Namaste!

In a recent post about a bag tag, I mentioned a manuscript for a book I was working on. Here is the “Secret” inspired book jacket that I made for my vision board. I gave myself the Pulitzer ha ha! Hey they say if you’re gonna dream, dream big. I’m not ready to give an excerpt just yet, but I will tell you it is a labor of love. It is written much in the style of Conversations With God, by Neal Donald Walsch, which is a series that has been such a strong influence in my life ever since I found it accidentally.

Much of what I read in CWG book 1 reflected so many ideas I had written about in my college philosophy papers. Before I knew this book existed I used to sit down and crank out philosophy papers as if I couldn’t come up for air until that last period dotted the page. I’d print them off, turn them in and then start with the cold sweats. Every time I turned in my papers, I would second guess myself after the fact. I remember thinking, “What on earth were you thinking? He’s going to think you’re nuts! Absolutely nuts! Why don’t you realize this until it’s too late?!! Oh god I’m going to get an F and a weird expression from Dr. Randall. I’m so mortified!” Then the papers would come back with an A, A-, or AA, and glowing remarks. I would be flabbergasted! I then of course thought my professor must be the one who is insane, but the cycle continued on and on. Until I graduated finally in ‘96 with a bachelor’s in The Studio Arts and a minor in philosophy (which was as much a shock to me as when Bush was announced president in both terms.) I found a passion for a subject that was just supposed to meet my pre-reqs for graduating, and ended up literally one class away from being a double major.

When I finished college I moved back to Chicago and found myself lonely and cut off from a rich world of creation and fertile ideas. Many of my friends were younger than I and still had a year or two left in college, and I found myself thrust into the mundane and boring world of Visual Merchandising. Woo hoo. Let’s see how many cool things I can do with a belt, a flannel shirt, and a hay bale. I was miserable and depressed and a member of a mail order book club called One Spirit. I somehow didn’t get the latest order form in the mail so I could send it back marked “do not send this month’s selected book” and the auto-selected book showed up in my mail much to my dismay. It was titled Conversations With God. What an unfortunate title! How I hated books with titles like that, so un-scholarly and woo woo sounding. Had the book club not duped me and actually sent the proper form I would have nipped that in the bud asap! But the book was in my home now, and I felt compelled to read it anyway. I thought, maybe I’ll get a good laugh out of this, I’m in need of a good laugh any how. So I opened it. It was a Saturday and I had the day off. I didn’t put the book down until I finished it. Then I turned it over and started reading it again! I had written so much just like this in college! So many of these ideas, I had too! Only I thought they were silly when I was in school. Now I realized I was not the one writing those papers. I was asking all kinds of questions and this was the way I was being answered. I was too dense to realize it at the time! I read CWG book 1 maybe a hundred times, and only that book for about a year. Nothing else compared. Granted there was more meat in CWG than I produced in my philosophy papers, but the similarities were uncanny. The description of time he offers in one of the books involved pieces of paper stacked on a spindle or something like this; I was given a vision, years before reading that description, of a deck of cards with the same almost exact explanation to correspond with the imagery. If I had a dollar for every time my jaw has dropped due to the similarities in those books and my college papers, well, I’d have a little bit of cash on hand anyway.

To wrap up this train of thought, when I was finally packing my apartment to move to a new one 8 months later, I found an old One Spirit order form under my bed that had never been opened. When I looked at it I realized that was the order form for the CWG book. I think that it’s pretty funny and a wonderfully subtle demonstration of the magnificent forces at work in our lives. My life changed drastically because of that one simple oversight.

I’m not sure what I expect from Namaste, but I do wish to share the information in hopes that it will help others get closer to their “godspace” so to speak. I plan to self publish in the form of an eBook. Check back for an excerpt in the next week or so.

Namaste!