Little Lessons on Love and Life: Timeless Messages with a Modern Voice
Rhiannon Waits, the author of the syndicated column, “Rhia’s Corner,” has compiled a collection of some of her finest inspirational messages that highlight her talents as a motivational and spiritual speaker and she’s wrapped them into her gift to the world entitled “Little Lessons on Love and Life.” While it only seems appropriate that a medium of Waits’ caliber started life near where Edgar Cayce, the famous American psychic diagnostician, was born and buried, it’s her writings that have actually brought her more pride than the psychic skills that were bestowed upon her. And proud she should be.
I confess that the title made me immediately wonder if this was going to be another “Life’s Little Instruction Book” or “Random Acts of Kindness” guide. Perhaps Waits was also concerned about such a comparison as she begins by stating that she’d “rather have too many gurus in the world trying to help than to have a world of people who didn’t give a darn about others.” And while she also worries that, “it is extremely difficult to stay on task and keep the spiritual messages pure when having to edit the words of spirit,” she’s done a great job of finding her own unique style for sharing her ideas about “spirit, heart, and earthly life.”
While Waits has no desire to tell us how to live our life, she freely discusses her refreshing and to-the-point thoughts about many topics. Even though the resulting lesson of each chapter is classic in its message, its applicability to the current world we live in is the focus. This is especially obvious when Waits discusses her feelings about the importance of making “the ‘No Child Left Behind’ law as much about child support as it is about education,” the need to deprogram “the Nintendo children” who have become “desensitized to blood, guts, and gore,” and her hope that the term “significant other (SO) children” replaces the use of the phrase stepchildren.
This book goes far beyond child-related topics though. When it comes to love, we are reminded that “relationships are not diapers to relieve yourself in and cast away” and that being needed can actually ruin your dream of being wanted. Waits refers to aging as a time when “….women look as if they have laid out during a hailstorm as the dents and dings of cellulite start to make their debut and men begin to grow ‘boobs.” However, we can take comfort in knowing that “there is nothing wrong with improving your physical self, as long as you remember the greatest quest is that of spirit.”
When it comes to letting go of past hurts, Waits also reminds us that we are “in charge of damage control” and that we can actually choose to “let it be their nightmares and their life chore to redeem themselves, not [ours].” I particularly enjoyed Waits’ ideas as they pertained to how we often incorrectly consider kindness or caring as a sign of personal weakness, how “a request for an opinion does not give [us] the right to insult another,” and how we can learn a lot, not from “fearless bravery in the face of death,” but from fearless bravery in feeling and showing love while in the midst of life.
Any person that is capable of staring at a stack of coffee filters and realizing that, for each filter we handle, we start “a new day that [holds] so many possibilities, dreams, and emotional earmarks,” therefore let our “first drink of coffee be filtered through this blessed contraption so [we] will have a wonderful day from the inside out,” truly does have lessons to share with the world. While the testimonials for “Little Lessons on Love and Life” focus on Rhiannon Waits’ psychic abilities, the soon-to-be-released second printing of this book will have words of praise for her actual writing talents. As Waits believes that karma isn’t so much a “judgment on your actions but [more] a mirror that reflects them,” such praises are truly well deserved.
Donna McLaughlin Schwender is the “soul proprietor” of One-Eared Dog, Ink. As a freelance writer living in upstate New York, she can be reached at schwender@aol.com.
Little Lessons on Love and Life, by Rhiannon Waits
Anabel Zoran, writes: "Little Lessons on Love and Life does offer encouragement and support; it reminds us that we are not alone in our struggle. Waits admits that she has received criticism over her style of writing, her response is that ‘whenever people become too fastidious over how a sentence is presented, they loose sight of the true meaning of the sentence, they have denied themselves education in a different area’."
Dec 6, 2007 - 10:56:21 PMLittle Lessons on Love and Life, by Rhiannon Waits