My name is Christy Rounds. This passage is from my book, Escape Bound:
“Whether you had the perfect mother, a terrible mother, or no mother at all is irrelevant. All pale in comparison to the all-encompassing love of the One Mother.”
These were the words that reverberated through the earth, permeating every cell in my body, at the very beginning of a ten day soul quest journey.
Moments earlier, in the high desert of the Inyo Mountains just east of the Sierra Nevadas, I’d been fighting a physical urge to drop to the ground. It felt like a hand was pressing down on my shoulder. The impulse to kneel was as strong as the urge to sneeze. Unable to resist, my legs crumpled beneath me, and I was kneeling on the ground, palms planted firmly in the dirt.
Then, the power hit me in waves, rising up through the earth, riveting my hands to the ground. My fingers felt like they were shooting out roots, anchoring me to the soil. Wave after wave of ecstasy coursed through my body as I received that message from the Earth Mother. Tears of awe and sheer bliss streamed down my face, and my throat ached from the effort of enduring a power that surpassed anything I’d ever felt.
Whether it was a spiritual birthing or dramatic form of a wake-up call, those words changed the trajectory of my life. They acted as a calling, invoking an inspiration to commune with nature in ways I never would have imagined possible.