For weeks leading up to my 21st Birthday, I was sure I was about to die. There wasn't any reason in my life to believe this, but something deep in my soul made it feel so real that it was heavy in my body. I'd played on the ideas that perhaps I hadn't lived beyond 21 or something traumatic had happened at that age in past lives, but none of the possibilities gave relief to the heaviness I was feeling. My 21st came and went and obviously I didn't die, but a week afterwards, the world I'd started building, came crashing down.

 

I was at a major change point in life. University and city life had chewed me up and spat me out again, this time with extra trauma baggage that could no longer fit under the rug. So, I packed my bags and moved back home.

 

I'd been opening up to spirituality over the previous few years, after reading The Celestine Prophecy and joining a meditation and spiritual awareness group. I was so desperate for solace at this time, that I turned heavily to more books and teachings, including developing more of an interest in crystals and the metaphysical world.

 

My mum had given me a chakra pendant for my 21st Birthday and my teachings taught me, it's best to cleanse crystals under the full moon, so I did. I hung it out on the clothesline as the sun set and the moon rose, but when I returned in the morning, it was gone. We searched high and low for hours with no luck and eventually gave up and considered it a gift to the crows.

 

Two weeks later I had run a bath to try and meditate in, but something kept stopping me. A few hours later, I had an exponential experience in our old cubby house, where I would sometimes meditate. I felt a light come down around and right through me, and push all the darkness down and out through my feet. While I thought the cubby was about to take off into space with the energy surge, I also felt like I was pure light. This lasted for a couple of minutes and afterwards I was in a transcendent state.

 

Coincidentally, my mum and sister were both asleep, even though it was 2pm in the afternoon. I walked blissfully into the bathroom and knelt beside the drawn bath.

 

“You wanted to be Baptised, my child?”, I heard a voice ask. Some part of me did, but not through the church. Without fear, nor resistance, my head, feeling somewhat separate from me, or as though I was the observer, was dipped into the bath for what felt like minutes, but holding my breath felt relaxing and effortless, which otherwise wouldn't have been the case.

 

My head rose and my body continued to act in an almost autopilot-like way, as I hopped into the bath fully dressed, my long white skirt floating around me. The wind had been still all day, but all of a sudden, the curtains started blowing rhythmically and more words started to flow through to me. I became worried as it all felt like such big commotion and energy, but I was assured that everyone was asleep and all was ok. That was when I heard clearly,

 

“1, 2, 3, who will follow me, to the glory of thy name? Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”

 

Which was followed by what I can only describe as the most peaceful nirvana. From the extreme depths of trauma I was in, to the absolute peace I felt in that moment, the contrast was absolutely profound. I just kept getting the messages

 

“Everything is in divine order.”

“Everything is perfect.”

“Everything is as it should be.”

 

I truly felt it and believed it and spent my first ever Christmas two days later completely in the present moment, with no presents to give but my presence.

 

For the next several months, I slowed right down, stayed completely sober and dedicated myself to morning rituals and meditations. To help me reset, I didn't socialise and had to find new outlets to keep my mind busy. I needed something more than a job a couple of days a week and watching weekly movies from Video Ezy, so I started focusing on channeling both writing and drawing.

 

I had been given a message by a spiritual healer that I would write a book and as I work well in a task response space, I put my skills I had learnt from school and university to work. I would walk to the beach and sit, draw and write for hours each day, until finally I had a book. I finished off rendering The Grain of Sand in photoshop and was eager to get it published.

 

But I was turned down by publisher after publisher, and as I had started studying Remedial Massage, I let the book go and it lay as a bunch of files in a folder, until my Godson was born a few years later. But still, I only printed one copy, dedicating it to him and thanking his mum for always believing in me and my book.

 

Fast forward another handful of years and my ex-husband and I were preparing for a trip to Peru for my 30th Birthday and to secretly get married by a shaman at ancient ruins. I started to get flashes of me dying at Machu Picchu – which we were visiting the day after my 30th Birthday, and due to be married the day afterwards. It scared me so much, that I decided to not add climbing the adjacent Huayna Picchu for its 'high risk' warning (I love climbing mountains!).

 

I had that same heavy feeling of death I had at 21 and was struggling be excited about going to a place I had dreamed of visiting since I read The Celestine Prophecy 12 years prior, so I went and saw a clairvoyant.

 

She started to ask if someone had died recently, or was about to die. We couldn't join any dots together, then all of a sudden, she says “Hold on! What's your birthdate?”. She scrawls it down and does some calculations and tells me I was coming to the end of a 9-year cycle. I do some simple 30-9 math and get 21. The penny drops. I was having a spiritual death at 21 and again at 30. Book me a flight on that light plane that has dodgy reviews – I'm not dying, I'm seeing the Nazca Lines! (admittedly I was still a little daunted about Machu Picchu).

 

I went to visit mum not long before the trip to Peru and she tells me “You'll never believe what I have found!”. Yep. You guessed it. 9 years later, my 21st pendant turns up under the same clothesline, almost in a straight line between the bath and the cubby house. 9 years of rain, mowing, the clothesline being reposted and general traffic – there it was, right where it disappeared almost 9 years earlier. Ironically, I was going through another major change point – I was getting married.

 

So why this long story about the pendant and what I call my awakening? Well, I've just turned 39, and I think you can work out the math. So finally, after almost 18 years of thinking my book was not worthy enough, nor perfect enough, I remembered back to the message I received at 21 – Everything is in divine order. Everything is perfect. Everything is as it should be. So, I set myself a challenge to release, or birth, The Grain of Sand on my 39th Birthday.

 

I decided to self-publish the book myself and I left it in (almost) its perfectly imperfect original form. Because life is perfectly imperfect. Did The Grain of Sand turn up 18 years late? It wasn't late. It arrived perfectly on time – the day I turned 39.