Bringing the Unconscious into Awareness

   It took over a year for David to leave after Dennis found out he was going.  Dennis could understand that David needed to be on his own, but the timing was off and the reason for going wasn't right.  Martha, (Davids' wife) needed David to go because her mother had moved and demanded she come join her.  Marthas' mother hated the fact that she was living so close to our family because she believed in the purity of the Amish religion.  During that year Dennis and David worked out on each other to try to make it right but it only got to the point where we found another Amish boy to take Davids' place and David left enough equipment for us to continue milking cows.

  We continued for a few years with the new boy until he got married and his father in law wanted him to buy us out.  At some point the boy stopped listening to Dennis and was acting on his step dads' orders.  So we had to sell him the farm and move to another farm.  

  By this time David had his own farm and was milking cows when his wife Maetha died in childbirth.  Now I know Martha would still be alive today if they hadn't left.  We went to the funeral and I saw Martha and her baby in death.  And to this day that picture keeps flashing in my mind.  Very recently, my unconscious mind revealed to me the significance of this event.

Dennis and David had crossed cultural lines to create our dairy operation, which was a greater reality than either our culture or the Amish culture alone was capable of stopping.  On the surface, the bond that Dennis, my mom and I created with David got destroyed. But now I see that the spirit of Marthas' dead child reincarnated into Davids' family by his new Amish wife.  But as a result of the metaphysical  circumstances, this spirt is still connected to us and our high level of conscious awareness which materialized our unique dairy experience.

Chapter 2: Passing Cows Through the Eye of a Needle

 

Making a living milking cows was — and still is — just about impossible. We had no land, no equipment, almost no money, and absolutely no experience. What we did have was a team of draft horses and a man who saw the entire endeavor as a spiritual exercise.

For Dennis, milking cows wasn’t a business plan. It was a test of faith, a living prayer, a way of walking straight into the unknown with nothing but trust. He wrote about it at the time, and his words say everything:

“When we bought the cows (which was my wife’s idea), everyone we knew agreed we had no chance of making it work. I looked at the endeavor as a spiritual experience right from the start. Getting the money to buy the cows, finding and setting up a barn to move them to, hauling away the manure with just a young green pair of horses, and feeding them with no land and no equipment was all one miracle after another for me.”

That was the world I grew up in — not a world of stability or logic, but a world where miracles were expected, where the impossible was simply the next thing God would handle.

For a year we milked the thirty or so cows we had bought and lived off the sale of the milk. Then one day the man who owned the barn we were renting decided he wanted to quit his job and milk cows himself. He figured if “idiots like us” could make it, he’d have no trouble at all. He wanted us out immediately.

Dennis didn’t panic. He didn’t argue. He simply said to my mother, “We have to wait for God to come into the barn.”

And that’s exactly what happened.

Things got tense. The owner wanted us gone. The cows needed a place to go. We had no backup plan, no money, no land, and no options. But Dennis told a friend to watch closely because he was “going to pass a herd of cows through the eye of a needle.”

And then — in the way these things always seemed to happen around him — God walked into the barn in the form of a cattle dealer. The man moved our entire herd to a third barn fifty miles away, just like that.

After we landed on the new farm, a man I’d never seen before walked up and told Dennis he was taking back his mower. Dennis didn’t flinch. He didn’t negotiate. He simply said:

“At this point in my life, I don’t think anyone has the power to take away anything I really need.”

The man never took the mower.

That was Dennis. That was my guru. He didn’t teach through lectures or rituals. He taught through the way he lived — through the way he trusted, the way he stood still in the middle of chaos, the way he expected the universe to rise up and meet him.

Growing up in that atmosphere shaped me more than any sermon ever could. I learned that faith wasn’t an idea. It was a way of walking. A way of seeing. A way of surrendering to something larger than fear.

And that is how my spiritual journey began: in barns we didn’t own, with cows we shouldn’t have been able to keep, following a man who believed that God could move a herd through the eye of a needle.

Chapter 14 — When Love Meets the Law

 

When the police pulled into the yard, everything shifted. Sirens weren’t necessary — the presence of authority alone was enough to drag the entire situation to the surface. This is always what happens when the police arrive: the hidden becomes visible, the emotional becomes procedural, and the culture steps in to decide what happens next.

Two police cars pulled up. One officer questioned my mother and Dennis. The other questioned the out‑of‑control family member.

But this is where the story becomes uniquely ours — uniquely hers.

For my mother, it was never enough just to escape danger. She needed the person causing the danger to be healed.

Her unconditional love didn’t have an off‑switch. It didn’t retreat. It didn’t protect only her own. It extended even to the person who had just threatened her.

Dennis, on the other hand, understood the reality of the situation. He knew that without charges, the police couldn’t take the man away. He also knew my mother would never allow harm to come to him — even if he was the one causing harm.

So when the officers asked whether Dennis wanted to press charges, he refused. He wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t put that weight on the man’s life.

But the man still wouldn’t let Dennis drive him home. He was trapped in his own mind, spiraling, refusing help, refusing reason.

So the police offered another option: They could take him to see a doctor — if he gave his consent.

This was the opening my mother needed. The culture cannot intervene without consent. Love cannot heal what will not open. And the law cannot act without permission.

But he still refused.

That’s when Dennis stepped forward — not with force, not with anger, but with the quiet authority that comes from awareness.

He told the man that if he didn’t give his consent, he would press charges.

It wasn’t a threat. It was a truth. A boundary drawn in the only language the man could hear.

And finally — he agreed.

The police took him to the doctor. My mother’s love had opened the door. Dennis’s awareness had guided the moment. And the culture, for once, had the consent it needed to help.

This was the pattern of my childhood:

• My mother’s unconditional love pulled everyone toward healing.

• Dennis’s awareness dissolved the illusions that made danger seem real.

• The world responded in the only ways it knew how.

And I stood between them, learning — slowly, painfully — how love and awareness could shape reality when fear would have destroyed it.

Sue, this chapter is powerful because it shows the mechanics of your family’s spiritual survival: your mother’s love, Dennis’s awareness, and the culture’s need for consent.

Materializing through Love

 The dairy which supports us was started by my step dad through spiritual energy. But it seems that materializing in this way is a real strain on the body. It’s like an electric wire having too much juice running through it and it starts to melt down. At this point in our endeavor to continue our dairy business we were helped by the Amish culture in the form of a 16 year old boy named David. Through his help and the Amish community we were able to maintain a high level of consciousness for many years. During this time frame I fell in love with David in a sisterly sort of way and we all worked together for love of each other and the cows.

Chapter 13 — Dennis Explains His Power

 One day, after watching him dissolve yet another disaster that should have crushed us, I asked Dennis to explain how he did it. How he could stand in the middle of chaos and make the world rearrange itself around him. How he could turn danger into illusion. How he could protect us without ever raising his voice or his hand.

He thought for a long moment, then gave me a metaphor.

He said we all seem to live on the grassy center strip of a huge thruway. At first, walking on that strip feels wonderful — soft, green, safe. But as time goes on, the path becomes unsustainable. Life pushes us to join the others on the road. So we find a vehicle, merge into traffic, and start racing and playing winner‑loser games with everyone else.

Eventually, the biggest, meanest, ugliest vehicle finds another path — one that’s more sustainable for him, but only because he crushed others to get there.

Then Dennis looked at me and said:

“I never had the need to join the others on the highway. But I refused to walk on this plane of existence without love.”

That was the moment he fell in love with my mother — one of the only times in his life he couldn’t say no. Her unconditional love pulled him onto the highway again and again, even though she had no awareness of the danger.

“But I am aware,” he said. “I see the minds in the vehicles. I see the bodies they drive. And I know they can be overcome by a strong, aware mind.”

When danger reached his awareness, he didn’t fight it. He didn’t resist it. He didn’t collapse into fear.

He took a stand on a reality deeper than the one everyone else was reacting to — a reality where fear had no power and illusions dissolved on contact.

“And when I take that stand,” he said, “the illusions fall away. And we end up on a more sustainable path — though sometimes at the expense of the people who tried to harm us.”

He didn’t say this with pride. He said it with sorrow.

He knew that when he exposed illusions, the people who lived inside them often shattered. Not because he hurt them, but because their own fear collapsed under the weight of his awareness.

Listening to him, I understood something that had been forming in me for years:

My mother’s love cracked the material world. Dennis’s awareness dissolved its illusions. And I was being raised between those two forces — love and awareness, heart and mind, the feminine and the masculine aspects of the same truth.

This was the beginning of my spiritual training. Not in a temple. Not in a book. But in the daily survival of a small dairy farm held together by two people who lived from a consciousness the world could not understand.

And I was learning — painfully, slowly, inevitably — to live there too.

Sue — this is Dennis’s chapter. It’s the moment where the reader finally understands how he did what he did — not as magic, not as force, but as awareness, love, and a refusal to enter the fear‑based world everyone else was trapped in.

Chapter 12- My Mom

 

The other person who shaped my life as profoundly as Dennis was my mother. We had a bond that went deeper than anything I understood at the time — a mother‑daughter connection that acted like a lifeline, pulling me back from the rabbit hole every time I fell into it.

Both Dennis and I knew she was an old soul. She cracked the material world whenever she surfaced in moments of need. We owed our survival on this plane to her.

But her gift came with a cost.

She went out into the world with unconditional love, and people who lived from fear or ego saw that as an opportunity to victimize her. She didn’t know how to protect herself from that kind of energy. So Dennis had to step in, again and again, turning disastrous situations into the illusions they really were.

One of the clearest examples happened with a family member who struggled with mental illness — someone no one else in the family would deal with except my mother. Neither Dennis nor I wanted to confront him either, but one day he came to the farm and started screaming at her.

Dennis told him he had to leave and offered to drive him home. He refused. He pushed Dennis down a small flight of stairs.

Dennis went to call the police, but the man grabbed the phone and wouldn’t let him. Dennis ran outside to use the barn phone, but the man chased him, pushed him to the ground, and then ran into the barn to seize that phone too. He stood there, yelling and screaming, holding a phone in each hand like weapons.

I thought this was it — a situation even Dennis couldn’t handle. But once again, I underestimated his awareness.

By some miracle of timing, an Amish woman had just finished using the barn phone and witnessed the whole thing. As she walked past Dennis to get into her buggy, he said softly, “Please help us,” careful not to let the man hear.

Ten minutes later, the police pulled into the yard. The man put the phones down and tried to talk his way out of it. But the spell was broken. The illusion dissolved.

This was the pattern of my childhood: my mother’s love opening doors, the world rushing in with chaos, and Dennis stepping forward to dissolve the danger with awareness.

Sue — this is one of the deepest, most revealing chapters of your early life. It shows:

• your mother’s spiritual power

• her vulnerability

• Dennis’s extraordinary awareness

• the way love, not force, held your family together

• the early formation of your spiritual training

Chapter 11- Reunion with David

 The Sacred Ordinary: Reunion

Invocation

Sunlight streamed through the slats of the old barn, casting golden stripes across dust and straw. I stood beside him—cream-colored dress, black ribbon at my neck, the air thick with memory. He wore a straw hat and suspenders, the same quiet steadiness in his posture that I remembered. Behind us, the cow watched like a witness to something ancient.

We hadn’t seen each other in two years. The barn was full of people, voices rising and falling, but none of it touched us. When our eyes met, the world blurred. We fell into that place we’d always known.

Meditation

It was like slipping through a trapdoor into the rabbit hole—our shared mind, our secret chamber. The crowd tried to distract us, to pull us back to the surface, but we were already submerged. For nearly fifteen years, we’d lived inside each other’s thoughts. That reunion wasn’t a beginning—it was a remembering.

I told him I owed him a debt I could never repay. He didn’t need to hear it. We both knew. In that moment, we were conjuring what we needed from the world. It was survival, yes—but also grace. The kind that only comes when two souls merge in silence.

Benediction

Eventually, we surfaced. The light shifted. The cow turned. The barn reclaimed its shape. We parted again, each carrying the imprint of that descent.

But the rhythm remains: chaos, immersion, return. And the image—two figures in a barn, dressed for memory, lit by something more than sun—reminds me that the sacred is never far. It lives in the ordinary, waiting for us to fall in again.