welcome to new connection where you can tune in and grow i'm your host vicky thompson you may be familiar with new connection magazine for conscious living which has been enjoyed by readers in the pacific northwest for more than seventeen years now are excited to bring new connection to life in your home a new connection we welcome authors practitioners and visionaries to share new ideas for alternative help spirituality and personal growth today i'd like to welcome to new connection jessica maxwell a nationally acclaimed travel writer and the author of roll around heaven and all true accidental spiritual adventure jessica welcome to new connection it's so good to have you here thank you for having me you're welcome well you have been a travel writer for years rivaling around the growth globe quite an adventure how did you get into travel writing well i like to say it's in my blood because i i'm scottish new zealander with possibly some maori which i hope will be read searching that and another book brittany french canary island or lebanese  possibly some west indies and a lot of french and irish and british and general so i mean walking a much i'm a walking you in that and get out of it and so was it that heritage that drew you to travel around the world it must have although in you know in my family history there were a lot of world travelers my father's father who was the new zealand scottish new zealander you know his grandfather was knighted on the you know at the battle of waterloo and was made the governor of the west indies so they were always very i'm kind of the oppressed and the oppressor cologne you know colonists so i've got the blood of all of them but it's all over the world so it's a natural match that was really intuitive i didn't really think about it i just wanted to see the world and felt comfortable in the world well i think that's a big thing with travel because you have to fit in your blood that i'm just going to get out of here and i'm going to go into the world see new things yeah and it was all it was also easy nothing's easy in journalism of course or to be an artist in america but it i managed to do it fairly early as a young person right out of college i was getting travel assignments and so there was kind of a grace to helping me get out there that you can't count on you just can hope well that's quite an adventure to get out in places so it sounds like you're adventurous spirit took you to travel writing but then it also took you and expectedly spiritual writing yeah and the travel writing became adventure writing the i define it as the adventure writing has to do with nature you're out in my case i love fishing  don't like killing things but i really get the relationship between the table and the field or the river or the ocean and i like taking some responsibility for that even though i don't you know i wish i didn't have to but  o they're built into travel writing and adventure writing is the arc of the narrative and i'm just i'm to celtic to not be a storyteller i think and so built into this was you know all the tools of the novelist although i love the unfolding story of the world i love the truth i love nonfiction and so travel writing get lets you go to exotic settings people who have unusual speech patterns accents wild climates cultural differences i just found it infinitely fascinating in its variety and when you when you're doing narrative writing you get to tell a story and that travel isn't built in narrative story ever one experiences their travel as a story so you put all that together and i was out the door you're out the door and doing different things roll around have spiritual adventure and it combines your skills and your creativity and imagination as a travel writer to share all of these amazing spiritual adventures what was your first experimental experience that kind of turned you into this whole new world well in the early eighty's you know mind you i thought getting assignments to go on the first fishing expedition to outer mongolia was the adventure of a lifetime but in the early nineties  my father died and three days after he died i was driving by myself in vashon island up of west seattle where i lived then and it was a blue sky day no clouds a lot of reviewers for some reason think i see this in the fathers in the clouds there were none and i look up and there's now what i call it is a holographic projection of my father's face three days exactly after he died and was filling the entire sky was going to tell anybody about this because it was so weird and we're in a very spiritually backwards culture you know old cultures the spiritual realm is first and you build your life around that we got it backwards or worse and so like most people i was weirded out by this and yet it was it was beautiful and i felt wonderful old seeing it and i knew it meant my dad some part of him was still existed and and that death was ok and he was ok and i was ok and so i was i loved this vision and it was a full on vision and most people who have visions are people like me who back then thought the last supper was when they had run out of food you know if you look in the in religious history these are people and abbott says you know they're they're adding i mean they're a or they're in monasteries or they're already always knew they were spiritual i just wanted to have a good flyfishing cast so i could have been more earthy and to have these you know truly mystical experiences well you know you'd be a bad adventure writer if after a while you didn't know this was a real adventure yes spirituality i think takes us to new places and sometimes we haven't even left our home but we've discovered a new you know to your landscape you don't have to leave your home in fact after i saw my father's face in the sky and i was going to tell you when my sister called me from her home a thousand miles away in southern california and she said this most amazing day of my life i saw daddy in a vision and i stopped her so we'd be scientific and she saw exactly the same thing and you know at that point i was i had i was stuck because i had a witness and that's when it began to dawn on me it took a few years a year not even a year later the holy pig farmer showed up he wanted to teach takut a class i was teaching at the university of washington through a friend and that my adventure girl said sure i didn't know what what he would be teaching but he's like a life trainer i think they call them in kind of a coach life coach but it does it from a spiritual point of view and he's also a pig farmer and he's also a pig farmer so i we he when he walked into the room this what we call this electorate piece walked in with them and i didn't you know remember i wasn't studied i didn't wasn't raised with any religion my mother had had a bad religious experience early on so she didn't want to put that on her children i really was ignorant and you know you're everyone should read shakespeare and you should read the bible to know the references in literature so i was really i was you know behind the times and being up to speed on that so i have just lost my place so you met with the holy pig farmer he came into a class yeah reteaching so he came into the class and he walks in and every cell in my body started you know vibrating and i didn't know about these sorts of things i didn't know what it meant but i was so drawn to him you know he talked for three hours in the next morning i called him to ask him to thank him again and just i was just magnetised to him and he said oh i knew i would meet you ten years ago we're going to write some very important spiritual books together and i said i'm a phishing writer why would you think that and he said no we will and that was in you know early one thousand or late one nine hundred ninety four and things just as collated after that and so he is on a farm raising pigs as you become your spiritual mentor and then oh he did then and he still is and where we're working on his first book of pure teachings that right now we're calling conversations with the holy pig farmer and once people read roll around heaven there is drawn to him as i was and i think we're introducing the first that i know but i don't know a real tall lanky drink of american a pig farmer spiritual teacher and and he is one and he is now willing to be the holy pig farmer i say well that's good because it's really uncool to hog the holy pig farmer need to share some of the pain with yes coming forth well in your book roll around him and you have a lot of adventures can you share some of the other fun experience experiences that you've had oh golly  and i had left my first marriage and i had gotten a classically bad rebound marriage and and i was just miserable and one night about three in the morning one was about this big and it was a female energy and i can't tell you how i know that but i did and it was vibrating i mean orbiting very very slowly looked like a galaxy was in my room you know and just kind of moving this way around and the most amazing things the side thing besides the fact that it was right there was how i felt because every time this fellow left i would go into this grief that made no sense and i was just completely for it in the presence of this this being and of course when i start thinking about it if you really think about the implications of that you know you have to accept that there are there are some kind of entities beyond this light spectrum that we see here normally and it cared about me my little silly human problem it came cared enough to visit me and make me feel happy happier than i felt and because of this mess i was and then doesn't that preclude a source of goodness doesn't there have to be where would it come from otherwise and you know when you talk to people who haven't had these experiences they often think oh you know that hooey until you have one and it is as real as this chair i think it's actually more real so when people someone who might not have had this experience who when they hear that you saw the divine being do you see it with your inner eyes or you're actually seeing it more with your outer eyes i am actually seeing it with my my eyes i mean it's and what's really interesting and i have talked with other people about this who have seen these things you're in the dark and yet it's a limited it's not a lock trick light it's some other source of light what was interesting too is that not too long after that not that i put a you know i don't know maybe a few months later i woke up and i had had this vision dream you know dreams that are so vivid that they're not like your normal dreams and and this one i was with this fellow that i was in this relationship again and this relation i was in in relation with back then and  i knew that we were in the deep south i knew it was centuries ago he was saying and this is where we're going to build the house and this is where our world will raise the horses and and he started naming all the plants and he said you know this is that that's that and what i remember when i woke up he said and this is flowering bay now i'm a bit of a naturalist and i've never heard of flowering day and  before i even opened my eyes the phone rang and it was this this fellow this lifetime and he said most amazing thing just happened i was a meditating and my mind opened up and i saw these boots w black holes and he described the whole outfit and he said we were married it was in virginia it was two hundred years ago you were standing waving at the porch of the house in a hoop skirt i own a ho who knew and and one when that was all over that morning my grief that always followed him every time he left it was like grief it was it felt like horrible grief it was gone and what he also said was that he had been called away and he went into the american revolution to fight in the in the war and he was killed and he said he was fine and i was a wreck and so it was like this this completion of this you know very dramatic past life experience so that you could move on as a holy pig farmers as all the work is to be done in this life so it was a completion that but but to have you know the visit taishan of the you know the great great red one and then this past life vision thing that affected this life and let me help me get out of this mess was was really you know quite mysterious and quite wonderful and it keeps you on the spiritual path too well it sounds like you were travel writer you weren't expecting to go down the spiritual path and yet you've had these very deep spiritual experiences because i think actually seeing the visions with your eyes is an incredible gift because sometimes it comes for others internally in their vision but to be able to actually see it with your physical your wonderful gift but you've gotten interesting responses from people or different teachers when you've told them your experiences and sometimes they say they react with a little bit of jealousy well and you're referring to something that happened in india  now i was sent to india to write a golf story i mean i'm still down to earth you know all the recently have i begun to do travel adventure stories that have a spiritual mission with them that took that took her fifteen years before i actually made that that turn but this was a trip in early two thousand and one and it was to india and i  interviewed it was to kind of sit with this fellow who used to be the head of the bank of india and had a personality to match and he had gotten lines and now people were coming to study with him and he used to be a golfer a scratch golfer so i was there to get tips from him so i say the whole week you come every morning and he opens his home and people come and sit and talk with them it's a tradition in india to have that kind of the if it felt right to do it and sure enough the microphone came right next to me right at the end and i kind of on automatic pilot took it and i told him and everyone in the room was so excited about it and and thrilled and i don't brag i mean i'm completely and all of this it is a gift and i'm trying to get it back in the book and he said oh my brilliant spiritual adventure spiritual experience is more brilliant than your brilliance spiritual experience and i was so wide open from studying with him you know the whole week that it was like a dagger to the heart so i it was over session was over and i ran out and i jumped in the backseat you have a driver in mumbai i can see you c never drive ourselves and i'm just erupting in horribly her tears and it was my driver who who said to me he said you know he looked listen to the whole story he goes i think your teacher i have to jealousy and it was the first time i realized that my you know desire to share the joy of this these experiences could could be some people would be competitive with that which i think is a real shame that surprised me and it made me put a little bit on you know on guard a bit to be a little more careful with whom i share the experiences and of course you put it in a book it's up to the reader you know but you found with your book such roll around haven't you found that you feel you have a raw effect roll around have an effect that happens to how to cook that's very positive outcome from sharing all these experiences can you share some of those well yeah i mean this book was not my idea you know my stories are my idea i thought going fly fishing  the amazon was a great adventure that's my idea this whole suite of experiences is not my idea so it's somebody else's or another it comes from another source and there's a lot of magic  woven in to this story and what we're finding is that when people read it the enchantment become they take it in if they're open and it's nothing but benevolent goodness to help and i think to kind of rhian chat the world we have really gone down a very dark alley in our western culture you go to bhutan in the himalayas it's not that way even bangkok with all its you know kind of chaos and some social messes it doesn't feel that way and so what what we've had reports and well the website director of a very famous independent bookstore didn't want to read the book is that like spiritual things and she was talked into reading it and she called the person who talked her into it back the next week and said thank you so much for making me read this book these wild wonderful magical things are now happening in my life you know my life miss non spiritual which is of course how it began with me one fellow it's an easy read it he began having angelic visitations himself that night another woman was talking she's actually part of the publishing houses publish the book she was talking about that it would you know take care of many people help many people and make and be very financially successful which is her part of the job and she says oh my gosh there's a twenty dollar bill under my desk and it wasn't there two seconds ago and there's no where it could've come from this is kind of silly little little fun things sometimes and sometimes they're great you know great openings for people and you have a sweet story about your husband because he wasn't he part of the fact as well oh you mean how i met him  yes well the main thing at the end of the book at the epilogue is called what on earth does all this mean for you and i look back on all these years and try to offer  what i've learned what has been shown to me and to try to put it in a context for people and one of the main things i've learned is that people don't ask and i don't think it matters what your concept of god or the divine is in fact it doesn't matter in fact we get into football game fights over that we should not what matters is that this reality that we live in or as there is a scriptural thing that says in whom we live and move and have our being that's not a grumpy guy in the sky image but this inner g is responsive and intelligent and maybe that's what god is but if you ask with all your heart for what you really need and you're patient you get answers and at that point in the story i knew i was emotionally healthy because i was spiritually anchored and i knew that it was time for me to have a healthy marriage and that's what i wanted and so i asked and it turned out that i was driving and i always wanted to be able to sing and i did have a good voice my voice opened up and i could really saying my my best friend who saw me since college can't believe the difference in my voice she's always had a great voice so i joined the choir at this very progressive presbyterian church i had started to go to which i love very much and the choir director sat me in front of this man i had sat in front of three years  earlier who would stand up to that we all were in the church service to sing a hymn and he had sung he sings really loud loudly and he sang the bass part all by himself because it was summer and choir was out he's in the choir and then three i think it was three and a half years later when i joined the choir i was seated right in front of him again and that's tom tom anderson and he became very quickly we became engaged and were married within the year and oddly  a trip to montana with randy my best friend who's like ethel to my to my lucy across the way in the cabin from the cabin we had read was a couple and the man was a missouri fireman and he was also a psychic i mean i can't get away from the stuff and he did this reading for me to read and he insisted on it and is in one thousand nine hundred eight and he said three kings three kings are coming and i said one king will be plenty thank you very much i can handle three three kings are coming and it turned out that when i fell in love with tom and married tom who is six four he has two wonderful sons then and eli who are you know six five and six six and they're the three kings and it is absolutely true and there's a picture of three kings and one small queen of oregon are there and there you are all together what a beautiful inspiring story overall around heaven sounds like a wonderful book and i am so pleased that you were able to come and share with us today thanks and thank you so much and so you can learn more about spiritual journeys at our website at w w w new connection journal dot com join