I first connected with the Course through a lover I had when I was eighteen. I was fascinated to find it thrown into a closet and I believe it was given to me then if I remember rightly. I moved to the big city and moved on.

When I was nineteen another lover broke my heart, so I went and worked a long serene summer driving a tractor in a vineyard while my heart mended, and that was when I studied the Course Workbook.

I was alone most of the time in nature. The land was full of wild animals and mineral springs. It was magical. I lived in a caravan by a river and studied the Course, really not understanding it but happy to be thinking about love and forgiveness and holiness after the shocking experience of the false love the world and popsongs talk about, and heartbreak, anger, and the need to forgive and forgive daily just to deal with the sadness of my disillusionment about the world and about people.

The Course was inspirational, supportive and nurturing for me. Even though I intellectually didn't get the complex theology at the time, the energy field of lovingness and purity inherent in the Course but invisible to the physical eye did the healing and uplifting work of helping me heal my broken heart.

Then I went and made the same error in understanding again, this time protecting my heart from being hurt. Then I made the error again, and again, and again, and again, and again, for another eleven years, before I became gratefully aware of and thus free of the error in understanding. By comprehending this one thing I have been able to study the course again. Now I am reading the workbook and text together a few chapters at a time.

The error I made is so simple, yet so sweeping and profound in its implications, that I believe I might put it in another post.

I find that some chapters and even paragraphs seem like they were authored by someone else or that the woman that chaneled it was having a bad day (i.e., bad reception). The beginning chapters are clear and concise while some later ones seem to be just jibberish. (Maybe it's my limited awareness and I'll be able to return to the jibberish some day and "get it"!)