A Book That Took 30 Years to be Born

 A Foretelling Dream 

In 1992, at the age of 42, I had gotten my first apartment all to myself with no kids, no family, and no man to consider. It was wonderful! It was so satisfying to buy everything new and decorate it with only my tastes to consider.

But then something unremembered happened and I took a nosedive into a black hole of my own making. For three days I curled up on the couch in a fetal position battered and bruised by life with no hope of escape. The boys were so worried about me that they called just about every hour to check in with me. No doubt, I tried to reassure them that I was okay, but I wasn’t in the least okay. It was a very deep, very dark hole and I felt alone without even a glimmer of hope. 

It was on the third day, Easter Sunday, that the dream came. In it the black hole of despair was poignant and all too real. And then l looked up to see a glimmer of light with a backdrop of blue skies. That little ray of sunshine was a beacon of hope that spurred me to climb out of the hole. 

I was standing on a high plateau. Behind me was a panorama of mountains and valleys with a road that twisted and turned, which I knew represented my life to that point. In front of me was a gate in the middle of a wooden fence that extended from horizon to horizon. In my hand was a key. I knew it opened the gate, but I wasn't ready to open it. Instead, I looked through a knothole and saw only the faintest outline of mountains and sky and water like the first wash on a canvas. Again, I knew why. I was being given the opportunity to paint my own future and it could be anything I wanted.  

As dreams do, one morphed into another. In the second dream I was in a foreign country giving a talk on Love to a small group of influential people dressed in the flowing robes of their country. The invitation came as a result of the stories told at this time and place going viral, a term not even known in the nineties. It was then that I had the first inkling of my heart's desire and what I wanted the picture of my life to look like. At the core of my being, more than anything, I wanted to write and talk about the power of Love for change in the life of every individual in the world who were ready to open their heart to the Light of Christ.  

I had been studying the subject of Love for about eight years at that point and had often thought about how different the world would be if people only knew the power of Love. That dream is still so clear in my mind that, even after three decades, it is remembered with clarity.  

Fast forward three years when the first chapters of “Love Dynamics” were written. The subtitle of the handbook is “A Guide to the Practice of Love and the Influence of Human Energy”. When the first version was finished and I read it through, I realized it was mostly regurgitating what other people had written; that it did not reflect the belief in my heart. That realization sent me on a long journey of questioning what I honestly believed. 

In 2003 a co-worker told me about a physic she had seen and gave me her contact information after which I made an appointment for James and me to get a reading. Memory is a quirky commodity. The place and the lady are remembered but not her name. The place was the basement suite of one of the grand old houses on upper Granville in Vancouver. It was dim and filled with eclectic bric-a-brac. On a table in the waiting room were business cards that said she did cat readings. She was a young woman dressed in overalls with frizzy hair and an overall look of frumpy. 

The short version of the two-hour-long reading is that she said I would write a book that would have a great impact on the world and that James and I would travel sharing the contents with people of influence. It was after that reading that I picked up the task of rewriting “Love’s Dynamic” laying out my own thoughts on Love and sharing the experiences that supported those beliefs. One of the core components of the book was creating a table of Love’s characteristics. Of note is that the umbrella over all other characteristics is acceptance. 

“Acceptance is a component of Love that goes beyond the confines of just tolerance. It is an open plain with no boundaries. It is a state of mind, a way of thinking that says in essence “You are human; I am human; we share space on this earth and that in itself is the only criteria for the acceptance that ultimately counts. It is the umbrella over every other attribute of Love.” 

It was after finishing the second version that the doubts set in. Who was I to be writing such an important work? I’m just an ordinary person with no special claim to fame. Who is going to care about anything I have to say on the subject? The doubts and questions resulted in putting the book on the shelf (so to speak) and doing my best to chalk it up to wishful thinking. It wasn’t until after we moved to Powell River that those doubts were allayed and it was published online and submitted to the search engines. 

It makes my heart glad to know that the words written impacted the lives of at least a few people who found the website. After two years, I let the domain expire and put it as part of our Loving Creations website. 

In the first years after moving to Powell River, life was busy with community work, building websites, and renovating our home and property. It wasn't until 2015 that the thought popped up to write the story of my life. The cover designed for it gives you an idea of where that was going. 😏

There was a whole bunch of angst attached to the memories of my life before meeting James. Of course, there were good times, many of them, but the overall picture was of a grey day with only patches of blue here and there.

A few weeks before my 74th birthday I was in a spiritually dark place. It seemed like God was picking on me. In my mind and heart, I had been His faithful servant and in return, I got an incurable condition I call ick that stole my joy and made life pretty much miserable. So I said, "The hell with it! The hell with all I had been taught, all I had learned on this spiritual path, and just live life without Jesus in it.

And then, something quite wonderful happened! I came out of that dark place and could let all the angst go and, instead, view my entire life as the gift it is.

It was only then that I could begin the six-month journey of writing, Norah eh?!