Destiny meets opportunity

The date of Shera’s course in Calgary was still a month away so I spent the time reading. I was having difficulty finding the book her sister Shanon had recommended. I did live in a bible belt surrounded as I was by a multitude of different religions. Caprice attended a catholic school for practical reasons – they were just the best at taking care of her special needs. Then we had the born-again Christians, the Hutterite colonies (they were our best customers), the Church of Latter-Day Saints, the Mennonite colonies and the Jehovah Witnesses. Books of this nature were not to be found. Most of the time I had to order them in from elsewhere and so while I waited, I read what I could find at the library. I read  There is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce, the man known as the sleeping prophet. This book led to my reading anything about this man I could find. He was a healer!

Caprice was still too weak to transfer herself and still in pain, which was discouraging for us, but we were working at it. The day for me to go to my first class came…….and went! I totally forgot about it! I didn’t realize this until that night, but then I thought, ‘maybe I should just cancel’ and I decided to call her the next day to do just that. She beat me to it. The phone rang the next morning and it was Shera offering to discount the night I had missed. I felt so bad I accepted her offer and the rest, as they say, is history.

It is as though some kind of spontaneous combustion happened and life as I knew it did an about face…..and in comes the memories,
tumbling down,
tumbling down,
tumbling down…

I was eighteen and had just completed first year of University taking a Bachelor of Home Economics and Science course. My classes for the year were math, English, chemistry, physics and art. My goal was to be a designer not a scientist! I did not relish the idea of three more years of this so? I quit and decided to take a secretarial course. Six months into this and due to graduate, I answered an ad for a secretary in the paper and was hired, so? I quit and took the job. There are many more times when I did this and I see today that this is my true nature. When caution was thrown to the wind and I just went with my gut. I see now that it’s when I did not trust in this natural instinct, that I got into trouble.

Now, with this course, it happened again. It was akin to jumping into a rushing river. Hah! Isn’t this the definition of spirituality? What the self-help gurus preach? “Go with the flow” - “be in the moment” – “trust in the inner self”. Imagine that! I’ve been ‘there’ all along and didn’t know it! Key words here, I did not know, I did not understand, that when this happens, soul has found a little crack in the armor of the belief systems that have been built, thought by thought from childhood on until they are so solid nothing can get through that tells us something different. Maybe I lucked out because I spent every summer during my childhood years pretty much in solitude at a cabin on a lake with only:
the birds and the bees and
the flowers and the trees and
a thing called love to keep me company.
Hours idled away, day after day, swimming, going fishing at 5am with my daddy on a mirror-like lake, picking blueberries, checking out bugs and frogs and snakes and just genuinely having a good time. Not a care in the world. It never dawned on me that I should be lonely.

Back to the task on hand, which was getting into my car at 5pm every Tuesday, driving the two hours there, attending the course and driving back home, getting me in about midnight. However, while I asked myself every time, ‘why are you doing this?’ I really enjoyed meeting Shera and soon we had become friends. We hit it off instantly. It was as though I had found a long-lost sister. Thanks to her course I began to feel more comfortable with attempting meditation. Every day while Caprice was at school I turned off the phone, put on soothing music and went through the process exactly as described in the book I had ordered, which I had received and read from cover to cover. After all, I was certainly not going to do anything without doing my research. I soon discovered I could have researched until hell froze over and I still wouldn’t have been prepared for what happens when destiny meets opportunity.