, from what my mother raised me to believe and from church songs sung by our congregation of mixed nationalities, that god loves all his children, all the children of the world. How could we hate or differentiate anyone negatively when God loves everyone? I knew that well and I knew that early, but it took a regrettably long time before I found the courage to stand up loudly for others.

I don't remember being exposed to any other bigotry until grade six. Likely it happened around me and I was oblivious to it. I was not the subject of its ridicule so I could be blissfully ignorant. One of my good friends then was from India. She had very dark and coarse hair on her legs and one day she wore shorts. It was obvious she had never shaved before and kids used the opportunity to taunt her all day. She was incredibly embarrassed and shaved her legs that night, probably while crying in the shower. I never defended her. I felt intimidated and self conscious someone would find out about my own unshaved legs under my pants. I let my own fear of humiliation silence me.

Grade seven and eight kids got meaner. It wasn't just about race, but beauty and weight and clothes and music and prestige and popularity. Some kids would do anything to keep their friends and status even if it meant being against someone else. There were cliques everywhere. We had gone from innocent children to wannabe teenagers fighting for social survival. Not long before grade eight graduation there was a peace march against racism at the high school I was scheduled to attend the following year. It was all over the news. The cliques worsened in high school often breaking off into groups divided by race. Two students from different cliques got into a fight. The fight was not initially about race, but something quite trivial. Neither clique cared what caused it and both jumped in turning it into a full on black versus white street brawl. The majority of the students were against fighting and wanted to end race based cliques. Their peace march shut down the main street by the school with hundreds of students of all races presenting a united front for integration. It inspired in me something I'd never felt before. I wanted to walk and chant with them. I remember thinking that's what the world should be like, a place where everyone puts differences aside and unites for the greater good, where they speak up for peace.

It did bring some big changes to the school, but as inspiring as the march had been, it didn't end all the cliques or bullying. I had a couple close gay friends in high school. Some people would mildly tease me sometimes for being their friend, but that didn't bother me. What did bother me was the unyielding harassment my gay friends would receive. One guy in particular who was a very good friend and was obviously gay, but hadn't come out yet, was constantly harassed. He dropped out before the end of his first year because he couldn't face the constant interrogation and physical, mental and emotional bullying he received every morning, every time he walked down the hallway, every lunch break, every class, every time he got on the bus, every time he ran into a bully in the bathroom, every time he walked into the smoking area and everywhere else you can think of. People would walk up to him, slap his face, call him a fag and walk away like they had the right to do so. Thinking back I should have raised my voice louder for him. Back then I stood by him and would tell people to leave him alone, but me and everyone that could see the injustice of what he was experiencing should have stepped up higher and louder until our voices drowned out the opposition. We should have marched for him. He was only a kid.

My herbology teacher and divination teacher, my godfathers, are gay. They have the most beautiful marriage. They are more open and honest and kind and compassionate to each other than most couples I know. If someone dared slap them I would be up in arms until the offender was prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and if the law offered no punishment I would protest until it did.

It's easy for me to stand up to injustices against people I love now. I try to do the same for strangers. It fascinates me when adults blatantly walk by a stranger in need without helping or even acknowledging them. I'm very sensitive to the needs of others, especially homeless people, so much so some might suspect that I was homeless in a past life. Every person sleeping on the streets was born to a mother. They all started as innocent babies. Every one of them has a story that got them where they are and so many of them are veterans who fought for our freedom or are people with mental illness that have been failed by a failing system. Every one of them deserves to eat.

One year just after Christmas my mom took my best friend at the time and I to Eaton Centre in Toronto. We'd both had recent birthdays and brought all our Christmas and birthday money with us. We'd been talking excitedly for weeks about how crazy we were going to go, buying clothes and shoes and music. It started during the walk from the parking lot to Eaton Centre. Every few feet there was someone sitting in the cold with a sign asking for help. Most people walked busily by talking on their cell phones, glancing down only long enough to see the time on their expensive watches, not seeing the pleading in the eyes of the man trying to keep warm by sitting over an exhaust grate, deaf to his coughing in the cold. We were still young enough to see it. Innocent eyes, not yet jaded, cried.

My mother is a generous woman, but our concern for the people we passed made her afraid for our safety. We were not afraid. We were insistent. We went in to the closest coffee shop and spent most of our money on trays of coffee and bags of food and spent the better part of our afternoon in Toronto handing them out to homeless people. It felt much better than buying ourselves another pair of shoes.

We knew we were blessed and far from starving and it was hugely evident to us that it is wrong for one person to have so much while another person starves. We wanted to do our part. A couple years later we started a tradition. Every Christmas Eve we would go to the largest local homeless shelter with donations. We would bring Christmas cookies, old clothes and whatever money we had. We would go to local coffee shops and ask them to donate their day old baked goods. We kept it up for years and it was my favourite part of Christmas. We imagined starting a homeless shelter that helped rehabilitate people. Once we were in our twenties we settled down and started our own families and the tradition slowly died. We still gave, but the setting changed and the date changed and doing it together changed. Those old days, driving around in her mom's car, feeling invigorated from sharing, are moments that fed our Spirits and helped shape who we are.

Some people play pivotal roles in your life even though they are not meant to stay in them forever. I've since lost touch with that friend. She had been one of my best friends from the age of eleven. We were very connected spiritually and were there for each other during the biggest changes and challenges in our youth. We used to joke that we were like Oprah and Gail. In class in grade school we would just look at each other across the classroom and laugh hysterically. It would drive the teachers wild with rage, but we couldn't help it. We were giggly girls, full of inside jokes. When I was sick during my pregnancy and could eat nothing else she would make and delivery me sandwiches. When her husband first left her I made myself available to her beckon call. Once as a teenager she was alone crying in her room and she called out my name. At my house several blocks away my heart knew she needed me and I picked up the phone. She was having a panic attack and contemplating suicide and we talked through it together. She suffered terrible traumas in her childhood that continued to torture her into adulthood.

It was that torture that pushed us apart. She was lost in the dark. She reached a stage where her anger at the world was so great that there was nothing anyone could do for her. She had lost control of herself and was trying to gain it back by angrily controlling others. I fought through it for a couple years hoping she would break free of her pain, anxiety and anger, but it only got worse. She became jealous and possessive of our friendship and would get mad at me when I would go out with other friends. It got to the point where I would I was avoiding telling her I'd been out with other people because she would get so upset. Once I overheard how angrily she spoke to her mother just for waking her up for my phone call and it broke my heart. She yelled worse obscenities at her mother than you'd hear from a crazy drunken fan at a football game. She was hurting everyone around her and not letting anyone help her. It was a truly heart breaking decision, but the relationship had become toxic and was seeping poisonous anger into my own life. As much as I loved her and her family I had to cut myself free or drown trying to save her. Her daughter, parents, grandparents and siblings were my extended family and had been most of my life. Losing them was an inevitable side effect and compounded my loss. It felt like a mass death.

It was not an easy decision to make. I meditated and prayed about it plenty first. I thought about the summer I lived at her house, the love our babies had for each other, her tipsy maid of honour speech at my wedding. Over twenty years of memories flashed through my meditations. The answer was unequivocally that the friendship had served its purpose and I needed to move on.

The spirits around her couldn't reach her. I prayed to them to help her and they were trying and had been trying for a long time, but there are certain states of mind and heart where people can't be reached. They wanted to help her, but she wouldn't let them in. That free will thing sometimes gets in our way. At one point a year or two before our relationship ended I'd given her spirit beads, a necklace made with glass beads blessed with herbs and other sacred items and rituals. The spirit beads were consecrated to a healing deity she had been close to at a more balanced point in her life. She ripped them off in her sleep and woke up to them flying across her room. She gave them back to me in pieces along with a drum I'd given her several years prior. She walked in a cloud of darkness so thick even the most unfamiliar eye could see she was deeply troubled. I worried she would follow through with the suicidal thoughts I knew she was feeling. I went to a psychic fair for fun with a different friend and the subject of her came up. A Native American shaman who I felt very akin to spoke to me of her condition. He wisely told me all I could do was send her light. I still do that now when I think of her.

Another good friend of mine, who I've known just as long, recently told me they've become very empathic. It's something she always knew was there, but was never willing to open up to before. Now she has a strong sense of energies and Spirits around her. She can feel they want to show themselves more, but she can only handle so much at a time. They express themselves in photographs and music and dreams and other signs that she is comfortable with. They are mostly angelic and ancestral spirits and are very respectful of her wishes. She is awakening to it gradually. They enter her life as much as she allows them. People set their own limits for themselves all the time without even realizing it. Free will; A choice to believe or not, to see or not, to hear or not, to act or not, to feel or not, to allow or not, to heal or not.

Being an intuitive, empathetic child prepared me minimally for what some people call a "spiritual awakening" or "psychic awakening". I don't like the term psychic. It carries stigmas that have nothing to do with my life. My ignorant father used to mock commercials for psychic hotlines saying that if they were so psychic they should call him. It would silently irritate me. I wanted to tell him that even if it worked like that they had no reason to want to call him and if they knew him they'd be wise to avoid his calls. His thinking he was the centre of the universe prevented him from ever coming close to understanding not everyone cares what he thinks. He would mistakenly syndicate the term psychic with mind reader and make other presumptions while making no effort to understand, only to mock. Ironically he has argued for other causes about people making uneducated presumptions.

At seventeen, in the midst of the lost chaos that was my life then, entered a great light that would lead to my awakening. As soon as I became conscious of the light I rushed into it. I wanted to know everything at once. I was impatient and arrogant like teenagers typically are. I have no regrets for rushing in like I did, but would not necessarily recommend others to enter in so ferociously. I needed the intensity of the awakening to balance out the intensity of the pain I was going through. I was energized by it and brought it with me everywhere. Some moments were so electric I thought I would burst into flames, others were so weighted down with emotion it felt like the seven seas were resting on my heart. My sense of empathy became so strong there were days I would have to avoid people altogether. One day on the bus I was overwhelmed by the emotions of others sitting around me. I could feel which individual was exhausted, anxious, impatient, worried. I was so open and receptive to energy I would've been able to tell you which person had a headache or toothache or missed their child or had fought with their husband. It was too much. I had to pull in the reigns to find a more functional place. I was getting lost in the light. Everyone has their own comfort levels. Mine is deeper than some, shallower than others.

There are many factors to living a balanced life. Walking with one foot in the physical world with the other in the spiritual world at whatever level you are comfortable with is a balance. It literally feels insane to me to think of walking without my comfort leveled awareness of spirit. It's also essential to be able to commune with the living, not just the dead. Two feet firmly in the physical world can drive you crazy with indifference and greed. Two feet wandering the borderless spirit world can lead to a different type of crazy town. Balance is essential.

Though some schools have found the benefits to introducing yoga, meditation and other spiritual classes, first world society doesn't habitually support spiritual growth, training or wellness within our educational institutions. Not religious training, but spiritual training. Everyone is spiritual. Everyone has a Spirit. Everyone has a heart. The Dalai Lama has been quoted as saying, "If every eight year old in the world is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world in one generation." How amazing and powerful that we have tools to teach our children that could literally change our world. I foresee these tools being implemented at substantially increased rates as the next generation expands their search guidelines looking for health and peace.

" _A human being is a part of the whole, called by us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security."_ _Albert Einstein_

The idea of separateness is a disillusion. The idea of borders separating us as humans, that people on one side can eat while the other side starves, lacks the oneness that will save us. This I've foreseen; The world is uniting. Don't let the wars dissuade you. Peace is coming. Oneness is coming. An overflow of love is going to take over and lead us. It's coming, but it starts with us as individuals changing our own minds and our own beliefs and our own hearts. The sooner we start the more lives we can impact. Let love lead you. Love is the primary universal truth. It's the first step, the last step and every step in between. Where there is love, there is no separation.

Spirit has shown me this and many things in my dreams. We've had conversations that have brought me to life changing realizations. Once when my great grama came to visit in my dreams she gave me a deep hug and whispered softly in my ear. It only lasted a few seconds. It was more meaningful in its briefness. Such a bright memory of a transient moment that impacted my whole life. I have a tendency to rush. In my late teens and early twenties I loved the fast rhythmic beat of loud house and techno music. I loved how it pressed me to move faster. Everything was about speed. Dancing, walking, driving, learning. Life was a constant hustle, a race to get ahead, further endorsed by espresso and nicotine. Perhaps I was trying to get away from where I'd been. Surely even not knowing where I was going was a better option than what was behind me. In the dream my great grama simply whispered, "Enjoy the moment." Those three little words slowed me right down. I consciously enjoyed her hug and when it was over I felt lifted. One more weight was off my chest. Enjoy the moment. It's not a race. It's a journey. Be present in each moment. Be conscious and enjoy it.

One of my godfathers other godchild had moved to San Francisco. I met him briefly when he came to visit. I showed up early for one of my divination classes and he answered the door and invited me in to wait for them. Their house always smelled like warm coffee. He poured me a cup as we talked. I liked him immediately for what seemed like loyalty to our mutual friends and for something else I couldn't place. He was a little manic like my ex-boyfriend, but in a gentler more self assured way. We talked about San Francisco, about the people we mutually loved and about Spirit. He shared a view with me that has helped me through tough times since. No matter what he's going through in the moment, good or bad, he steps outside of himself to look at the bigger picture. He looks at it with outside eyes and it reminds him to appreciate the experience and the lessons it will teach. It was the first time I'd thought to try and look at my life as an outsider and admire it from that angle. We are all intrigued by each other's stories and the difficulties we survive, we should be as intrigued with and appreciative of our own.

Part of my divination lesson that day turned out to be to read tarot cards for his new wife who returned with my godfathers from a shopping excursion. I love to read cards. I find it exhilarating still. I don't always like what I have to tell the people I'm reading for, especially when I have to tell them uncomfortable news. It's a struggle to tell people painful truths, especially when they don't really want to hear it, but it's such a disservice to lie or say nothing. Whether my godfathers predicted ahead of time what the context of the reading would be about or not I never asked. I took her in the living room at the front of the house while everyone else puttered about in the warm kitchen at the back of the house. We had total privacy.

She was a very tall, warm and earthy girl, super smiley in a boho skirt, excited to hear about her future. I didn't want to disappoint her. The reading started definitively about finances. She was very good with money. Her husband was not. He was trying to start a new business, but it was taking more from them then it was going to give back. She was worried about their financial future. He wasn't, but he needed to be. She was grateful I told her this and said it was something she'd been feeling for awhile and was going to try and work at with him. Then came their love life. They were both genuinely very much in love. It was real love, but it wasn't meant to last. I tried to hint at it, but she got so upset. It sucks to give all bad news to someone, especially someone I just met and liked very much. I felt terrible for them and didn't want to upset her or her husband who I figured she would tell. She asked me if there was any way to save the marriage. She was anxiously pleading with her eyes. I lied and said maybe. I felt guilty to Spirit for not being clearer about what they were so obviously showing me. When you read you have a responsibility to be honest. Not all readings are always that clear, but this one was. I found out a couple years later the two had split and he was living with a different girl in Toronto.

One of the reasons my godparents taught divination was so their students would never go hungry. They said that if nothing else we would be able to go read cards on a street corner somewhere and buy ourselves a meal. A down on their luck friend of mine regularly drummed on the streets for spare change. Once for tarot card practice I went and sat with him and read cards for free for people passing by. It was humbling for many reasons. Admittedly I probably looked like a street kid and most people either ignored me or glanced at me with pity. That didn't bother me so much as having to tell an uncomfortable truth in another reading. One girl, about my age and visibly very pregnant, came and sat with me for a reading. The cards very clearly told me that her baby daddy left her. I asked her and she said no. I tried asking her another way, but she said they were together. I pulled card after card shuffled and reshuffled, but they kept saying he was out of the picture and wasn't coming back. Slowly she began to show she was in denial about him leaving her. She admitted to them being less together, but that it was only temporary. She asked me how to get him back. There was no way I could break the heart of this young delusional, vulnerable, pregnant girl by saying he was gone forever. I made some small suggestions to appease her and told her that no matter what happened she would be okay. I wasn't built to break hearts. It breaks my own just as much to watch them. Since then I pretty much only read for people I think can handle the truth and for people I think it would truly benefit, mostly close friends and family.

One of the very first readings I ever did was for my ex best friend. It was before any formal training had started and we were having fun more than anything else tossing around cards and conjuring up predictions. We weren't taking it very seriously and she was someone I could be brutally honest with. Her father was a physically abusive alcoholic and racist just like his own father had been. She was nothing like him then and tried to defy him every chance she got. In the reading I told her she would marry a black man and walk down the aisle pregnant. We laughed so hard we cried snotty nose running tears thinking about how livid he would be. It was probably the worst thing she could ever do to upset her dad. We laughed even harder when it actually happened a few years later.

Some people are obsessed with pleasure. Some people find pleasure in revenge. Others are adrenaline junkies obsessed with pushing limits. Addicts of all kinds look for pleasure in bottles and pills and food and sex. Certainly I enjoy my share of pleasure and it has its place, but I doubt there is a greater pleasure than that found in a sense of connection. I suspect those that hunger for it need only look deeper for the satisfaction they are craving. Whether it be connection with another human being, a community, with animals, angels or feeling your oneness with the earth. The greatest pleasure is internal. It's simple and free.

One time and one time only, many years ago, I meditated into ecstasy. I focused on trying to listen to a healing female deity I was familiar with and fell into a near sleep trance. I was lifted into a euphoria of elation. There was no mantra, no words, no verbal communication, just a fully satisfied feeling of ecstasy. In it there was no want, no need, nothing missing, nothing better. It wasn't fast or slow. It wasn't riveting or reassuring. It was simply perfection. I haven't been able to get so perfectly back to that. I'm not sure I want to. It's now an ideal I hold of what is possible. I optimistically like to dream it's where all future humanity will get to one day, a reality so pure and connected that we all become capable of reaching states of ecstasy.

I've lived in the closet with my beliefs. I'm torn between feeling love and loyalty to the Spirits around me and the wonderful healing and blessings they bring and this need to hide my belief in them to avoid prosecution. I've hidden parts of myself because I am afraid others will pull away from me and more importantly that people will pull away from my daughter. There is so much judgment I don't want her to feel or see, even among some people we know well. People should be free to live their lives as who they are. They should be free to be true to themselves. They should be free to live their life without fear. I want my daughter to be able to grow up in an environment where she feels free. Where she never feels like she has to be someone other than herself.

My fisherman uncle, my mom's youngest brother, has come around to the idea of something more in this world. I feel like he was hiding himself for a long time too. It took a divorce from his cheating wife of over 25 years to change him. The pain that he's gone through from losing her has really spun him around as a person. He's grown up. The youngest of my mother's four siblings, he was always a bit of a loner, never fully connected to anyone in the family, always aloof. His wife was his first love. He forgave her cheating and lying many times before he finally couldn't handle living with someone he distrusted so much. As much as he wanted her to be faithful he couldn't force her to be. As much as he wanted to trust her she wasn't working to earn it.

She was unhappy too. She stayed in their marriage so long for the sake of their two boys and the house she wanted so badly to keep. What had seemed like a perfect pairing in their youth had turned out to be something that wasn't meant to be forever. It ate at him that the person he had envisioned retiring with and living with until death do them part wasn't as committed to him as he was to them. She instantly found another lover, another stab in the heart. He turned to his family for support. The same family that he often placed in lower priority below his wife and their social life he now saw the full value of. His father, his sisters, brother and me his eldest niece, all stepped up for him. It visibly changed him. He smiled more. He showed more depth of character. He went from being distant to calling and stopping by regularly. He showed up to all family events and started spending almost every Sunday with his father. Underneath his distant exterior was a warm family man that has kept us in stitches with his comedic views and grandeur stories from the deep woods of Algonquin Park.

My fisherman uncle went to college to be a ranger. He could tell you which bark to make tea out of and which plants to eat if you're lost in the woods. He can tell you how to survive a snow storm in a tent and a kidney stone attack when you've portaged deep into the woods, all from personal experience. He's met many bears and wolves up close without flinching. It's all for the fishing. He packs light, bringing only the essentials on his portaging trips. Food is wasted space and doesn't travel well. Occasionally he'll bring bacon or flour to make breakfast or bake bread over the camp fire. Aside from that he lives almost exclusively off the fish he catches while he's in the woods. Part of me would love to go with him on one of his excursions, another part of me screams that it loves running water, flush toilets and is a little afraid of bears. I've yet to convince to him to stay at one of the established camp sites in the park, perhaps one with showers. He finds them too crowded and prefers his rustic quiet commune in the wild. He's always found connection in nature. Now he's more connected to his family too. He's still portaging whenever possible and he kept custody of his two boys and his house, but everything else is new. He is moving on with his life, becoming a stronger and wiser person in the process.

After my nana died my fisherman uncle and I helped move my papa back from East Coast Canada to Ontario. We flew out and took turns driving my papa's car with his two Labrador retrievers back to our hometown. Both of us are prone to quiet moments, but with the exception of some panicked into silence moments driving through Montreal at rush hour, we talked and laughed the whole drive home.

He came to my wedding even though that's not his kind of event. The flu he had offered him an easy out, but he came anyway. I found him trying not to throw up in my mother's basement and thanked him for coming despite looking deep woods green. We hugged and he told me nothing would have made him miss it.

I opened up to my fisherman uncle about my beliefs after his divorce and he accepted them. It was the ultimate bond to an already established relationship. He even let me read his cards. I won't relay the full details of his reading except to say that I am very much looking forward to seeing it unfold as he and my cousins deserve.

All my cousins on my mother's side are younger than I am and in very different stages of life. The closest in age is ten years my junior and still not out of the partying stage of life. Like myself he's an only child and very much like a little brother to me. The rest are all teenagers. My aunt and uncles are as close in age to me as their children are. They are closer in age to my husband who enjoys their company as friends and drinking buddies whenever they visit. Despite the age differences and distance some of us live from each other we are gratefully a tight knit family.

My teenage cousins in Switzerland are not like the typical teenagers I know from southern Ontario. They stayed innocent longer, exposed to less pop culture and more treks into the Alps. They are all more capable, resourceful and self sufficient from time spent survival camping in scouts. There are the twins, one boy and one girl and their younger brother. One summer the male twin negotiated with his mother to use the money she would have otherwise spent on new clothes to put towards a plane ticket to Canada. He didn't buy so much as new socks. He started a few small lemonade stand like businesses and saved every penny. He used that money to come to Canada with a friend for three weeks in the summer. Money well spent on experience.

Very few experiences open us up to new ideas as easily as travel. Seeing another side of the world, culture, another way of life, other landmarks, art and history manufactures open-mindedness. Seventeen was a big year for me. In addition to the new friends and new light it was also the summer my mom sent me to stay with my uncle and aunt in Switzerland. I was sad to leave my friends, old and new and scared to venture out while still going through so much, but psyched for the opportunity I knew would be life changing. I'd been before for a few weeks with my mom and step dad and had that first trip when I was nine with my great grama, but this was going to be true independence, travelling solo. I planned to go to Paris and see Jim Morrison's grave and go to raves in Germany. Turned out my mom wasn't a fan of that plan. I was allowed to travel their small town by myself, becoming a frequent visitor at the pub and discotheque, but the only day trip she allowed me to go solo to was a twenty minute train ride to an Art Gallery in Basel. Luckily, I have the best family in the world and my Swiss aunt and uncle spent every day they had off touring me across the country and beyond.

One of my favourite places on earth is the Cote D'Azur. My aunt's mother has an amazing life. We spent a week at her house between Nice and Antibes. It was on a hill overlooking parts of a small town with a far off view of the ocean. The weather is so moderate most of the year and it rains so infrequently that parts of her house were in an outdoor setting. Her living room was set outside with a hammock instead of a couch, grass instead of carpet. Her dining room was outdoors covered by an arbor with flowering live vines. The walls were made of stones that looked like ancient castle ruins. Every morning we woke to rich yoghurt with fruit for breakfast then took a short drive to swim in the ocean. Everyone there, myself included, was topless. No one cared. They were all there for the same warm sun and warm ocean. After swimming we would wander through the Cathedral in Antibes, eat olives walking the market in Nice, or watch puppet shows in the mountain top village of Biot. Had my aunt's mother not been graciously touring us around she would have been playing tennis or boating with friends in the afternoon, followed by a nap, then dinner with friends in the evening. She knew how to get as much physical pleasure out of life as I've ever seen with her French wine and whimsical carefree attitude. My aunt drove me back to Switzerland sun kissed with a brighter perspective about rebuilding my life and living it to the fullest.

We drove through bella Italia, stopping occasionally to enjoy the sights and sounds and to be introduced to real full flavoured ristretto. We bonded talking about life and love and fertility. This trip was before she was blessed with my cousins, her beautiful three babies. It took ten years of miscarriages before they miraculously arrived. After the twins they told her she likely would never have any more children. She surprised with a second blessed son a couple years later.

One winter long before her babies were born she came to Canada for Christmas. We were so excited she came without my uncle who couldn't get away from work to spend such sacred time with us. She ended up spending Christmas afternoon laying flat on the floor of our house, her legs propped up against the wall trying to prevent what was inevitably a miscarriage. The rest of Christmas evening was spent in the hospital getting a D & C procedure done. I remember my mom and I sitting with her in the hospital room rubbing her head after the procedure while she tried not to cry. She tried to be so strong even though she must have felt so lonely in a foreign country without her husband having just lost her baby.

Her husband, my uncle in Switzerland is as charismatic and as social as a person can get and in the most genuinely generous of ways. He is a gifted, energetic story teller who is always open to travelling the globe and meeting new people who quickly become his best friends. He met his wife on a train in Scotland while he was stationed in Germany during his enrollment in the United Nations. They clicked instantly. Her first language is French and she spoke very little English and only some broken German. He spoke even less broken German and one naughty phrase in French, "Voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir". She laughed. It was love. They married quickly and happily at a chalet in the mountains. The emotional component of their fertility struggles took its toll on the marriage and for awhile we worried they wouldn't make it through. Thankfully they went on to have their three perfect babies and are still living their happily ever after. My papa says of his eldest son that he lives like a king. I certainly think he married a queen.

She is one of many queens that have inspired me to pull through tough times. When facing my own fertility issues, including my inability to have a second baby, it was comforting to remember what she went through. Every queen in my life has a story to tell and their sharing it has helped me deal with my own trials and tribulations. It's inevitable that heartbreak will happen, but no one is really going through anything alone, no matter how lonely they may feel. Know someone else is out there has survived something similar. Know someone else in the world is cheering for you. I'm cheering for you. I'm cheering for humanity. I believe in us. I believe in our power to love. Love is the Law. Love and nothing else. "Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own." **Mother Teresa**

Spirit is always cheering for us too. The most powerful choice I ever made to was to surrender to the will of Spirit, to trust that they have a broader view from the other side and can guide us with more wisdom to a higher destiny. It's something I need to remind myself of often so I never get too far away from them again. There was a period of time not long ago where I was too busy telling Spirit what to do instead of listening to what they were telling me what to do. I had to be reminded to surrender. Surrender to your higher self, your ancestors or whatever Godly forces you believe in. Let them be your light. Be receptive to the help they so anxiously want to give. Be wise to the lessons they are so desperately trying to teach. Trust that inner voice, that deeper instinct. Allow them room in your life to act for you and on your behalf. My life is not perfect now that I do this, but it is divinely empowered and filled with purpose.

All children have special loves, special talents. My daughter loves theatre, art, languages, design, dance, music and singing. It comes naturally to her. We've put her in many different activities and participated in many activities with her over the years and so far these have been the ones to stick. When she's sick they are the only things she shows special interest in. She has very creative energy. She is equally good at science, especially as it applies to animals and nature and math comes easily to her, but they are currently often trumped by her heartfelt joy of the arts. I'm sure as she develops her talents will streamline and her purpose will appear. Where your talent and your love unite, where your head and your heart meet, lives the direction of your purpose. There are many doors open to her and time will see what specific path or paths she grows into. Whether she chooses to be an artist, a farmer, an activist, a stay at home mom, a café attendant, so long as she is being true to herself I will be proud of her.

We are more than just our titles. Some of the biggest parts of our purpose may have nothing to do with our profession. I know many people making differences in their families, at their churches, temples or mosques or volunteering at their children's school. One of the biggest things you can do to help the world is to grow yourself, to grow as a person. Taking an art class, learning another language, spending time with people that inspire you, playing a sport, joining a book club, taking quiet moments for yourself, are all ways to open your mind, grow as a person and heal your Spirit. Treat yourself with the respect you deserve. Make some time for yourself. Many people who are empathic, sensitive, who are parents or who are taking care of loved ones, tend to put others needs ahead of their own. This can detract us from our own health and our own purpose. We must prioritize your own health, physically, mentally and spiritually no matter what else we are faced with in life.

My remaining grandparents are of ill health and are aging rapidly. They are in their eighties and are very near the end of their full lives. Watching death grow on them a little more each day has been morbidly draining. Their bodies are deteriorating and their minds are slowly going in the same direction. When I'm with them I try to soak up as much of their love and stories and hugs as I can, always wondering if it will be the last visit, the last embrace, the last words. When their health first started to go south I prayed with all my might for them to live as long as possible. Their physical health has passed a point of healing. Nothing can make them revert back to the health they had. There comes a time in your life when health abandons you and nothing can bring it back. Praying to extend this period of time was of no service to my grandparents. They were blessed to be able to live their purposes and now they are ready and waiting to die. They are in pain. They are not able to take care of themselves. They are suffering.

My family has all stepped up to help them in any way possible. Balancing the care they need with the care we need for ourselves has been a challenge. As much as we need to prioritize them, we also need to prioritize ourselves. This has been an adjustment. When something first goes wrong our reaction has been to drop whatever we were doing and rush to their aide. One of my papa's more recent heart attacks did that to us. We all rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night, manically high on adrenaline and worry. He was stabilized and spent a few days in recovery and then was released. The adrenaline kept us going for those few days. Then we all crashed. The following heart attack not long after the other one brought back all the craze and worry and we went manic again, rushing to his aide and the aide of his wife. My step grama who also suffers from recent debilitating medical conditions went manic with us. It was a manic panic of insecurity and sadness over potentially losing him.

It's near impossible to avoid this kind of mania during the crisis of a loved one. During an emotional response it's incredibly difficult to sit back and remind yourself to breathe. It's integral to try. The crash after this longer bout in the hospital was worse than the last. Exhaustion and depression swarmed us. He will die one day. Likely sooner than later. It's an inevitable truth. Death comes for us all. This crash brought with it the realization that he should die. We all should die. This quest to live forever is not a worthwhile or realistic cause. Fighting to extend our health and ability is worthwhile. Fighting to keep him when he's way past any opportunity for comfort is only extending his misery. He has a right to die. He has a right to be at peace. That realization flowed into the realization that I deserve to be at peace while I am alive. I deserve to be at peace with his imminent death. Torturing myself is of no benefit to anyone least of all the ones I'm worried about. No matter what crisis surrounds me, I am deserving of being at peace with it. I am deserving of quiet moments just for me. I am deserving of acceptance of my limitations. I am deserving of acceptance of uncertainty.

My mother and I went for lunch at a restaurant across the street from my papa's hospital. We talked quietly about what we were going through and what we were worried about. We talked about my papa dying. She looked at me with peacefully sad eyes and said that she had accepted it too. It will be solemn when he passes. He will be missed and he will always be loved. More importantly he will be at peace too.

I had thought that trying to teach this to a child would be more difficult. My daughter is becoming impressively well adjusted with death. Sadly, she's had lots of experience, the first major family death being her nana, my mother in law. In her eyes her nana was the sweet lady that gave her snuggles and kisses and sweet treats and loved puzzles. When she died she cried her big little girl heart out. My husband and daughter and I were planning our last summer outing to a wave pool. We had just finished excitedly applying sun screen and were putting on our shoes when the phone rang. I almost didn't answer, but felt moved to do so. It was my mother. She told me to call my brother in law right away. My sister in law has had complicated health and I prayed she was okay. There were no hysterics in her voice, but the quiet sorrow gave away that something serious had happened. I asked her to tell me what was wrong. She didn't want to and asked me to call my brother in law right away. My brother in law is very loved by my husband and I. He had tried to call us while I was in the shower getting ready for our excursion and my husband had been in the backyard with our daughter. No one had answered so he called my mom hoping she could reach us. I dialed his number with heavy fingers and a pensive heart. I could hear my sister in law crying in the background when he answered. He said my name and then he told me. My mother in law, my husband's mother, my daughter's and my step son's nana, had died.

From the minute he told me I knew my own feelings would have to wait. Today was about everyone else. Whatever I was feeling would be dealt with later. I was about to have the worst conversations of my life with three of the people I love most in the world. How do you tell people you love something that will hurt them so much? I understood why my mom hadn't wanted to be the one to tell me. I asked my daughter to go to her room for a minute and went in the living room with my husband. He'd heard my part of the conversation with my brother in law and was manic in his motions already, pacing and visibly trying not to shake. He knew something severe had happened and was waiting to find out if it was his sister or his mother. Either news was going to be devastating. He wouldn't sit down. I didn't want to tell him like that. I didn't want to tell him at all. There was no way to sugar coat it. It had to be done. I told him his mom had unexpectedly had a heart attack. I told him she died. He started to sob while loudly saying no, no. I tried to hug him and he let me for a second, but he couldn't stand still. We walked down the hall to my daughter's room where she was waiting in the doorway looking at us with unease. She asked what was wrong. Conversation number two. I knelt down and pulled her into a big hug and said that something sad had happened. I told her nana went to heaven. She instantly cried full force. It was almost a scream at the same time. My husband bent down and picked her up. He paced the house holding her, the both of them crying streams down their faces. I hugged and consoled them as best I could. They couldn't stop crying. My husband asked me to call his son. Conversation number three. I picked up the phone and dialed almost hoping he wouldn't answer. He answered with his typical cheerful, good-humored hello. I did not want to tell him on the phone, but didn't think there was a way I could tell him to come to our place right away without having him drive over worried and more than anything I wanted him safe. I told him something serious had happened. I realized when I said that, that his first thought might be that something had happened to his father. I said his Nana passed away. We talked for a couple minutes. I wished he'd been with us for a family hug and so we could see his reaction and talk about what he was feeling. I sent him as much love as I could over the phone. When I hung up I couldn't help but cry.

There would be lots of time to process what I was feeling later. I only let myself cry for a minute. My husband wanted to go up north right away. I was nervous about driving so upset and would have preferred we all stayed home for the night and go first thing in the morning when we weren't so freshly raw from shock and grief. There was no arguing with him, he wanted to be with his sister. We packed quickly and hit the road. I insisted on driving and he agreed. He was in no state to focus. After a quiet three hour drive we arrived at his sisters.

The next few days up north my daughter would cry and witness more crying then she'd previously seen in her whole little life. No matter how turbulent our relationships were to my mother in law we were all experiencing grief for our loss and the loss our loved ones. Perhaps it was youth or perhaps it was faith, but my daughter seemed to accept it all rather quickly. At first I was worried she was holding in too much. That was not the case. She had poured out her tears a few times, let her feelings be known, then like an elastic band she bounced back. Her short grieving period was not a reflection of how much she loved her Nana. She just accepted it very quickly. Her nature is not to mourn. She'd only experienced death previously through the death of our very kindly, very senior neighbour and his equally senior, very blind cat. She had cried hysterically when she found out, then almost immediately bounced back. When my grandfather, my father's father died only months after her Nana, she cried hard, let it all out and bounced back again. Her resilience amazes me.

We have an ancestor shrine that she helps me take care of. On it are pictures of our family in heaven, most of whom she's only heard stories of. It brings her great comfort knowing that they are still around her, still loving her from some place close by, still alive in her heart and celebrated in memory. Along with the pictures of our family are pictures or names written on paper of people that are our ancestors for something other than blood. These are names and pictures of friends, or of strangers whose stories have inspired change in my life. Few are famous to most people though one famous name will most definitely land their name on our shrine one day, Oprah Winfrey.

Through my wild, tumultuous youth she was there. Another queen who, unbeknownst to her, was creating change in my life. My mom and I would regularly watch The Oprah Winfrey show after school. We laughed at how frequently it became a tear fest. We didn't mind the tears. She'd achieved a new level of depth and brought us with her. It was worth the emotion to feel connected and inspired by the stories being shared. I remember the day she announced the Angel Network. The Angel Network was a whole new level of tears.

The best material gift my husband ever gave me was Oprah's 20th Anniversary collection. It features different works of the Angel Network and the Christmas Oprah made the dreams of fifty thousand children in Africa come true. A Christmas tradition I recently started with my daughter is to watch the special where Oprah goes to Africa. My daughter enjoys it as much as I do getting teary eyed with joy. Even on my worst day when I was a teenager, watching the Oprah show would give me hope that there might be something out there for me to aspire to. I desperately wanted to be a member of her audience on a live show. I wanted so badly to feel the energy of her and that room in person. I had so few dreams for myself then. I believed that this would happen one day. Somehow I would do it. I had to. I wanted it so badly. When she retired her show in 2011 I was devastated. Not only did I feel a deep sated loss from no longer being able to see her show, there was the loss of my dream of being in the audience watching it live. It made me wonder how I had believed so strongly that it would happen. Instinctively I'd really thought it would manifest. I eventually shrugged it off as misplaced faith and misjudged instincts thinking that maybe I should start to dream a little more realistically.

In the year 2012 Oprah was on her Lifeclass Tour. I found out she was coming to Toronto Monday, April 16, 2012. The minute I heard I called my mom at work. I may not have gotten to see her show, but I was going to this and I couldn't think of anyone I would want to go with more than my mom. She was excited too. As soon as I hung up with her I went to ask my manager if I could have the day off as a vacation day and she agreed. I booked our tickets and planned the day. When the day finally arrived I was a mess with excitement. I could barely eat or think. I was in a dreamlike state. I couldn't wait to see Oprah and hear Deepak Chopra and all the other speakers that would be there. The turnout for her Toronto Lifeclass show broke records. We got there hours early to wait in line. So did everyone else. It was the longest line up outside the Metro Toronto Convention Centre ever. Over eight thousand people lined up for hours for city blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks to squeeze into an oversized conference room. Pictures of the line up were all over local and national news. It's rare to find masses so entirely friendly, no hint of rowdiness. There was no competition, no line jumping, just a mass of people looking forward to the same thing. The same presence, the same peace of mind, the same connection and inspiration we'd all found on her show.

After hours standing on the street we were all huddled in to the convention centre and found our seats. The thick energy from everyone's excitement was thrilling. Music started and everyone started screaming and jumping up and down. Then they said that this would be a live show. A live Oprah show! I remembered my dream to be a part of her live audience. I realized it was coming true. I lost it. Grateful, uncontrollable tears flowed out of me like a running faucet. Bigger than winning any lottery, my dream had come true. I could feel Spirit present the entire lengthy show. I could feel them telling me that dreams come true and to never give up on them again no matter how impossible they seem. Just because you can't imagine how it will happen doesn't mean that it won't happen. I carry that with me. Spirit has a bigger imagination than we do.

When I was a little girl I would watch the commercials showing nearly naked, sick children asking for aide in third world countries. I would watch them on purpose and cry. I wondered how anyone could know that problems like this existed and not want to help. I promised myself that when I grew up I wouldn't ignore the problem and would do what I could to help. When I got my first full time job the first thing I did was sponsor a child in Africa. When I got my first significant promotion I took on another sponsor child. At work I was given the liberty of fundraising for different charities at different times of the year. I started a professional clothing drive that supported low income woman needing clothes for interviews and professional jobs. I ran multiple food drives including one focused on baby food for local food banks. I'd initiated sponsoring a program at a local charity for low income families at Christmas with grocery store gift cards and presents for each family member. My coworkers and clients were supportive, but it wasn't enough for me. I didn't feel like I was doing enough. I volunteered outside of work at a women's shelter for awhile and still I felt like something was off. Perhaps had the charity work been my full time job I would have found enough satisfaction in it, but I don't think so. I didn't fit where I was. My dream was different than what I was currently doing. I just didn't know what my dream was or how to manifest it.

Going to work the day after the Oprah show was a slam in the face. My branch manager, new to her role, was a very dirty sales person. My coworkers and I had been keeping notes on incidents we believed were of questionable integrity. All she cared about was showing big sale numbers, no matter how risky a deal she had to approve to get them. She'd been asking us to change our comments and leave out pertinent derogatory information that would affect the approval of credit applications to increase the deals chance of approval. We were asked not to recommend declining deals in our comments. When we did get decent deals she manipulated the stories about how we got them to our Regional Director to make it look like she had brought in the business instead of us. I had recently confronted her about some of her practices and was now feeling the stress of her hovering over me looking for reasons to criticize my work. She had forgotten I had requested a vacation day and used it as a perfect excuse to say that I hadn't asked for permission. The day after being so full of elation at the Oprah show I walked in to work and faced a meeting with her and a representative from Human Resources who accused me of taking the day off work without proper approval and was written up.

Looking back now this was a clear sign from Spirit that I was in the wrong place applying my efforts in life in the wrong direction. Sadly I didn't see that then. I stood my ground and dug my feet in further. I thought my role was to stand up to her and the injustice of her practices. I reported all her actions to human resources who launched a full scale investigation. During this time I felt very sorry for her. I felt like she didn't know any better and was only acting out of self defense. I didn't feel like she was supposed to be my enemy, but that she was someone who was lost in a world of greed and selfishness. Part of me felt like I should help her, another part of me thought she should be fired. I could feel her deceased brother around sometimes. Once early on during the investigation I felt him standing in the doorway of my office. I looked up and could see his energy was vibrant. He asked me clearly and pleadingly not to have her fired. It really shook me up. During one of the interviews the third party investigator asked me what I thought her punishment should be. I thought to myself that clearly she should be fired, but remembered her brother's words and felt merciful. I couldn't answer him. Everything blurred out. I couldn't bring myself to suggest a punishment.

Throughout the investigation I had been waking up before dawn to go for invasive fertility treatments before work. I was on the maximum amount of hormones allowed and was feeling very overwhelmed by what felt like injustices all over my life. I was out of my flow. I'd lost my rhythm and everything was off beat. It was hard to listen to Spirit. Immediately after finding out that another fertility treatment had been in vain I showed up to our weekly meeting where my manager announced she was pregnant. It was devastating. This woman who was torturing me was allowed to have a second child and I wasn't. I have no idea how I kept from breaking down during the meeting. I cried generously in my office afterwards. Inside I was raging at the world. How could I have gone in such a short period of time from profound joy at the Oprah show feeling like I was moving in the right direction to feeling like I was the walking dead in a horror movie called my life.

The investigation into her practices was lengthy and eventually declared inconclusive. They wrote off her actions as errors made due to insufficient training and withdrew my write up for the vacation day. Not long after I was asked to assist in other departments temporarily due to staffing shortages and luckily did not have to see her much before she went off on maternity leave.

I should have left before she came back from her maternity leave. I could feel it, but couldn't bring myself to. I thought maybe they would send her to another location given that she'd had problems with not just me, but other staff at my branch. Leaving that branch meant that I was losing my close proximity to home. It meant I would lose time with my daughter and husband. It meant no more going home for lunch and no more being able to drop my daughter off at school in the morning. It meant risking working later hours and different days which meant that my daughter for the first time in her life would have to go daycare. It meant working with new people with more seniority who likely wouldn't share Christmas and summer vacation times like my favourite current coworker did. It meant not being as available to the people I love most. I was torn between working for someone so manipulative in a job I was good at and won awards for and inconveniencing my family and starting over from scratch.

She returned with full force. I knew the first day she was back she was on the hunt for me. I asked for a transfer after only a couple weeks and was waiting for human resources to approve the request. I was breaking down from the constant stress. All my grandparents were starting to show signs of severe ill health, both my grampa and my papa had heart attacks and bad falls. I'd painfully fractured the same ankle that I'd fractured the previous year. My dream of more children had died. My fertility doctor had cut off my treatments telling me that I wasn't allowed anymore fertility hormones as I had reached the maximum allowed for my lifetime. My job had become severe and unfulfilling. I felt like a deer in the headlights. Everything was going wrong and I couldn't move. I couldn't fix it. I could feel that I was in the wrong place, but didn't know where to go. Right after that she wrote me up for an exaggerated reason and suspended me for three days without pay. I couldn't believe it was all happening. It felt like I was being assaulted. I was depressed and plagued by anxiety and could barely function. I took an extended mental health leave and started my journey inward.

I had become idle in my job. I'd become complacent in life. I had stopped taking risks and essentially stopped growing. I had reached a certain level and decided to stay there. This is not what spirit wanted for me. Deep down it was not what I wanted for myself. As awful an experience as all the turmoil was I can now fully say that I am so thankful they put me through all that hardship. Otherwise I may not have left for years or at all. I would have wasted all that time not being focused on my higher purpose.

It was eerie being off work. I felt uncomfortable being off, but life felt so heavy I had no choice. I'd worked full time since I was twenty years old and it had given me purpose. I didn't know how to explain it to others, especially any coworkers who contacted me. I wanted to tell a couple of them, but couldn't bring myself to try to explain. I knew they were concerned about me, but I was embarrassed I hadn't been able to better manage the stress and didn't want to explain the other issues in my life that were hurting me. I felt ashamed. I felt like I'd been lost at sea for a long time and just noticed. My job environment had become horrific and intolerable. I was devastated at the idea of not being able to have another child. I worship my little girl and would have loved to worship more children just as much. There were deeper parts of me that I had buried deep down that needed addressing too. There were parts of me that didn't feel satisfied that needed to be looked at and questioned. I hadn't been taking enough time for myself the past few years and everything had compounded. I hadn't been looking internally enough. I hadn't been listening to my own Spirit or the Spirits around me with enough depth. Trying so hard to be in control had spun me out of control.

Everyone I loved around me seemed to need me so much at the same time. My daughter needed more of me. My ailing grandparents needed more of me. My uncle's divorce and aunt's breast cancer happened during this time. My mom was over stressed about everyone and needed my support. It was during that time our family was slammed with death. First my husband's mother died. My husband and sister in law understandably needed more support. Then another relative tragically and unexpectedly died and it flattened all of us that someone so young had been taken so early. We worried frantically about how the grief was affecting the health of my grandparents. Shortly after that my father's father died. Everything happened within a year. I could barely function at home forget going back to work. My job had become looking after myself and everyone I loved.

At thirty something years old it felt like part of me was reliving being seventeen again, but from a much wiser perspective. I knew the process this time. As hard as it is to rearrange and reprioritize life I dug in and went to work on myself. I started therapy at my local clinic. It felt freeing to vent to a neutral party. It felt honest to finally be taking care of myself again. I was back to working with Spirit in depth. Prayer, meditation, nature walks and swims, listening. Writing is my other therapy. It is a liberating outlet where I can be myself and say what I really think and feel behind the comfort of my keyboard without fear. And so this book began at Spirit's instruction and for self therapy. Once it started I remembered what it felt like to write. It has always helped me uncover hidden feelings and bring me to new realizations. I remembered what it felt like to dream. I remembered how much writing had been what I had always loved. I had been so busy with my nose to the grindstone that I had forgotten to look up to heaven. I had forgotten about my dreams. Live your dreams.

It starts with small steps in the direction you want to go in. Even if that direction is vague moving gradually towards it will bring clarity. Every step brings more vision and more purpose and more drive. Writing this book has made me feel more driven and decided and clear than I've felt in any job previously. I am finally facing the direction I am being moved towards without fighting it and it feels wonderful. I'm no longer fighting the waves of the ocean, but swimming with the current of my life. What is ahead on this road is yet to be entirely seen, but knowing I'm heading the right way is all the comfort I need right now. Thank you Spirit.

"God has not called me to be SUCCESSFUL. He has called me to be FAITHFUL." Mother Teresa

