I'M BONNA ( RHYMES WITH DONNA)
BONNA RAE
My home is in the Sonoran Desert of
Arizona, and has been over forty years. I Love it here.
I'm
an ex-wife (had a fairly long wife-experience) and I'm a
mother and grandmother, fellow human being.
This is
my story, that will soon enough be a "done deal," but
I will leave a few footprints to maybe help someone else on
their journey. Thus, this website.
Perhaps it will speak
to you and help you along your way, improve relationships, bring
peace, and help you to live a happier, more loving life.
A while ago, I was born, or so they say. I came into physical
form, and thus began my conditioning in this physical realm.
I was the oldest of what eventually came to be eleven children.
At the beginning, there were five girls and we were each
other's friends and enjoyed a happy childhood. We were
raised in a small town in New Mexico. We had no television until
I was 15 years old, so our time was spent in constant play,
entertaining ourselves and each other. We roller skated up and
down the sidewalks on our street. Roller skating was the only
time we wore shoes in our summer play, as we had to attach the
roller skates to our shoes using a "skate key" or
pliers when we couldn't find the skate key, which was
often. We would wear the metal off the wheels.
I would spend hours throwing a softball onto the roof of our
home, catching the ball when it rolled off the roof. We were
thrilled when we got a pogo stick one Christmas and were adroit
at jumping incessantly, so much that we created bloody blisters
on the sides of our feet. There were hours of hopscotch and jump
rope, singing rhymes and counting until we finally missed the
rope.
My sister and I would ride our bicycles to the Benjamin
Franklin Five and Dime Store to buy the newest paper doll books.
Our bikes were left outside unlocked while we shopped and were
always there when our purchases were made and we were going
home. We loved our endless hours of playing paper dolls that had
to be hand-cut from the book, no perforated edges to help out. I
wrote a poem about my paper doll days called "Ann and
I."
At night we played kick-the-can and
hide-and-seek through the neighborhood, kids having constant
fun.
Many days we would haul our red metal wagon up and down the
alleys, scouring for empty glass soda bottles, which we’d turn
in at the 7-Eleven Store, some for three cents each, the big
ones for a nickel. Candy bars and pop-sickles were a nickel and
comic books a dime. We walked to the city swimming pool to cool
ourselves in the heat of the summer and spent hours in the city
library, where we’d check out armloads of books to read,
entering new worlds with each book. In school, historical
events were lightly glossed over. It was a sobering, to say the
least, when I realized that atrocities in our history were
committed in the name of Christianity and Christ himself. My
poem, "Christianity" is about that insanity.
I could live with that realization about Christianity, mainly
because these heartrending and horrific ages of atrocities in
the name of religion weren't done in the name of MY
religion. As a young adult, I read the Bible from front to
back, delighting in the New Testament and the love and life of
Jesus Christ, teaching peace and love for all people. First I
waded through the Old Testament which left me deeply wondering.
I had been taught about how we shouted for joy at the prospect
of coming to the planet Earth and of our brother,
Lucifer's, plan that was rejected by God Our Father. The
poem "The Devil Made Me Do It" is the result of deep
and disturbing questions.
Many years later, my
oldest daughter and I were at a garage sale and she handed me a
small paperback book by Dr. Wayne Dyer, remarking she thought I
would like it. Why she figured I would like it, I don‘t know,
except that it was meant to be. I don't know which of his
books it was, but that book changed the course of my life. In
the book, Wayne Dyer wrote, “You are loved unconditionally by
God.” He explained "unconditional love", and at a
cellular, deep level, I knew his explanation was true. I knew
there was nothing conditional about God’s love, and that changed
my world in a profound and unalterable way.
I found
myself unable to believe some of the basic tenets I’d been
taught all my life:
* God is a separate being living somewhere in the Universe.
*
God expects me to behave in a certain way, following His
guidelines.
* Sacrifice brings forth the blessings
of Heaven, and I must sacrifice and constantly strive to be
perfect so that I will earn a place for myself in the eternal
hereafter.
* If I live as God commands, I will return
and live with Him again.
* If I fail, He will feel ever so bad about it, but because He
is bound by His own laws and has given me my free agency, I
won’t live with Him ever again.
* If I fail badly
enough, I will ultimately be cast into outer darkness along with
Satan and his evil host who are here on the earth to tempt and
torment mankind.
I could no longer buy into the
concepts that made me one of the elite, chosen ones of God.
What
happy news! Even though it shook my world, completely changing
it, I found it a wonder. God loves us all. There are no
chosen, special ones. We are all One, Heart of God’s Heart, One
and All. We are One Species, mankind.
This revelation
was the birth of a new life, being my perception had changed.
Now
I believe there is a choice to live in the realization of the
great, Eternal Beings that we are even as we walk in human,
physical form.
Perhaps some of these poems and
stories will speak to your heart and be beneficial for you.