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Author Shaw clearly relishes sharing her love of God, family, spiritual synchronicity, wordplay, and poetry in this exuberant autobiography. Filled with poems and family photos, she takes her reader on a lively page-by-page journey of understanding her perception of how the Spirit creates messages in language and in nature for believers to ponder in their life journeys. In tandem with this playful theme, she also shares many poignant, down-to-earth details about her life from birth onward. She writes: “We benefit when we are able to cling to our special memories at the times we experience life’s painful situations that are necessary parts of our lives.”
Shaw presents the peaks and valleys of her spiritually rich existence in great detail. Her background includes the confusion caused by her parents, who divorced and remarried early in her life. Despite their fully expressed love for her in early childhood, both were sometimes emotionally inaccessible after they moved on and married other partners. Another factor that could have created more havoc in Shaw’s life was her own early first pregnancy and early first marriage.
Shaw was gifted with many factors that support healthy emotional development and just as many that could have derailed her from the achievements she sought and gained. However, her deep faith in God, the emotional support of extended family on both sides, and her resilient spirit ushered her through tough times that will be familiar to many readers. At times, Shaw’s narrative comes across as a bit confusing when she extols her love of wordplay and signs she feels are brought forth by spirit, but any reader with a similar love of words and images will understand and embrace the notions she shares. There is clearly much joy to experience in reading this autobiography.