Tag Archives: Egypt

It Begins Again

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Here, in the land of the red rocks, I have begun my second book, the sequel to The Messenger. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that The Messenger II has begun because it is time, I am ready, and I am in the right place. I am merely the scribe, not the author. As it was with the first book, I am being impressed with the continuation of the story of Lukhamen, my Spirit Guide; that is, I see it in my mind’s eye. It is fascinating. I wish I could explain it.

I can tell you that this is how it happens: I sit before my computer and the story begins where it left off.  Always. No matter how much time there is between segments. And I see it unfolding in the present, even though the lives of the people I write about lived long ago. When the segment (for that is how it happens, in segments) is over, I am back in my own present. That may be confusing. Let me say it another way: When I am in the story, or when I am observing the story taking place, I see it as it is occurring. Not as it occurred. That is why I write it in the present tense.

Or how about this: When you are watching a movie, and unless there is a flashback, you are watching a story unfold in the present. It is happening now, in front of your eyes, even if you are watching a historical dramatization of past events. That is what it is like for me. I am watching a movie. I see a little of it at a time, and I write it down as it is happening. Afterwards, I go back to what I have written and edit it —make it into coherent sentences.  Chose the right word to describe what I saw on the “screen.”

I suppose you would call this channeling. The word for it is not important. The significance of this amazing occurrence is that it is a gift—a miraculous gift— that I can pass on. Not only is the story fascinating—who wouldn’t like to be a witness to the end of an era in Egyptian history—but it contains a message, a wonderful message, a message of hope, a message that saved my life when my son died.

I’m going to share with you now a little of the story as it begins again, a little preview of things to come:

 

sankh

The heat of the sun wakes him. He rises upon his arms, and notices that his hands are rough and bloody in places. From crawling? He turns on his hips to half-sit, to see his surroundings. He is in the desert, alone. A scorpion scuttles past him, causing him to start. He needs shade, water. A bush beckons to him, and he pulls himself through the rough sand toward it, dragging his legs. It takes all his strength to reach the sparse shade.  He is exhausted by the time he reaches it, and lies prostrate beneath its fragile shelter. He cannot remember how he got here.

He dimly remembers a boat, and a river. No, not a boat. A temple barge. The heat scorches his bloody hands and burns the scalp beneath his hair. I had a family. I had a god. The words will not form on his parched lips. They are in his mind, his poor, wretched mind, which does not know what brought him here to this place that must surely kill him with its heat, its searing sun, and its sere, bleak loneliness. He closes his eyes and waits for death. He does not see, nor does he feel the hands that lift him onto the makeshift carrier. He does not feel the wracking ride over the rough rises, nor is he aware of the horse that drags him or its rider.

sankh

Like you, I do not know what is going to happen. The other part of The Messenger II, as it was in the original Messenger, will be based on the memories I have of my husband Bill, who passed away seven years ago. I am guessing that most of my readers have read The Messenger, and understand already how the present and the past can come together in the most beautiful way. I suspect it will be the same with The Messenger II.

And so it begins again.

***

Read The Messenger: The Improbable Story of a Grieving Mother and a Spirit Guide by Helen Delaney. Find it at www.Amazon.com or www.themessenger.space

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Nobody’s Gone for Good

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It has been one year since I began writing this blog. I have, over the course of the year, written about a lot of things, mostly the vicissitudes and the challenges of living day to day. On this, the blog’s first anniversary, I decided it was time to remember why I started writing it in the first place. It was to introduce my book, The Messenger: The Improbable Story of a Grieving Mother and a Spirit Guide.  Writing this book, which is about the death of my son Eddie and the discovery of Spirit, my own and that of a loving Guide, simply saved my life. The Messenger, whose name is Lukhamen, lived in Egypt a long time ago, some two hundred years after the death of Christ. His story, as he imparted it to me, is a glimpse of life as it was under the brutal occupation of Rome. But it wasn’t until I went to Egypt – quite by chance – and the places I had seen only in my mind’s eye became a reality, that I understood who he was, and why he came into my life at its darkest hour.  The book – his gift to me – is a message of hope for anyone who has lost someone they loved, but especially parents who have lost a child.  The Messenger has found its way into the hands of precious people who have known the awful pain of grief. They have told me that the book was a comfort to them. That is its purpose. I plan to spend this next year seeking out others like them, and asking them to talk with me and to each other, so that we might share our experiences, strength, and hope.  Thank you to all who have stayed with me during this year, and to all who have joined our journey along the way. Your encouragement has lifted me out of many a dark day. Here is how it all started one year ago:

***

Welcome to my blog, Nobody’s Gone for Good. I never dreamed I would write a blog. Blogs were not invented by my generation. My granddaughters are in their twenties. A blog? Why? And why now? For the most part, I have led an ordinary life. But something happened to me that was not at all ordinary. It was, to say the least, improbable. It began a long time ago, and it took me a long time to write it down. I didn’t fully understand it until I had finished. It’s all in a book now, and it is time to let it go – to wherever it is supposed to go, to wherever it may do the most good. I have been told by this generation that a blog is its first step into the world. I am nothing if not obedient.

The title of my blog, Nobody’s Gone for Good, is borrowed. I was sitting in a movie theater when I heard those words sung onscreen. A woman who had passed on was sitting by her husband; her song was meant to console him, a man so lost in grief that he could neither see her nor hear her. My daughter, who was sitting next to me, touched my arm and said, “That’s it. That’s your line.” I had been looking for one simple sentence that would describe the book I had just finished, one simple sentence to describe the long journey that began with the death of my child.

Do our dead sing to us? Do they love us still? Where are they? Are they gone forever? Or does something live on, and do they whisper to us, saying, Don’t cry. Nobody’s gone for good.

Shakespeare said it so well: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Something happened to me that happens to many, many souls. At the darkest moment, in the deepest throes of anguish, at the point in time when all seems lost, a gift is imparted; a pinpoint of light shines in the night, the glimmer of a small star reaches a spirit in despair, and gives it hope.

 

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Look for The Messenger: The Improbable Story of a Grieving Mother and a Spirit Guide by Helen Delaney at www.Amazon.com

Called

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If you have read my book, The Messenger, you will not be surprised to know that I was “called” to New York this weekend to see an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum titled “Ancient Egypt Transformed: The Middle Kingdom.”  The photo above is of a sculpted Pharaoh who lived more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ. Walking through the artfully lit rooms among unspeakably beautiful works of art was humbling and touching.

In these days and times it is good to take some time out to nourish things of the soul, take a deep breath, & realize that beauty is among us and, like love, it is greater than time.

I’ll be back on this page next Sunday.

 

You Do Not Have to Believe This Story

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After reading the back cover, people will either open my book titled The Messenger, or they won’t go near it. The subtitle: The Improbable Story of a Grieving Mother and a Spirit Guide will intrigue some, while others will be put off by it. Those who begin to read it will find that it opens with this sentence: You do not have to believe this story. It happened all the same. I don’t ask my readers to believe it. I simply put it before them, as it was put before me.

Half the book is my story as I lived it—the gruesome, heartbreaking experience of the death of my child and its aftermath. The other half was given to me by someone who lived almost two thousand years ago in Egypt: My Spirit Guide, Lukhamen. Let me use the proper term for what happened. I channeled his story. Improbable? Indeed it was. Is.

I’ve read about other people who’ve experienced this phenomenon. I have also met some. They were not “woo-woo” people. They were not flaky or inveterate liars. Or con artists. Or on drugs. They were ordinary people with ordinary lives, ordinary jobs, and not particularly imaginative. The first one I happened to hear (on National Public Radio) was a well-known newspaper journalist. As for me, I have lived my own professional life in the company of hard-core realists – engineers, research scientists, and government officials. I spent my entire career in Washington, D.C., interrupted only by a brief stint as a diplomat in Brussels. My life was lived in two centers of government that are about as far removed from metaphysical philosophies as ever I could imagine. I was, and still am, tremendously impressed with intelligence and the scientific mind that is driven to explore the unknown, the unknowable, and the unbelievable. But let me stop there. I am not an apologist for channelers or channeling. It is, as they say, what it is.

What I would like to do is answer the most-asked questions put to me by my readers. I believe I should include these in an introduction to The Messenger II. (I’m working on a sequel.) The questions are, WHAT WAS IT LIKE? And HOW DID IT HAPPEN?

To answer the first question, the best explanation I can give is that it was like looking at television. Imagine that you are watching, say, a soap opera. (That is so unfair to my Spirit Guide, but it is a commonly understood form of a continuing story.) Each segment is just a few minutes long. You turn off the television and write down what you heard and saw. It was almost just that simple. Except that I was looking at television with my eyes closed. The story would always resume where it left off. Like soap operas do. One negative reviewer (gratefully, I’ve only gotten one so far) questioned my ability to recall conversations. He just chalked the whole thing up to the conclusion that I invented the whole thing. I must say I’m flattered that he would credit me with the massive imagination it would have taken to dream it all up plus the fiction writer’s gift for concocting a complicated plot.

Many of us can recall (more or less) scenes from our favorite movies. How many of us can remember the lines from a famous airport scene that ends with, “Here’s looking at you, kid?” Can you see the hat Ingrid Bergman is wearing? Can you see the tears in her eyes? I can.

And how did such an extraordinary, improbable thing happen? It happened because I requested it. Now, when I think of it, it was more like a prayer. I asked for a Spirit Guide to come to me, to help me. I was at the end of my rope and nobody had yet made me understand why my young son had to die. I asked and I received. I asked and Love answered.

The truth that I will ask my readers to believe comes at the end of the book. And it is this: There exists a Love that is greater than any of us can imagine. It will find us in the darkest hour. There is a light in the night for all who mourn, and death is banished. Life is all there is, and love is greater than fire, and wind, and time.

***

From the back cover of The Messenger:

Helen Delaney is in a railway book store, inconsolable and suicidal after the death of her son. A book at eye level catches her attention. She touches it, and it falls off the shelf, into her hand. It is a set of instructions on how to connect with a spirit guide. Thus begins The Messenger, the true, intimate story of a grieving mother, a gifted medium, and the spirit guide Lukhamen, who keeps her alive by recounting the story of his life.

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The Messenger by Helen Delaney is available at http://www.Amazon.com