https://LindaHourihanHHCP.com
This book, NATURE SPIRIT WISDOM, subtitled, LIGHT WITHIN THE ANGEL, MINERAL, PLANT, and ANIMAL KINGDIMS, is dedicated to my mother, who has now transitioned from this earth plane of existence. I feel her presence with me still. She was the most amazing woman I have ever met. You cannot always tell the extraordinary when it blends itself so well with the ordinary. It is like quartz crystal, magnifying its Light within you and the Earth reflected in the kingdoms of which you are intrinsically birthed.
Each book in this trilogy including Book 1, IN THEIR IMAGE AND LIKENESS; Book 2 which is MY RED BAG OF COURAGE; and Book 3, NATURE SPIRIT WISDOM, is dedicated to my mother. She was so extraordinary. Mom had incredible wisdom and was ahead of her time. I share her pearls of wisdom in each book.
Book 2, MY RED BAG OF COURAGE, continues with the fortitude Mom taught me to have by her own example of courage-filled life. She played an extremely influential role in my life. She was my rock, my confidant, and my best friend.
While you might think you have, or had, the greatest mother on Earth, I think I certainly did. For the first seven years of my life, it was just my mother and me. They were my Camelot years. I remember being a very young child, snuggling in the neck of my mother, smelling her Coty’s Emeraude perfume, and the tea parties she and I would have together. I remember being in the crib and calling her to come and get me up. She would greet me sweetly in the morning and gently pluck me up in time to watch my favorite television shows, Captain Kangaroo, and Romper Room. Usually the show Captain Bob, which had picture drawing and painting came on too early in the morning for me. It turns out I am a night person.
I remember the cowboy wallpaper, with a young boy holding a rope and lasso riding a bucking bronco on my bedroom wall. My memories of that time are vivid. Mom made life so much fun. She even allowed me to jump on her bed and throw myself backwards in ripples of bounces, that is, until I crashed my head on the hard marble headboard. I was two years old at the time. Evidently heads bleed a lot. I still have a divot at the top and back of my head as a keepsake.
Mom did not have her driver’s license, so she called her sister Terry to rush us to the emergency room. Milford Regional Hospital was just one relatively small building at that time. Today what used to be a single-building hospital is merely an entrance to enormous other additions. I still remember the emergency room was so freezing cold, and the metal table I was laid upon seemed even colder. I don’t remember much else except the cold.
Mom was number thirteen[1] of fourteen children. Twin boys died at birth, so I had eleven sets of aunts and uncles and cousins of all ages and as numerous as the stars in the night sky. You will notice that each book in this trilogy has thirteen chapters, in honor of my mother. My life along with my husband, has generated thirteen grandchildren.
Now, Mom and I have a metaphysical connection. It is thought that you pick your parents before you incarnate in this life. I am so glad I picked her. The life lessons she taught me carried me throughout all my life. She did stand up for herself, something she must have learned from having eleven other brothers and sisters, a first husband who evidently loved all women way too much, and finding ways for childcare while she worked at a time in history when it was more popular to look down on single and unwed mothers than help them. My mother and I shared this lived experience and found a way through it all, together.
Her childhood family had a farm on Blackstone Street in Mendon, Massachusetts. My mother told me when she was younger, her job was to pick blueberries. Mom hated fruit. My mother’s mother, who I called Memere, discovered every time she tried to feed my mother fruit when she was a baby, she would throw up. Yet, my mother loved to pick blueberries for her siblings. Instead of blueberry pies, Memere would bake a raisin pie that was just for my mother.
While her older brothers and sisters worked on the farm, my mother’s job was to do the laundry, washing and ironing clothes. Mom also taught me her ironing and seamstress skills. For a while my mother was a seamstress in her home business as well as for a local dry cleaner.
Mom signed me up to take Singer sewing classes out of the store on Main Street in Milford. But my mother was very disappointed when they taught me to make unfinished seams that were sure to fray once washed in a washing machine. I took home economics classes in junior high school, but Mom taught me how to cook every day at home. She did not miss a trick.
For a short while, I also was a seamstress, making a bridesmaid’s dress that had nine ruffles from the waist to the floor. I was scared to take on such an important project, but I knew how to make ruffles, and simply believed there was nothing I could not do. It came out so fantastic that I surprised myself. I also made my own clothes for a while. When I had my first child, a daughter, I made her sweet little dresses and headbands and bows for her hair.
Mom and I had outdoor rock gardens at our red house on the hill across from Lake Nipmuc in Mendon. Mom planted Iris bulbs and succulents called Hens and Chickens. She would always share all her flowers with me. She would take the large outcropping of ledge upon which our house was built for her gardens. I would take the less precarious ledge outcrop in the back of the house. She planted numerus Myrtle (Periwinkle), Tiger Lilies (Dad hated Tiger Lilies, not sure why), and Hosta plants that lined the 77 steps circling from the back door (there was no front door) all the way to the driveway at the bottom where the well was.
Mom would try to teach me lessons all through life, like the time she tried teaching me not to be late all the time. We would agree to meet for lunch or go shopping, but somehow my internal clock always ran about fifteen minutes late. One day we agreed to go shopping at a certain time, but as usual, I was late. I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally got to Lincoln Drugstore in Milford where we agreed to meet to go shopping. I pulled in right behind her, fifteen minutes late. She could not even teach me that lesson.
I did remember this lesson though when I began my business, The Massage Clinic in Stratford, Milford, Orange, and West Haven, Connecticut. I made sure to arrive an hour early because I could not trust myself not to be late. By the time I unpacked the clean sheets (which Mom had folded the day before when she lived with us in Derby), turned on the office soothing music, turned on the heated table, checked the day’s appointments on the computer, and got settled in, the client would show up, sometimes early, but I was ready. Thank you, Mom.
But the best thing about my mother was the long-lasting friendship we shared all throughout life. She would call, or I would call her every day. It turns out that she was my best friend throughout all my life. Other friends came and went, but my mother was always there, thank God!
Then the sad day came when I visited my mother in the late morning. It was just my mother and me, like in my first seven years of life, and my husband, John, with her. I gave her a kiss on her cheek. “Please give John a kiss for me,” Mom said quietly. John kissed Mom gently. She must have known she was leaving this life.
My sister had been visiting Mom in the nursing home almost every other day, bringing her fish chowder and other food Mom liked, taking care of her needs, and spending time with her as they crocheted. On this day, for the first time in mom’s life, she was in so much pain that morphine was prescribed. She passed into the arms of the angels by early evening. Mom will always hold that special spot in my heart that only a mother can hold. For me, she was the perfect example of how to receive and share the Light and Love of Eternal Universal Life Force Energy, God. I humbly thank you, the reader, for picking up this third book in this trilogy, each of which is full of illuminations on your path of life. The empowerment, love and light in this book can release the mental, emotional, and spiritual constrictions with which you may have been bound. Your free will can flourish with each page in this book of enlightenment.
GOD BLESS EVERYONE EVERYWHERE WITHOUT EXCEPTION