Something Stirring Out There.

   You've probably heard that the southland of this country has been ripped up by tornados and straight line storms over the last few days.
   Over two hundred people have been killed, including 8 in my state, Virginia.
   I might have been one of them if something hadn't been stirring out there and nudged me to cancel a trip to Richmond the next day. It's only a 3 hour drive from my house, and I was going to see my daughter and her family. I was feeling uneasy about the trip - for no reason that I can think of - and on the morning before I was due to leave, I called Karen to firm up the visit and she said several things had come up. My grand daughhter Courtney wasn't going to be there, (I wanted to see her in her new prom dress) she and Randy had a wedding to go to on Saturday, and Brock's baseball game would be cancelled because of the storms. So we decided to postpone my trip.
   Good thing. A tornado raced down I-64 the next day - the route I take to get to their house.
   Maybe that explains the uneasiness about the trip. Whether the tornado and I would have actually met is anybody's guess. But .... Something was stirring out there.

Resurrection

   Easter. Resurrection. Are we talking Ghosts? Visions? Are we supposed to believe that a spirit is telling us he survived death? For over two thousand years millions of Christians have believed that Jesus Christ died, was buried and on the third day he rose from the dead. And a ton of people saw him. Millions - maybe billions believe this ghost story of the New Testament.
   Me too.
   The difference is that most of those people are willing to take the Bible's word for it. On faith.
   Not me. Neither my Christian upbringing nor my Roman Catholic schooling could convince me that there is life after death. Sometimes they tried and I would sit there and chuckle - like a brat - thinking, "Dream on..." Except for the times when they started hurling the stories of Satan and his bands of demons around - then, scared stiff, I'd make a beeline for the confessional and spill my guts, prostrating myself on the beliefs of the RC church, begging for forgiveness. The rest of the afternoon was usually spent trying to stay awake while I tried in vain to keep track of the rosary which had been doled out as my penance. Major turn off that. The longer I knelt there the more atheistic my thoughts got.
   But not for long. Who can look out on a spring morning with all it's brand new earthly life and not believe in God? Or hold a new baby - or a kitten...
   Not me. God - the Universe - whoever you are - is here. 
   And then when Drew died, I knew with absolutely certainty that his body may have died - he's gone - but he lives. I saw him five days after he died. Totally Drew. There is life after death, we can and do come back in spirit. There is no doubt. There is a resurrection of the body.
   Jesus tried to tell us.
   The book, Show Me Heaven Drew, in which I have documented that first year after Drew left us, is nearing publication and you will be the first to know when and where it can be found.
   I spent Saturday with Sara, Drew's childhood sweetheart, adding the finishing touches to the publication process. These youngsters know everything about computers. She's a whiz kid. I'm not.
   I hope you had a lovely Easter and ate a lot of chocolate. It perks all the endorphins up.

PollyAnna

   I re-read yesterday's blog and wasn't totally thrilled with it. It wasn't supposed to sound so Pollyana-ish but it did.
   I'm very aware that we have no control over some of the things that happen to us and that you can't just flip a switch and say, "Okay! That's done. Let's move on." No. It doesn't happen like that at all.
   The truly devastating things that happen to us are very often too deep to fathom, too deep to push aside easily. Too deep to want to think about. The wound too painful to look at in broad daylight. To open it up and air it out.
  But that deep place is so sad. So dark, so ... unthinkable. I can't stay at the bottom of that pit forever. So I chose to find the way out. One step at a time. One moment at a time until the moments became minutes and the minutes turned into hours and days. It takes time and that time span is different for everyone.
   The choice to consciously make things better made the difference between living and dying for me.
   The cold and the dark and the numbness at the bottom of my pit would have claimed my life if I'd stayed.
   I hope that if any of you have ever reached those depths, you'll remind yourself that you still know how to climb and you can reach for the sky, one handhold at a time.
Here's mine.      

The Choice to be Happy

   We tell our kids over and over again about making good choices. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't.We're not that far removed from those juvenile years of travelling blindly, doing what we're told - or not. The difference is that most of us have learned some hard lessons in the 'consequences' department. Most of us have accumulated enough of those that we 'get it'.
   The one choice that makes the most sense to me is also the hardest. That's the choice to be happy. And no matter what - I've learned it doesn't happen over night.
   When something terrible happens, for a while, we're thrown into confusion, shame, grief, horror - whatever - but eventually, we realize there are different ways to handle these things. You take a hard look at where you are and in my case, I began to think, "How can I get as far away as possible from this thing, in the shortest time possible... Losing Drew had put me in a place that was just too damn hard to be in. It wasn't me and it certainly wasn't him.So I made a choice to look for ways out. Easier said than done, my   friend.
   This 'teacher' named grief has a mind of its own and it has a course to follow and it won't be shoved or pushed or hurried in any way. I imagine that all heartbreaks are similar. The heart break of death, divorce, infidelity, failure, job loss - any number of things. 
  But when the time's right - and it differs for all of us - you can begin to look at your options. You hate this situation. It feels like hell - it is hell. What now.
   When I reached this junction, I made the descison to choose my perception of what was happening, and when I had analysed that to death and gotten nowhere, I decided that it was going to take a supreme effort of body mind and spirit to begin to heal. So, I ate a lot of chocolate for feel-good endorphins and drank red wine (for courage) and then had to excercise until I was blue in the face to combat the side-effects of that diet - and I began to keep a journal. My soul began to write.
   I had deliberately found a way to feel. Not okay - but better. One friend of mine following the death of his wife, took off sailing around the world. Another, an ex-football player - took up ball room dancing. There are ways to combat this crap and if you make the choice to find them - you can.
   It is ultimately the choice to be happy. You won't get there over night, but with that choice, you'll find the right road.
    More next time.
Courage, Mon Ami!
  

Continued...

   You'll hear over and over again that "It's not what happens to you that matters but how you deal with it." That's true. But I believe that "what happens to you" matters too.

   Over the years, through successes and blunders, I like most of you have developed some ideas about experiencing and dealing with my spirit's chosen course. In the next blog let's explore them.
In the meantime, whatever happens to you this weekend, on this gorgeous planet, I hope it's wonderful. I hope you'll find appreciation and be happy.

The School of Hard Whops

   It gets confusing.
   The world  is filled with living, breathing beings. We see them as people, earthlings if you will. I'm quite sure there are all sorts of other beings on other worlds but for the time being, let's look at us.
   What I do know is this: In reality, we are all spirits, strong, powerful beings who have agreed to come to earth for one or more lifetimes.
   What I want to know is this: Why on earth would I chose to live on earth? With all its suffering, its hatred, its meaness - why? Why didn't I choose to be a gorgeous bubble of irridescent gas floating around deep space at the birth of this universe? How very peaceful. Or better still, I could have stayed on my cushy cloud strumming my harp? It's also possible I haven't quite earned that status yet, and if I want to, I'd better get down here and learn some hard lessons. Perhaps. And if that's the case, we've come to the right school. We're in a very dense vibration with a degree of difficulty that will test us to the limits of our endurance. And sometimes beyond. If we conme close to mastering our humanity, like anything else, we will emerge stronger, better and wiser beings. With more kudos than we had when we arrived. 
   I think we have some choice as to how we weather this lifetime. And that in itself is a choice. We can choose to be active, pro-active or static. Free will is a double-edged tool. Have you noticed? It can be wielded in any direction and here too, we are required to make choices. We can learn the lessons we've chosen (that's right) or reject them.
     One thing is clear, my spirit has decided on this earth course to move us forward, so I don't want this physical me to mess up the plan by going backwards. I have to keep remembering that I am a strong and powerful spirit who has chosen to experience humanity.
    

Spirit Nursery - Babies-in-Waiting

     Here's another aspect to seeing spirits.

   I had a dream one night, the first dream of this kind I can remember ever having. It was early morning actually, in that space between waking and sleeping. The mind's out of the way, still sleeping, so the spirit can move freely before it gets bogged down in the affairs of living on earth..
   In the dream I saw myself standing inside my daughter's living room looking out of sliding glass doors onto the deck. There were three young children playing together in what seemed to be a sandbox. I recognized two of them as my two and three year old grandchildren, Brock and Courtney. The third child had her back to me but as I stood there watching she turned around and smiled at me. She was about three years old, her hair was shoulder-length and strawberry blonde and her smile was the biggest smile I've ever seen.
   Sometime during the day I called my daughter and told her about the dream.
  "I don't think I know her," she said.
  "You're not pregnant are you?" I asked. Her horrified answer shot down the line "With a two and three year old? Do I seem crazy to you, Mom? No, I am not! Pregnant or crazy". 
   Four years later Becca was born to Karen. At three years old she had shoulder-length strawberry blonde hair and a gorgeous smile. She was the baby from my dream. 
   As you might imagine, I began to pay close attention to babies in my dreams. My son's oldest child was born a year after Becca. I saw James in a dream (at about the age of two) nine or ten months before he arrived. I noticed that I could pick up not only physical characteristics but personality markers too. James was a much quieter personality, more serious that Becca. The night he was born he got into some serious breathing difficulties and we were all worried about him. His mother, a neo-natal nurse was very much afraid for him and Michael my son was pale, tense and trying to be calm for her sake as doctors and nurses worked on the baby in the ICU.
   I finally got up the courage to say the only thing I could say that might help.
   "The only thing I can tell you Michael, is that I've seen this baby in a dream - at two years old. He's going to be okay."
   Michael's not sure about this stuff and long ago I might have been burned at the stake for suggesting such a thing  - but James made it. Alive and well and thriving ten years later. He's a quiet child for the most part, studious and a little serious.
   My other two younger grandchildren have made appearances too and so have certain babies of friends. 
   One young friend of mine miscarried a baby boy several years ago. I saw this dark-haired, big-eyed infant just once but very clearly. I saw him again in a dream two years later when this young woman excitedly announced that she was pregnant again. When he was born, I recognized him as the child she had miscarried. He'd decided to give it another try! Perhaps it just wasn't the right time for this spirit to reincarnate the first time. So he just waited until it was.
   To me, this is one of the most exciting manifestations. Because, if I see spirits before they are born - and am able to identify them absolutely after they're born, there is clearly life on The Other Side. These spirits are living before they get here and that makes me know that we'll all be living after we leave. Make sense?
   So, sleep well, and pay attention to those strange little people in your dreams. You're going to see them soon.

Will I Know You In Heaven?

   A friend who knew I was writing the book "Show Me Heaven, Drew", gave me this story.

   She had lost a daughter three years before in a car accident on one of the windy country roads around here, and like me, had felt her child's presense around her. A touch on her hand, someone playing with her hair, and once she had heard her voice on the stairs. And Unidentifiable phone calls. Her awareness was tweaked and she began to look for signs that Annabelle was around her. Her husband was getting the same tweaks.
   One night she had a dream that she was standing in a garden. It was filled with the same misty light that fills some of mine. Her daughter stood in front of her. Annabelle looked just as she had on earth, at seventeen. Same long, brown hair, same smile, but what impressed my friend most was that her gestures, her personality, the emotions around Annabelle were just as they had always been.The same sensitivity, the same sense of humor, her smile ... nothing had changed.
   They talked for a while and then the girl said she had to go. She started looking over her shoulder and appeared to be expecting someone or something ... My friend followed her daughter's eyes and noticed an elderly woman walking across the garden towards them. She couldn't tell who it was, but Annabelle recognized her. She  waved excitedly. Then waved goodbye to her mom and began running towards the approaching woman. The dream ended.
   The next morning at breakfast, the phone rang and it was a member of the family letting my friend know that an aunt had passed away suddenly during the night.
   She hadn't seen this particular aunt much over the last several years, but knew immediately that this was the elderly woman in her dream who Annabelle had run to greet.
   So it seems that we do recognize each other on the other side. And that those already there have far better recall than we do.Which encourages me. There have been times over the last couple of years that I've met people and run into them months later (here on earth) and have absolutely no idea who they are. But they seem nice, and they seem to like me and I'm hoping that one day my memory will kick back in and I'll remember their names.  
   I wonder if it's true that we are met on the other side by people we know... I hope so because my sense of direction doesn't work well here, so God knows where I'll wind up Over There if no one's there to meet me.
   Until next time. Be happy, have fun.

Spirit Senses

     Will I know you in Heaven? Will you know me? Will we look the same - you and me? Sometimes I wonder that if I live to be old - really old - will you recognize me? I know I'll know you Drew, because you're forever young. The answer is yes - we'll see and remember everything through our Spirit Senses.
     When I first began this blog, I talked about seeing spirits, talking to spirits - people who have passed on. Like the little guy in the movie "Sixth Sense" ...I see dead people.  :o) That's scary - but accurate enough in the language of a child. who cannot yet articulate exactly what he sees.
      When I see and tallk to spirit, here's what I "see."
     Using the language and senses of my soul which have more depth, more dimension and more feeling than any we are given to work with here on earth, I first sense a presence. Have you ever felt as though someone was staring at you? And if you glance up and across the room, you see that actually someone is staring at you? That's your soul sensing another soul in its vicinity. Remember, you are in fact a spirit living here in a physical body.This is not the physical you having a woowooo Twilight Zone experience, it's your soul stepping out of its earthly experience for a moment, to be a spirit again.
     So this is what happens first. I sense a presense nearby. I recognize what's happening and now I involve all of me in the the experience. I join my spirit, saying, "I'm here."
     Now that I've joined body and soul together, I get a sense of who I'm "picking up". Male or female. Or is it an animal I knew in life? The impression is very clear and long before I actually see through the eyes of spirit, I know who I'm with.
     Suppose it's my father. I feel his personality, I hear a song he sang to me as a child and my heart leaps. I may smell his cigar smoke. "Dad's here!" Now I begin to see him as though he was right in front of me. I allow his being to show me himself as he is now. (They are always much younger than they were when they went over. Usually about 30 or 40 - whatever they think is the perfect age for them) I can see what he's wearing. I can see if he's carrying anything, like a book, a cane, an umbrella ... he may be wearing a coat - or shorts. He's all there. Then I sense his mood. Is he happy, confused, sad? Is his demeanor urgently trying to tell me something or, as sometimes happens with Drew - "I Just Called to Say I love You?" Just popped in. If there is something they want to say, this is the time to let them know you're listening. Ask, "Is there something you want to tell me?" You may get silence. Followed by one single word - or a stream of thought that goes so quickly you're scrambling to keep up. This is when I grab a pencil and a piece of paper and start scribbling. Sometimes they want to show you where they are now. This is your turn to ask questions. "Have you seen so and so??" He didn't go to hell after all!! Just kidding - you know I don't believe in hell. Is Mom there? Is there music? Is there football? Are there mountains, can you ski?
     They'll tell you. 
     You know when they're ready to go. They simply fade. Maybe they'll say something like "Gotta go!" as Drew does. Maybe they'll just smile and leave.
     This is spirit communication. We can all do it. We just have to remember who we are. Powerful spirits living on earth in earth bodies - but with all of our spirit senses alive and well. We just have to remember.
      And believe.
     Next blog, we'll talk about meeting people we know Heaven.

From the Mountains

     From the Mountains Cometh My Strength. James.

   I'm back in the Rockies for a few days, replenishing my spirit. This is Bachelor Gulch in Colorado, about six miles from Vail and the place that is home to one of the best hotels and resorts in the world. The Ritz Carlton at Bachelor Gulch. This is where Drew lived, worked and played in the mountains for the last five years of his life. It is also the place that awarded him their Five Star Employee Award for 2008.
   So I'm sitting on my balcony, looking out at Beaver Creek Mountain watching the ski crowd weaving and swerving their way down the slopes. The snow boarders swishing and curving, swaying - flying like the wind -  and aggravating the serious skiiers :) It's sixty degrees farenheit, the sun is shining and I can breathe in the air here, fill my lungs with life and peace and strength, surrounded by Drew's freinds and co-workers and being spoilt to death. I love these kids! They are all so vibrant, so kind so smart and sweet.  
  
   From the Mountains Cometh My Strength: It's a quote that's always resonated with me. Perhaps it has something to do with my wild and free youth in Rhodesia. Not so free actually. If you've ever been a resident of an all-girls boarding school, you will know that there are eyes in the walls, in the floors and in the hallways and bushes. You can't get away with anything - much less making a break for it. But it had its moments.For instance, I was crazy in love at sixteen with the captain of the Umtali Boys High School Rugby team. (McDreamy, move over!) He was seventeen. Clandestine phone calls, love letters and trumped up excuses for going to town, took up a fair amount of my time - and his - but everything was so exciting and naughty!!
I don't know about him but it kept me from dying of boredom for a while.
  But I digress. Here's the point - that school's motto was; Ex Montibus Robur as some of you from that era may remember.  From the Mountains Strength. So strong, so brave and sure and confident. Everything I wasn't. So it could be that just plain boy-craziness had me hooked.
    But I don't believe that.
   When I look out at the Rocky Mountains, my soul flies free. Words fade in insignificance and I stand in awe in their majesty, their beauty, their rock solid strength. And for a while I can breathe it in and feel that it belongs to me. From The Mountains, Strength.