Vercelli house What is love
About Me
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.