Blue Light and Cherry Trees
Jesse Remer Henderson tells an eye-opening story of the mysterious connections among souls after death, before conception, and throughout life. Contact information for Jesse's Doula Services will be found at the end of the article.
My story begins about twelve years ago. I was very close to my aunt and uncle and when my uncle died of testicular cancer after eight years (there's another amazing story), my aunt moved to our small coastal town in Oregon and we shared an apartment together.
During this time in the grieving process, I was a college student and had been exploring my own spiritual awakening. I received my degree in Journalism and found myself attracted to a pattern of meditative writing called "intuitive or automatic writing." During one of these writings I felt that I was contacted by my uncle who shared things only he and my aunt knew personally. After a series of "testing" we felt pretty convinced it was he, and the messages he wished to share were of hope and the continuation of life, of love transformed. He said that his spirit would return and that "he" would come back as my first born daughter, born September 30, 2003. At the time, I was not married or in a partnership and felt that 2003 was so far off in the future, it felt amazing but didn't register as anything tangible.
I was fascinated with the idea of this sense of "birth destiny" as my parents had instilled these very ideas that life is a connected cycle of unfolding. I myself was a premature baby, born at 29 weeks and only 2.9 pounds in rural Oregon, and spent three months in Intensive Care with double pneumonia and a twenty percent chance of survival. For the first two months, I was in isolation in a rural hospital. My parents did not get to touch me, only look through a glass window. It was here that I contracted pneumonia and started to die. My parents were called and told they had one final "life-saving measure" they could take. At two months I was chosen to be the first baby in southern Oregon to be life-flighted to OHSU where I was given a last chance.
The first thing they did was allow my parents to hold me on a daily basis, now a standard of Kangaroo Care. I recovered enough that I was able to go home with my parents at five pounds, at three months old. My mom kept her milk in by expressing daily and was able to breastfeed me 100% within six weeks. Today I have no physical health problems to speak of, and attest that it was the loving contact of my parents that literally saved my life.
Meeting my husband
The same summer of the writings, I met my husband in an equally powerful and synchronistic way. I was given his phone number by my mother, who took it on a hunch because she had dreamed that his parents were her in-laws. As soon as he walked in the door I felt my whole body shake in awakening as if I'd known him my whole life and was greeting and old friend. I remember telling him it was a feeling of "boundary-lessness" or being completely open to the universe. I have always been guided in life by particular experiences that have this same quality. It's more vivid in my adult life, as almost a feeling of Great Universal Energy that says "YES!" whenever presented with the correct path. It has led me to chance meetings, beautiful houses, relationships, and new career paths.
But at twenty-three, this was still to be articulated and so I graduated, delved into my new relationship and launched into a busy career--the amazing idea of my future child's conception faded into memory along with the writings tucked up on the shelf. Five years later, we married and moved to Portland. I then started to uncover my birth path and examine my own birth more closely.
It started with dreams. Months before I met my husband I had very vivid dreams of babies and birth. Sometimes I was the one birthing, sometimes I was a midwife or helper, sometimes I was breastfeeding. These dreams stayed with me, though came less frequently as I focused on my career. Once we moved to Portland, in 1999 the dreams started to come again. I began to feel dissatisfied with my work and felt that something was missing. I had found my soul mate, achieved the financial and social success of my career in marketing, but felt instead like something in me was dying. I was turning twenty-seven, the Saturn Return, and began to delve into my roots, my family and childhood, my own birth experience. All the while, my questions were, "What is my birth path? Why am I here? What is needed of me? What will make me feel real?"
Guidance in a dream
This inquiry gave me a dream that I was surrounded by my spirit guides. They looked down and said about me, "She's a midwife, she just doesn't know it." At first, I felt that perhaps "midwife" meant facilitator. One day I was reading the local business paper and read an article about a university non-profit called the Performance Center. The article focused on "spirit in the workplace. I put the article down, looked at my husband and said, "I'm going to work with this organization. This is what I'm supposed to do next." A year later by destiny, I joined the international non-profit focusing on business performance supporting a team of facilitators that taught things like "How to be resilient in the workforce" and "Building trust."
Thinking I had found the end of my search, I settled in. But still the dreams came of birth, of transformation. A year and a half later, I couldn't ignore them, and spent an evening looking on the web at midwifery. As soon as I did, the old feeling that sparked my meeting with my husband, the great YES!!!, filled my soul.
I started by attending a local group of aspiring midwives. The hostess, Tricia, and I made an immediate connection. I soon became a doula and midwifery student and co-founded a flourishing group with Tricia--Mother Tree Birth, the name of which is visioned from the spirit of a real tree in her front yard.
Through all of these years, my dream imagery has always centered on babies and birth and has led me on this amazing journey. Part of my midwifery course was to build a pre-conception plan focusing on the body, mind, spiritual and cultural aspects of conception and birth. I began sharing it with clients as ancient wisdom drawn from many wise ones in the birth community as "Conscious Birth."
Enter "Rosemarie"
And then it became more personal. I started to dream nightly of babies, birth and breastfeeding. Nick and I started talking about family, but with the idea, for me at least, that I wished to wait until my midwifery studies were complete (about 2004). Then one morning Nick awoke and told me that he'd had a dream of our daughter. She was a little dark curly-haired girl about four years old and had visited him saying she was his daughter "Rosemarie." She asked him when he would be ready for her to come. Or as he put it, "when he would get his act together so she could make her entry."
It was such a vivid dream for him that he began to feel very ready to have a family and was basically just waiting for me. It was also amazing that her name was Rosemarie because we had used that herb in our wedding bouquets and it is the only scent I associate with memory and it takes me straight to the love of our wedding day whenever I smell it. I shared with him then the writings with my uncle and all that I had discovered years before. Without hesitation he accepted those words in a kind of matter-of-fact way.
Around this time, I went off the pill for the first time in eight years and started tracking my cycles. They were long--34 days, 52 days, 41 days. But because I wasn't trying to conceive, only tracking, I didn't mind. I did however start taking prenatal vitamins, doing blood tests, eliminating caffeine etc. I figured since I'd had eight years on the pill, I would want at least the two years I was planning for (until graduation in 2004) to be "clean" and connected with myself.
I also connected with our counselor and asked him to help me do some of my own regressions. An image of Nick about 100 years ago in an Irish cottage finding me as his wife, just before this child and I died in childbirth, filled my mind and I knew that this "past life" was part of why we were meant to come back together in this life. To complete the circle of the "premature" death. When I shared this, Nick also accepted it and felt it as truth. It gave him an even deeper connectedness to the idea of our daughter.
Then on New Year's Eve I felt this amazing pull of the moon. It was almost new moon, but I felt this amazing power. I had dreamt the night before of our cherry trees in full bloom and I was standing underneath them and letting the petals fall on me. It was exactly two weeks into my cycle--a perfect time for conception IF I had been on a 28-day cycle--which in the year of tracking, I never was.
That evening there seemed to be a blue light everywhere and an amazing warm energy. The significance of this blue light was like a spirit portal or the "openness" I had felt at other significant times in my life.
Nick looked at me with a knowing that even I couldn't fully comprehend. All I could hear was a word in my head YES, the same one that has always led me in life. All I could feel were the petals on my skin and all I could see was this amazing blue light. I said YES and she was conceived. I felt it was like she walked through and grounded herself inside me. I just knew despite all odds, I knew. The next day I looked at a due date calculator and her due date is September 25, 2003. Knowing my cycles are long, I see the idea of her birth date being September 30, 2003 is just about as synchronistic as it could get.
We confirmed her conception two weeks later, two days before the full moon and again it was felt intuitively by me as I was drawn to the moon in an almost hypnotic way.
We are now five months pregnant. We haven't officially checked her sex yet, but two intuitive readings and the old-fashioned "egg-sexing" technique of a pendulum check as well as our own experiences have confirmed girl. Since the time of her conception, she's been a bit shy, only coming forward in twelve weeks to show her strong heart beat, and no dreams. Nick also later dreamt of a baby boy, but he said that dream felt fainter--as if that was baby number two--farther off.
We are daily amazed at how this life has gifted us with these insights and connections to our future children. It has made Nick feel very bonded to this baby in a way that never leaves him feeling the outsider in my body's changes. In fact, it has given him a direction and an enthusiasm as he starts to develop his own personal relationship with her. I will not be surprised when we find ourselves with the dark, curly-haired and feisty girl named Rosemarie some day soon.
Thank you so much for listening to my story. I was deeply touched by the focus of your work and the other stories you share and I hope that you will find our story an affirmation of your work. We have so much yet to understand about the magic of our BEING-ness.
P.S. Since the time of this writing, both grandfathers have dreamt directly of our little one, always a girl. My father described his dream in great detail. The whole family was at the ocean and the baby was at the water's edge. She was about eight months old. She was sitting up splashing in the waves. My father (her grandfather) looked over and saw a pod of dolphins heading towards her. In concern, he ran to her. When he arrived, he saw that she was directing the dolphins like a conductor, amusing herself as they swam and jumped and turned at her command. He awoke thinking, "What is your name, my little one?"
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Jesse Remer Henderson, CD
Mother Tree Doula Services
1606 SE Clinton St. Portland, OR 97202
503-407-4732
www.mothertreebirth.com
jesse@mothertreebirth.com