Rock-Solid Blessings from My Garden

By Cheri Nelson Herring

When we can become grateful for the life we have lived and when we can become courageous enough to share our strengths and vulnerabilities, we just might make the world a better place in our own unique way. If we allow ourselves the time to become still and receptive to our Higher Power, we might find ourselves having a spiritual adventure beyond the world of reason.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781504372770

Cheri Nelson Herring

The following is the author’s unique voice and credentials: With Jonathan Livingston Seagull as a guide many years ago, Cheri Herring began her own journey for personal growth, embracing lessons of the heart presented through the eyes of children, world-renowned self-help and spiritual teachers, and nature. In this book she integrates lessons she has come to appreciate—the positive and the negative—throughout her almost seven decades of life. During her career as an English teacher, she required her students at the beginning of each class to practice expressing their thoughts through the casual format of journal entries. After more than a decade into her retirement, she began to iterate this practice with a lofty goal in mind: to reveal her lifelong quest for courage and enlightenment. Sharing this book is her greatest attempt to soar to new heights.

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Copyright © 2017 Cheri Nelson Herring.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-7252-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-7253-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-7277-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017900500

Balboa Press rev. date: 01/13/2017

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Rock-Solid Blessings from My Garden

Chapter 2: My Garden Myself

Chapter 3: Excavating Our Pearls: The Garden Within

Chapter 4: Acres of Diamonds

Chapter 5: Tiny Teacher—Big Spirit

Chapter 6: The Significance of Redbirds

Chapter 7: The Unexpected Voice of a Mockingbird

Chapter 8: Enriching One’s Identity: Anole Gets a New Tail

Chapter 9: A Smorgasbord of Enrichment

Chapter 10: Galveston’s Garden of Blessings

Chapter 11: A Trio Dressed as the Holy Spirit

Chapter 12: Farewells and New Beginnings

Chapter 13: An Intertwining Vine of Trumpets and Trumpeters

Chapter 14: Echoes in the Garden

Chapter 15: Opening up the Prickly Pear

Chapter 16: Big Punches Sometimes Come in Small Packages

Chapter 17: Paying Attention to What Is Not Working

Chapter 18: The Answer to a Prayer in a Five-Act Play

Chapter 19: The Holy Spirit in a Jack-in-the-Box

Chapter 20: A Walking Stick, E. T., and Me

Chapter 21: Rubik’s Magic Cube

Chapter 22: An Anole, Persistence, and the Holy Spirit

Chapter 23: A Vulture or a Hummingbird

Chapter 24: Gardens of Gratitude

Chapter 25: Mystical Mentors

Chapter 26: Confident Declarations

Addendum We Are All Each Other’s Teachers

About the Author

One hundred percent of the net profits of this book go to UNICEF.

To learn more about UNICEF in the United States and worldwide, what they do, and how to get involved, go to: unicefusa.org.

This book is dedicated to every child on the planet and to the inner child within us all.

Acknowledgments

I thank God for allowing me to be an infinitesimal part of this magnificent garden we call earth for seventy years and for surrounding me with His purest teachers, our children. My gratitude extends to my never-ending list of thought coaches, spiritual teachers, and writing teachers who continually enlighten me with their intentions to make our world a better place.

Preface

Becoming truly authentic has been my life’s quest. Freedom to be and to share oneself wholeheartedly often requires courage in the face of fear. My fears have included the fear of being misunderstood and the fear of being falsely judged. My fears arose at an early age from my sense of feeling different. Differences come in many packages, each with its own treasury of joys and adversities. The important lesson is that we feel comfortable with our differences and begin to appreciate and to utilize them to make the world a better place.

My first memory of thinking outside the box occurred when I was six years old. My second-grade classmates and I were lined up to return to our classroom after recess, and the teacher was trying to quieten the group before we entered the building. Across the playground was the entrance to the first-grade classrooms. After her brief effort to create silence, she told us to think about which entrance we wanted to enter. Immediately, I envisioned going through the first graders’ door so we could delay going back into the boredom of the afternoon, sitting in silence in those uncomfortable wooden desks. I instantly imagined sauntering quietly down three very long hallways and seeing what was happening in the third-, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade classrooms. Plus, I might get a glimpse of my big sister along the way. Finally, the teacher asked us to raise our hands if we wanted to go through that door. Of course, I was the only one to raise my hand. The other students understood the sarcasm, the reference that we were not acting like big second graders. I still remember the flushed feeling of embarrassment, the feeling of perceiving things differently. I would have more experiences like this in my lifetime, reinforcing my belief that I should keep my perceptions to myself.

Many years would pass before I would encounter experts in the areas of personality types, temperaments, and learning styles, which gave me a better understanding of my introverted, right-brained thinking style and a greater appreciation for the potpourri of personalities in my life, including family, friends, students, colleagues, and acquaintances. As a teacher, my experiences galvanized my determination to let others know their voices had value, a practice I continue to this day with my three precious granddaughters.

Twenty-five years ago I started writing a children’s book about being courageous in spite of one’s fears. I never finished that book. I had more to learn about courage. Once again, with hopes of conquering my fears through my writing, I followed William Zinsser’s advice in his book Writing about Your Life. I began to write and to organize hundreds of journal entries into categories from childhood to the present time, allowing the threads that have unified my life to intertwine, revealing God’s purpose for my presence here. With a desire to turn these writings into a book, I realized I must begin the process of synthesizing the evolution of my life’s themes. Inundated with enough material for several books, divine guidance intervened, helping me consolidate some of my thoughts and experiences into a simple book. As I got out of the shower one morning, the title Rock-Solid Blessings from My Garden subtly rippled into my mind, encompassing the myriad of miracles that had been appearing in the garden of my own backyard. This mystical energy I’ve come to know as the Holy Spirit acknowledges devotion to a worthy discipline and miraculously offers assistance as we put our pen to paper. The presentation of these writings is my quantum leap in courage, with the purpose of adding more love, understanding, and compassion to the world.

Introduction

As a child growing up in the small farming community of Portales, New Mexico, in the 1950s, life was simple. I recall hours spent in vacant dirt lots in the heat of the summer in search of intriguing creatures we called horned lizards, which blended in with their natural habitat of parched dirt and tumbleweeds. I was one of those lucky kids who had the freedom to roam carefreely from vacant lot to vacant lot all over town from morning until evening if I so desired, just like those lizards I loved to discover. As an outdoorsy kid, I loved tromping around in pursuit of these palm-sized reptiles, which could puff themselves up like a balloon for protection. I really do not know the exact attraction other than the element of surprise when I found one.

Occasionally I would catch and keep one in a shoebox for a few hours before releasing it. Its sharp-pointed crowns, sides, and back created an intriguing mini-dinosaur, making the search all the more enticing for an adventuresome juvenile. I never had any intention of depriving one of these innocuous creatures of its freedom for any length of time, which was exactly the way I felt the day my little friend and I decided to spend hours in the vacant lot across the street from her house in search of baby horned lizards. The goal was, as I recall, to catch one hundred of these cute, camouflaged clones of their parents. We painstakingly prepared a cardboard box for the terrarium and added the appropriate amenities to make them feel comfortable and secure in their temporary nursery, which included a carpet of dirt, lids with water, assorted weeds, and rocks. As that hot summer day came to a close, we were so proud of our accomplishment that we wanted to show our mothers what we had created. Since my friend lived right across the street, we carefully carried our project to her house first. Then I walked a few blocks to get my mother to come and see our terrarium filled with