Monday, November 23, 2009

Review of Awakening with Mother Earth

Awakening with Mother Earth – Hearing Gaia Sing
By Fran Moeller Gatins

Our Mother Earth wants our souls to sing. She asks us to move beyond fear and forgetfulness into the light of universal hope and love. So saith Fran Moeller Gatins, who invites us to share her personal odyssey during which Gaia, mother of the ancient gods whose spirit is the very soul of our planet , chooses the author to become one of her “voices” in order to teach humankind that ancient wisdom is not incompatible with the evolution of our physical forms, our sacred structures and the ultimate essence of what we perceive to be the creators of the ever-changing cosmos.

This contemporary “bene gesserit” spent several years writing occasional “meditations” during travels in which she recorded her interactions with spirit guides as well as earth, wind, metal, fire and air before Gaia began the conversations in which she counseled that global shifts in paradigms do not necessarily consign humankind to obliteration if we retain a vibrant sense of openness to and respect for all manifestations of life past, present and future.

Change is a constant even for the goddess. She asks us to maintain our equilibrium through prayer, gratitude and forgiveness while we destroy old patterns of domination engendered by fear and unwillingness to listen to the truth-tellers in the quiet within.

Use this very conversational, well written and buoyant diary as a practical and poetic guide to living with the sacred in our everyday lives through a “spirit of curiosity, adventure and delight, even playfulness” as we join our Mother Earth in the hero’s journey to awaken our relationship with the universe.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

"We were dancing on a volcano" Joseph Gatins

Make room Margaret Mitchell. A real-life refugee from the potato famine spawned a dynasty in which his son was among the Madoffs of his day, gaining notoriety and the attention of the Feds a hundred years ago as a wheeler/dealer stock trader known on Wall Street as a “bucket shop man.” His oldest son, in turn, transformed himself into a pillar of social and entrepreneurial respectability on Peachtree Street aided by Atlanta’s adulation of his French wife, the “Comtesse.”

Their son, Francis, the author’s father, joined the circle of American expatriates living in Paris between the great wars during which time he fell in love with a beautiful aristocrat from Colombia. As a French military prisoner of war responsible for opening cattle cars arriving at a death camp in the Ukraine, Francis was witness to the horrors of the Holocaust while his mother played a significant role in providing succor through the Red Cross to those unable to escape Paris during the Nazi occupation.

Once the reader negotiates the initial introduction to the bewildering number of Josephs and Egles , the fact-filled pages fly swiftly through one hundred and forty years of the triumphs and tribulations of this indomitable family which has survived wars, tenuous marriages, the ebb and flow of their finances and the scourge of alcoholism. Through it the women of the family were sustained by the certitude of their strong and rigid Catholic faith.

This searingly honest and well written family history will be my Christmas gift to my most cosmopolitan friends, many of whom now also are “dancing on a volcano” of global uncertainty.