Recently a wise advisor was reading my chakras and said, “Your throat chakra is showing that you are not using your voice as you need to. That’s very odd because you are a writer. Do you know what that could possibly mean?” I have pondered his words for months. I haven’t told the following to anyone but my daughter, so I pray this is how I am meant to use my voice. I hope that anyone else who needs to open and let her/his voice flow will be inspired to do so…
My connection to Michael helped to create the need inside of me to share a message that is the opposite of what I grew up believing. The message is that the traditional concepts of God (as the easily angered judge of mankind) are untrue. My writings are in harmony with and expansions of Michael’s poem entitled “God” from his “Dancing the Dream” book. My first book on this subject is “Nina’s Story: The Crimson Flowers.”
I have loved Michael’s music throughout his career, but did not give much conscious thought to his spirit, his being and his heart. So many of his songs that I didn’t even know existed, seem now to contain messages from the universe. They call to me, often screaming, “Why didn’t you hear this before?”
In March of 2003 I had just recently moved back to Colorado. We had a record-breaking snowfall that literally trapped us inside for a while. The flimsy snow shovel we had was practically useless. Influenced greatly by the blizzard and its long lasting effects, I fell into a deep depression mode that lasted months, years—and hasn’t totally left me. I am no stranger to depression, struggling with it all my life, even as a small child. There are more similarities to Michael’s childhood than are possible for me to mention here. I will focus on the similarities in religious upbringing, because that seems to be where our spirits collided to produce a story. Inside my depression, a strong voice kept telling me to write a book. I had no idea who the voice belonged to, but I took it to be a loving voice forcefully pushing me to get up and do this.
Within a year I reconnected with Dawn, a childhood friend who opened my mind to The Law of Attraction thinking. Soon after our reunion meeting she was diagnosed with breast cancer and she passed in September of 2006. I didn’t discuss my “voice” with her, but I did talk to her of connecting with me from the other side. She promised she’d find a way to do this, and she did. It would take too long to describe all of the ways. The most outstanding way was to turn my TV on. When my son began getting scared by this, I asked her to stop and she did. One time on a trip with my daughter, this happened in the hotel room. The TV turned on while I was sleeping. I checked to see if the remote was on the bed and I could have rolled over on it. It was on the night stand and my daughter was in the shower. No one else was in the room. I knew it was Dawn. She had found a way to say this fun “Hello” again without startling my young son. Though I am sad that I can’t see her in this life or talk to her on the phone anymore, I am excited that she can keep her promise to continue communicating.
On May 10 of 2007, I finally started writing the book I had thought about for years. It was to be a story of my experiences in my childhood church, a church that taught God as someone fearsome, vindictive and hungry for worship. This ogre of a “God” commanded very strict adherence to myriads of rules. There would be banishment for the “disobedient” human. I was told by the church leaders that theirs was the ONLY true church. I didn’t even realize that other churches were claiming the same thing. This church was my world. It took years to break free of the self-defeating, humiliation that this church had taught. I was in my mid-30’s when I finally did. Women and children especially, were emotionally and physically abused by the patriarchal culture of the church. The main goal regarding children (preached throughout my childhood) was the need to “break their spirits.” Many attempts were made to break my spirit. In some ways they seem to have succeeded, but I think I still retained enough spirit to finally escape and help others.
I had to write about my slow evolution from seeing God as scary to feeling that we are all part of a loving Spirit force. Soon after beginning the book, I started meeting with a spiritual guide. I had never done this before, and it was fascinating to me. She told me that I had (as we all do) thousands of beings of light surrounding me. It was during a guided meditation later that year (2007) that I saw this huge brilliant angel of light by the door of the room (there were a few other people in the meditation group). I told the spiritual guide what I saw and she said, “Oh, yes—that’s my angel—he’s really big—his name is Arnie.”
I told her, “No, this is a different one. He’s telling me that his name is Michael.”
I didn’t connect this name to Michael Jackson whatsoever at the time.
I had a vision that evening that a bright angel named Michael (I couldn’t distinguish any facial features) was leading me to my grandmother. The path was a gradually ascending series of dark wooden steps embedded into the ground. The angel held my hand as we walked, led me to a Native American type of structure—and there my grandmother greeted me and took my hand. My grandmother is not Native American, so I didn’t understand those symbols at the time.
Later, that same year (2007) I believe it was in October, I had one of the clearest dreams I’ve ever had. It was Michael Jackson, in human form (as he was then) in a house with a dark wood interior. He was speaking to me near a stairway and I remember standing on a stairway with a dark wooden bannister. I was on the last step and Michael was standing on the floor by the stairway. Paris was behind him, and spoke pleadingly with me after Michael spoke. I don’t know how to interpret to you what they were asking, so I will leave that for another time, but I remember awaking without answering his question in my dream.
I didn’t connect this dream to the “Michael angel” vision. I just remember thinking and thinking about his question and Paris’ pleading. I felt so much love toward him—and her, but I was confused by the dream and a bit scared by it. I tried to dismiss and forget the dream.
When he died less than two years later, my heart was for my baby girl and of course deeply grieving on behalf of his children. My daughter had loved him since she was two years old. Her heartbreak over his death was obvious. He had been like a loving father influence for her, and she had suffered so many snide verbal abuses while standing up for him in school and defending him to rude family members regarding the false accusations. She was attached to him at a spirit level, but I didn’t truly understand until July 7th, 2009, when he broke through the wall between worlds to touch my life again. I had grabbed a fiction book I’d shelved for months, to take to a hair appointment, so that I wouldn’t have to read their magazines. Seeing his name in the book happened simultaneously with one of his songs coming over the sound system of the hair salon I was sitting in. Later that night, after watching the recorded second half of the Memorial Service that I’d reluctantly missed to keep my hair appointment, I heard Michael’s voice again. It was inside my head. He asked me the same question from my dream of 2007. This time I said “Yes!” I remember sobbing and telling him I was sorry for not listening before, and feeling a need to express to him that I understood him, finally.
In late 2009, I felt I had hit a point where I needed to take the writing to another level. I wasn’t satisfied with the way the book was. I knew I needed help to make it better. In what to me still seems like a miraculous sequence of events, I met some new people that contributed greatly to the fruition of Nina’s Story. A local theatre director, Wendy Ishii, introduced me to her writer friend and his writing classes. I studied with screenwriter/ success coach/ and talent representative, Peter DeAnello to fine-tune my writing skills. I took off nine months from writing the book to study screenplay writing and incorporate these skills into my novel. I felt that I was on the right track when it hit me one day that my mentor’s names were Peter and Wendy. I started bringing my writing assignments to class in a Tinkerbell folder. One assignment was to write a silent film story. I brought in my BOSE CD player and played “Speechless” as the background music to my short silent movie story. I was nervous about doing this, thinking that others in the class would make insensitive comments about Michael, but I took the chance anyway. To my joy and relief, it was received very well.
Michael’s “signs” as many of you deeply understand, surpass all others in clarity and strength. He has more tools to use than many spirits that have ascended before him, because we have so many of his songs to remind us of him. How many of us get into the car and turn on the radio JUST as a Michael song is on, or walk into a store and hear his music as we’re entering and feel as if he is actually saying “Hello” to us in that moment?
There are so many signs like this for me, and when I felt something was to happen to take my dad away from me, I was bold (or desperate) enough to ask him to promise me that he too would find ways to get through the “wall between worlds” and let me know he was still with me. My dad has gotten through, in much the same ways Michael does. He uses Elvis songs a lot. J I am grateful to Michael for teaching me how to recognize and believe the signs from my dad.
I know now that Michael’s was the voice in my head pulling me from a debilitating depression years ago. Michael’s was the spirit showing me himself in angel form. Michael’s is an astonishingly powerful spirit that is changing the world. I believe he has been doing so for many, many years. I feel his spirit in writings of the distant past; one name stands out in particular—John Keats, the poet. I don’t claim to know how any of this works, I just feel it. Spirit has given me strong pointers.
I am joyous to feel and see all of the other spirits (now in human form) around me and flowing into Michael communities like this one who also have a “knowing” about this “Illumination” we call Michael—this ageless being we once knew as Michael Joseph Jackson. This being is so much more than what can be contained in the one lifetime of Michael Jackson. He came to me as “Endymion” in my book, an ancient spirit, perhaps free again to reach more deeply into every heart that will hear.
I don’t claim to understand what is happening. I don’t know why I was consciously blind to connecting Michael’s spirit to Michael Jackson before his death. I didn’t connect the voice from 2003 or the angel from 2007 with him at the time. I just knew that someone was helping me. Now, I see how so many of us have discovered a depth of connection with him that cannot be explained with an impotent little word like “fan.” Perhaps his spirit has been whispering to us for a very long time, perhaps we have been his friends, lovers or family in other lifetimes. I believe the one thing he wishes us to remember is to not get exclusively caught up in the Michael Jackson lifetime that he inhabited, but to release this “Major Love” so that all beings may feel the connection through the walls of time and space and life and death. He is pointing us to LOVE—not to only one man—but to LOVE. His purpose is vast and uncontainable and he is a MOST powerful spokesperson. Thank you for listening—as I feel you have been listening forever. ~h~
Do you believe in LOVE after life? www.heavenleigh11.com Nina’s Story: The Crimson Flowers
