This book is not about conservation nor eco-practices. It's not that these activities aren't valuable, but the real damage here is not because of what we do, it's because of who we are. This is about how we and the planet and everything around us are linked on an intimate energy level, and to heal the planet, we need to start with ourselves.
We make choices and with those choices we create a life. Enough of us make the same choices and we create a future.
You wish you had more and question if those who have more deserve it? You long for love and ask what you're doing wrong? You look around the world and think why all the unfairness, the confusion, the unending conflict. People fighting...they don't know what they want. Or they know exactly what they want and it's something someone else has.
The turmoil you experience in your personal lives spills into our world...you see it projected everywhere. Our world is reflecting all of those parts within us that feel the same way about our life. You're frustrated? The earth shakes. You rage and the weather obliges. You resent your neighbor and armies lay siege on one another.
And you look in wonder at the chaos? Where do you think it comes from? More importantly, how do you fix it.
This book is a light to show where you are wounded and need to be healed, how to take responsibility for your choices...and see that the seduction of victimhood actually strips your power to make changes. And, then, to learn how to make better choices...how to create a better life.
And if enough do this, we create a better world.
About the Author: Michelle Duarte was a copywriter in advertising for too many years to count. She wound up as an executive creative director/director of creative services for an international ad agency on Madison Avenue. She quit the agency and the career and moved back home to Los Angeles where she decided to start over in her life. She was in L.A. during the big Northridge quake in 1994, which became both a signpost and a push in her journey to create a better and more satisfying future.
What if, she wondered, there could a friendly visitor from the stars who could take the long view and help us on planet earth make sense of such frightening events around us? And that was the start of her new path. She studied meditation, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, alternative spiritual paths, counseling, quantum physics, comparative religion, New Age mysticism. She even took a two-year accredited course to earn her Masters of Divinity, but balks at the title Reverend "I think that is better earned with a longer history of devotion."
She has written a couple of screenplays that have been optioned (but is not holding her breath). This book is the culmination of 20 years of work, learning to ask better questions and make better choices.
She fell in love and decided that all things were possible.
She remarried and now lives with her husband, Dean, and their cat, Miss Scarlett, in Oregon in a small town with no stop lights where they built and operate a small, eco-friendly resort. She misses New York pizza and L.A. chili rellenos. The rest, not so much.
Finally, this thought...an Australian theologian, Neville Rowe, once said, 'We can believe we are on an evolutionary path toward God if we wish, or we can understand that we are already God experiencing itself.'
"After the process of writing this book, I'm no longer sure there is a difference."
