Books We Love Insider Blog

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

FUZZY, FURRY FANTASIES by Shirley Martin

If you could change into an animal, what animal would you like to be? I'd like to be a wolf, master of the forest, running wild and free.

The process of changing into an animal--fiction or not--is called shapeshifting. When I began writing my shapeshifter novel, "Wolf Magic" I wondered if there were any books on the subject. A trip to the local bookstore proved that, sure enough, someone had actually written a book on shapeshifting. This book was extremely helpful, giving me insight on the life of a shapeshifter.

According to paranormal readings, the physical world is only one of several worlds.
1. Our physical world is at the bottom.
2. On top of that is the etheric plane.
3. The astral plane is directly above the etheric.
4. The mental plane is on top of the astral.

Esoteric study teaches us that we exist simultaneously on four different planes of existence. And shapeshifting shows us that shapeshifting is a spiritual journey to connect to animal power.

Does everyone have an animal side somewhere in their subconscious? Some people believe so. This animal side is more or less present in the shapeshifter at all times. In a deep kind of mental shift, agility on two legs might be difficult. In this state, the shapeshifter can't appear normal to others. Indeed, shapeshifters may howl or growl at others.

Here's how the shift affects Annwn, the heroine of "Wolf Magic." Annwn is a nurse-in-training at the druids' hospital.

"She nearly tripped on her feet as she hurried along, struggling with an overwhelming desire to race on all fours. She didn't want to be in the hospital, longing to go outside and roll in the dirt. Passing other nurses who greeted her along the way, she responded, shocked to find that her voice sounded like an old man's, low and gravelly.

On the way to the men's ward, she reached the closer where clean linens were kept. She clasped the doorknob but couldn't open the closet door!"

Have you heard of bilocation shifting? Oh, you don't know what that is? Bilocation shifting happens on the etheric plane. At this point, dear reader, it may be necessary to suspend disbelief. But on the other hand, it doesn't hurt to have an open mind.

In normal bilocation, the body that materializes is a carbon copy of the human's own body. (This is what you see when you see a ghost, if you see a ghost!) Among those who believe in the paranormal, it's accepted that matter exists not only on the material plane, but astral and etheric matter also exist, as explained at the beginning.

One of the characteristics of bilocation shifting is that the body, in its animal and human aspects, exists in two different places at the same time. Any wounds received by the animal body are also, at the same time, at the exact same place on the human body.

How does bilocation occur? First, the person becomes unconscious, as if in a deep trance. The person "acquires" an animal body, such as a wolf, in the etheric form. The etheric body roams freely. Now suppose the etheric wolf body goes outside, running in a neighbor's yard. If someone sees the wolf, he may well throw a stone at it, hitting it in the eye. At the same moment, the human will awake, screaming with pain. (See, I told you that it might be necessary to suspend disbelief.)

Now, ladies and gentlemen, stretch your imagination as far as it will go and ask yourself: What about actual physical shifting? Some people really do believe in this. Accepting that it can happen, physical shifting is one of the rarest types of shifting, but also the most dramatic. The most common shifter types are wolf, fox, cat, and bear. The fifth most common is bird.

So what animal would you like--

Oops, gotta go now. A full moon is rising over the forest, and I smell a rabbit.

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Tuesday, March 31, 2015

What is Death? by Eleanor Stem

Buy Miri's Song from Amazon

Egyptian Judgement in the Afterlife

I believe in reincarnation, that’s all there is to it. Souls clump together and help each other through lifetimes. We learn, collect good and bad karma, love or dislike each other, hurt or shore up the other. When we’ve known souls for several lifetimes, and one leaves this plane, it is difficult to bear. We miss them. Our hearts break for our losses, while they are glad to be back. Once we move on, we again remember what we thought we’d never forget, but did.

As 2015 shot out of the gate, and within weeks of each other, both my husband and I lost life-long friends, people we knew since we were children. We grew up with them, rode bikes together, suffered through puberty, know their children, their spouses.

Husband’s friend lived down the street. He was always intense, and dedicated all of his energy to whatever he did. While young, he played in a band, traveled all over. One interesting place he lived was in Oklahoma among the Native Americans. He was a collector. He collected Native American artifacts, arrowheads. He loved music. It was part of his life. He breathed it, felt the thrumming of chords and notes in his flesh and sinew. He collected rare cd’s, band tee-shirts, memorabilia. Loved to have his picture taken with a musical group and post it on facebook. One Saturday in mid-February, his chest hurt. By morning, he was gone.

My friend and I started out as pen pals when I was twelve and she ten. At the time, I was embarrassed to have a friend so much younger than me, and I didn’t tell anyone about our age differences, fearing I’d be ridiculed. She lived in the West Midlands of England, near the Potteries where people in her neighborhood worked in factories and crafted Wedgewood and Prince Albert dishware. I visited her more than once, met her family, her aunt and uncle. I lived the same town for a year with my boys while I researched a novel. She saw my anger when I divorced; I saw her sorrow when her father died. Just before Christmas, she was diagnosed with cancer, and left this mortal coil a month and five days later.

We were shocked by these quick deaths, so unexpected. Medicine today is quite good. The doctors should have saved our friends, our loved ones. Why didn’t they? People with the worst, most insidious cancers can live quite a long time. Why didn’t my friend, or my husband’s friend stick around?

Because we are the ones who choose when we come or go, what our lessons will be, how we will learn these lessons, who we want to run with, love and dislike. Once our life's lessons are complete, we leave. We review. We either hang out in the clouds or begin another life. Our guides help us. God aids us. We are not alone.

I had vivid dreams of my friend laughing at my sorrows. She was glad to be on the other side. I asked where her life review took place, and she answered, on a hot, sandy beach. She was always cold in England, and this satisfied her a great deal. Almost a year ago, she told me she was bored. In my dreams, she admitted her life had been too constricted, controlled. Now, she wants to play, have a more exuberant life, be slightly naughty. She stuck around for her memorial service, then with a sweep of her skirts, she was gone. I hope this new place she goes to will be filled with more love, more light, and be better than the violence and hate of this earthen plane.

Monday, March 30, 2015

The Easter Bunny Went AWOL by Gail Roughton

One work day afternoon, more years back than I care to admit, my desk phone rang. I grabbed it immediately, both because I was (and still am) very good at my “day job” and because it was a school holiday and my children, ranging in age from fifteen to twelve, were home alone. Now that in and of itself should tell you how long ago it was since nowadays, all kids call their parents at work on their cell phones, but cell phones at that time were large, square and black and generally lived as permanent fixtures on car dashboards. (Told you it was a long time ago.)

“Mama?” Uh-oh. My eldest child and only daughter had that accusatory edge in her voice, as though miffed at something. Or someone. I braced myself for some tale of sibling strife.

“Hey, baby. Everything okay?”

“No, everything is not okay! I’ve been through this house from top to bottom and I can’t find the Easter Bunny anywhere! Now, don’t you think you or Daddy need to get busy, hmmmmm?”

At this point, I should explain that Easter was a big deal in our family. So was Halloween and so was Christmas. Don’t get me wrong, I know we’re not unique in that, it’s just – how shall I phrase this? My husband and I went a little crazy on holidays. Any holiday. Every holiday. Okay, we went completely over the top. We kept right on going over the top for years after most families dispense with any pretense that baskets of candy are delivered in the dead of night by a magical rabbit or that the presents surrounding the tree on Christmas morning came down the chimney with a jolly, bearded old man in a red suit.

The unfilled Easter baskets themselves were part and parcel of the magic. All three of my children had their own Easter basket, chosen for them on their first Easter. The basket itself never changed, not in all the years the Easter bunny came. They sat their empty basket out on the kitchen table every Easter Eve, after we’d dyed the Easter eggs and carefully arranged them in the big Easter basket saved from my own childhood. And sometime during the night, the Easter bunny filled those baskets with enough gaily wrapped chocolate candy and jelly beans to give an elephant a sugar rush. Then he tiptoed down the hall and left each filled basket by each child’s respective bed, and sat a big boxed chocolate bunny beside the filled basket. It had to sit beside the basket because the basket was too dang full for the chocolate bunny to fit inside it. Of course, a new stuffed animal always sat on the other side of the baskets to finish things off. The new stuffed animal didn’t have to be a bunny, though, sometimes it was a duck or a lamb.

All this was easy enough to pull off when the kids were little. Things got a bit more complicated as they aged. Especially since neither they nor we were about to acknowledge the fact that either Mama or Daddy went down the candy aisle of the grocery store filling their cart with bags of candy and hid it to await Easter Eve, or that it was Mama who lined the baskets with grass and tore open the bags of candy on the kitchen table, carefully dividing it between the three baskets by counting out “one, two, three, one, two, three…”. Certainly no one would ever admit it was Mama who snuck into the dark rooms and sat the baskets beside each respective bed.

As they aged, by tacit agreement, without it ever being discussed, I moved “Operation Easter Basket” from the kitchen table into my bedroom closet, sitting on the floor in the late night and early morning hours to count out “one, two, three…”. The boy who would become our son-in-law entered our door at the age of seventeen, and the count shifted to “one, two, three, four…” because of course, Jason had to spend the night on Easter Eve so the Easter Bunny could bring his basket, too. And by tacit agreement, without it ever being discussed, the kids turned their lights off at least by midnight and climbed into their respective beds.

Whether the kids were really asleep during those teen years when I snuck into dark rooms to deposit baskets, I don’t know. I didn’t ask, and it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the continuity, the tradition, the celebration of the magic interwoven into childhood and holidays. I’ve got to admit, I wasn’t sure that celebration mattered as much to my teenage children as it did to us as parents. At least, not until my fifteen year old daughter made it known that the Easter Bunny was an anticipated visitor who’d apparently gone AWOL and she expected the situation to be rectified immediately. And no, the Easter Bunny wasn’t AWOL. His candy stash was sitting behind me in an office closet, safely away from exploring teenagers. He doesn’t come to my house anymore, but that’s as it should be. He certainly comes to her house, leaving baskets of goodies and surprises beside two little beds. Because magic is a legacy, a gift from one generation to the next. Pass it on and never let the magic die. Happy Easter!