This song written by Don McLean is one of my all-time favorites. Kudos to whoever created this amazing video putting images of Van Gogh's beautiful artwork to this touching song. It's worth taking a few minutes out of your very busy day today to let the music, the words and images fill your consciousness and open your heart. (If anyone knows who created this wonderful video, please let me know so he/she can be properly credited.)
Many books have changed my life, but for this post I decided to go back to the very first book that changed my life followed by how it was connected to the second book that changed my life.
The year was 1972. I was working in the office at the University of Wisconsin Kenosha Campus. For a Christmas present, one of the professors gave me a book, almost with an apology. The book was Let’s Have Healthy Children by Adele Davis. He said, “You make think this is an odd book for me to give you, but you are a young mother and my wife and I feel that the information in this book will give you the tools to help you as a parent raise your children to be as healthy as possible. I thanked him for the book and immediately put it on my bookshelf and never looked at it again.
Fast forward four years to 1976. I had just given birth to my second child and as I had done with my first child, I had decided to breast feed. A question occurred to me, “I wonder if there is a way I can make my breast milk healthier for my baby.” I thought about that book I had put on the shelf many years ago, took it down and read it from cover to cover. To say the information in that book changed my life would be an understatement. As a result of reading that book I literally threw away every processed food I had in the house, I started a food coop with several other women so that we could purchase organic food directly from farmers, I started giving talks at our local library about cooking with natural foods and was hired by the local vocational school to teach classes in natural food cooking. I also read every other book that Adele David wrote including Let’s Eat Right to keep Fit, Let’s Get Well, Let’s Stay Healthy.
A few years later I was gifted with another book by a friend who said that this book had changed her life and she thought I would resonate with it. The book was A World Beyond by Ruth Montgomery. That book also changed my life as it opened me up to my spiritual nature and as a result I quit my corporate job, opened a healing center and started on my conscious spiritual path. Like the Adele Davis books, I purchased and read every one of Ruth Montgomery’s books and know that I would have never met Victor had I not read those books. In one of her books she mentioned that she had a mentor but she couldn’t reveal her name because the mentor was a well-known scientific expert and that her association with the spiritual realm might diminish her reputation as a scientist. In her last book, Ruth Montgomery wrote that her mentor had died so now she was able to reveal her name. It was Adele Davis.
Honestly, when I read that I had to put the book down and take it all in. The two authors who had the most influence in changing my life were connected! I treasure my collection of both these authors' books.
A friend and I were recently talking about how Reiki can be used to help plants survive and thrive. It reminded me of how I had used Reiki on a newly planted tree in my front yard that was showing no signs of thriving. Here's a 1 minute video I made documenting the effects of Reiki on my now stunning tree that graces me with its beauty every day: