My name is Rosalie and I am a mother, a survivor and a writer.  I need your help to raise $4,500 to share the lessons of my journey. Funds from the book can also help meet medical and living expenses which will continue to sustain my life.

THE APPEAL

I am asking for contributions to publish a book, a book that has been written over the last dozen years and is now ready to be birthed. Vibrating At The Speed Of Love is a book about the tension between the ego and spirit, between human drives and the Divine impulse we all share. It is ordinary, predictable, and the most basic struggle. My life—our lives—are filled with a tension, at times severe, between earthly ego-driven I-want-things-to-be-a-certain-way tension, bloated with our precious opinions and judgements that keep us taut, and away from the peace that passes understanding.

THE CONFRONTATION

One of the shocks to my system over the last decade plus has been the confrontation of me to me—selfish, fear-driven, always trying to stay one step ahead of an inadequate, frustrated me with a dream of becoming a writer, which I have done but not in the way I have wanted. Becoming the kind of writer is a whole other story.

I started writing down passages after a medical crisis first surfaced years ago yet I never found the courage to come out of the spiritual closet and birth it. What began as writing down moments of my own spiritual experiences has become grist for the journey, comforting me as a spiritual first aid kit.

Oddly, the book has been a kind of salvation, a reminder for when I lose my way and forget I’m of spirit and not mere gristle and bone. I need this reminder. The simple meditative-style passages reveal the truth of things, at least they have for me. They may for you too. The book helps bring a subtle yet sturdy sense of peace, regrounding one to the ethereal, liberation from the temporal and thought.

THE TUMOR

More than a dozen years ago an angry tumor surfaced, screaming for attention. A surgery was performed, after which I decided to turn my life upside down, leave gainful employment and become a writer. If not now, then when could I? How much time does anyone really have? During the decade that followed I had numerous procedures, began a modest career though not always writing what truly moved me.

I now have a permanent colostomy that has really gotten my attention. I must publish the book that has helped define me, as well as comfort me. I have been in denial of my authentic self, a fraud in some respects as a spiritually oriented being. My life has once again been turned upside down with God conspiring on my behalf.

THE SURVIVOR’S CONTRADICTION

Oh my! The reliance on thinking we are the masters and creators of our own lives is a heavy intoxication, one which is driven by ego. While on one level that is true enough, on another it could not be further from it. We love to take credit for accomplishments, relegating horrors to either a mistaken belief in God’s punishment or proof God doesn’t exist at all—an  antiquated and simplistic concept of the Divine. My experience is that God is Love, Peace, a serene pool of tranquility and bliss that defies description. It is not confined by a particular ideology. Rather, God is known through the Spirit and experiencing the Presence.

A few years ago, I was blessed to work with a Holocaust survivor, an experience which changed the trajectory of my life. Funnily, we used to argue about God, he and I. He became a non-believer after surviving the horrors of concentration camps.

He had an amazing opera voice. I’d heard him sing, seen his face, witnessed his very being transformed. From where did that originate? He wouldn’t acknowledge the possible source, some Divine DNA matrix singing through him, the contradiction of It’s very insistence presiding through his throat like a songbird. Yet, when I would point this out, he’d grow quiet, wordless. He had even become a cantor, singing prayers to a God he didn’t believe in yet was he really that sure?

MY OWN CONTRADICTION

As I pull back from this memory now, I see how much I’ve denied myself. Believing in God, yes, but all too often, not having faith to act on the richness of anything I could share with others through my humble talents. I continually have put my faith in the traditional, the linear, not in what really moves me when in the Presence, not in the force and power of Love but instead in ego-dependent conventions, traditions that have only ever taken me so far, only to leave me adrift.

Yet, the tumor’s recent return at first perceived as a killing field is anything but! Just imagine how amazed I am to have learned it is actually a living field, a field filled with Divine promise to live a life I was meant to live—a spiritual expression which transcends form and time, filled with more love than fear, more joy in the smallest ingredients of life, not the largest, most dramatic. That field compels me to write beyond any despair, beyond any fear, and write about the Love I have felt and to share it with others facing the universal contradiction we all experience when inhabiting a body.


THE BOOK

Vibrating At The Speed Of Love is comprised of short easy-to-read passages across 100 pages written in contemplative fashion addressing just such a tension between imprisonment of thoughts driven by ego and those offering peace and liberation from God. While it was born out of a medical crisis, it was also born out of a creative and inspirational experience fueled by Love.

If you recognize any glimmer of your own struggle regardless of circumstance, please help me publish what may provide comfort to you as it has for me. No contribution is too small to help publish this little book, Vibrating at the Speed of Love. It will be available as an eBook and in print, with contributors receiving a signed copy of the print version.

My bona fides: In the last 15 years I have built a modest career as a freelance writer, publishing numerous essays of my own on diverse topics, large and small. I invite you to read them, as well as review articles I’ve written for magazines and businesses. They can be found on my website www.rosaliecushman.com  The holocaust memoir, The Man Confused by God, is available as an eBook on Amazon at The Man Confused By God https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006MAA44E/ref=cm_sw_r_sms_tai_o5HyCbAQYAA3B