Part One - updated

It is not easy to document the growth of a soul, yet that is what I'm going to do, starting at the beginning.
At what I conceive to be the beginning, because our true beginnings are unknown to us.
My earliest memory is of watching the snow fall outside a window.





Do our spiritual lives begin at a moment of awakening, an image of the world that prints into our memory?

I think so, it was probably my first moment of consciousness.

Then, I remember being on the top bunk of the bed I shared with my sister, watching my Mum at work in the one-room cottage we lived in, and I'm reading the Bible, like a story-book, likely skipping the boring bits.

When I was nine, we moved to Australia,  I remember the shock of the cold winter night in Perth, when I had been expecting heat... in Finland, Australia was the golden land of the perpetual summer :)

And so began my lifelong strangeness, a sense of isolation within myself, a stranger in a strange land, wherever I went.
I learnt to read English pretty damn quickly, my Grandmother sent me books in Finnish every birthday and Christmas, but I devoured them rapidly,  I was so ravenous for reading.

 I developed a keen moral sense from reading authors like
Susan Coolidge  "What Katy Did" and  Louisa May Alcott
with "Anne of Green Gables" and the "Little Women" series.
"The novel is based on Louisa and her sisters’ coming of age and is set in Civil War New England.  'Jo March' was the first American juvenile heroine to act from her own individuality --a living, breathing person rather than the idealized stereotype then prevalent in children’s fiction."
This strong sense of individuality imprinted itself onto me, and I remember resolving to always be myself and not conform to any outside pressures to change who I am.

My Mum also taught us to pray, and I said the Lord's Prayer (religiously ;) every night, in Finnish, I still remember when I realized I had started thinking in English, how surprised I was, but I loyally stuck to praying in Finnish for a long time after that.

So then came years of growing up, I fell in love at 14 and 16 and at 20, and had a child at 22...
with meeting my husband, I came into contact with the Focolare, a fireside I warmed my soul by for a decade.

It started by the idea that if we all loved each other, being united in God, the world would be a paradise, the inescapable realization that I was one of ones not making it possible, hit me, I had to see what would happen if I put God in charge of my life, and made the practise of loving, the guiding principle.

And so it begins...