>Governor Joshua L. Chamberlain’s Thanksgiving Proclamation

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In 1867, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, my former husband, was the new Governor of Maine after serving an illustrious career as an officer in the Civil War. He was Maine’s first postwar governor and elected on the Republican ticket, which, at that time, was much more like the present Democratic party. In the 1860s, there was no official governor’s mansion in Maine’s state capital of Augusta. Mrs. Chamberlain, the First Lady of Maine (me), remained back home in Brunswick raising the children while Lawrence served four terms as governor.

Thanksgiving in Maine had existed since the colony was founded but before President Lincoln declared the official national holiday, each state in New England celebrated on a different day. Back then, Thanksgiving was more about celebrating the harvest but the tragedy of the Civil War reshaped the way we celebrate the holiday today. Governor Chamberlain’s Thanksgiving Proclamation reflects the mood of the country in mourning the staggering losses in the war while trying to heal the emotional wounds everyone suffered. Governor Chamberlain’s Thanksgiving Proclamation was issued to be celebrated in April but several days in the year were often proclaimed for these purposes in the country in history. A very similar attitude would have been adopted for the traditional November holiday. Thanksgiving in Maine equivalent to our holiday was typically held around November 18.

Here is the image of his actual Thanksgiving Proclamation and the text is below that:

State of Maine.
By the Governor.
A Proclamation.

In accordance with a venerated custom, and in acknowledgment of our dependence on the Divine favor, I do hereby, with the advice of the Executive Council, appoint

Thursday, the Fourth Day of April next,
to be observed as a day of

Public Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer.

And I earnestly request the people of this State to devote the day to the serious duties it enjoins; that by meditation, penitence and prayer, and recognizing our utter need of His saving power in Christ, we may so humble ourselves before God, as to be spared the chastisement which our sins deserve, and obtain the blessings of His grace upon ourselves, our country, and our fellow men.

Given of the Council Chamber, in Augusta, this sixteenth day of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the ninety-first.

Joshua L. Chamberlain.
By His Excellency the Governor.

Ephraim Flint, Secretary of State.

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>What have I done?

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One of my favorite things to do these days is turn off the lights, television, laptop and BlackBerry to sit in silence and look at my Christmas tree. Something is calming about the white lights illuminating the garland beads and glittery ornaments. It feels like home to me, which is unfamiliar territory, because I haven’t felt a sense of “home” in years. I haven’t really felt a sense of calm in years, for that matter. Life sort of sneaked up on me and even though I’m only 28, I feel at least 40, sometimes asking myself if this is all there is to my life and if I’ve really accomplished anything at all. People say I have but I don’t feel it. There is always a weight pressing on me that I haven’t used my gifts well enough, I haven’t reached enough people, and I haven’t served the world as well as I was intended to do. Since before I could even read, I was telling my mother that I’m going to do great things in my life and make the world a better place. That might sound a little cliche but it’s always been an understood fact in my family. I’m the one to rescue everyone from being ruined. But what have I really done? I feel like I’ve had 28 years and I haven’t done much.

The issue of time has been pressing on me today because the issue of finding a surgeon to correct my clubfeet has been left up to me. My primary doctor is wonderful but sometimes the severity of my disability goes over his head. The reality of going through major foot surgery frightens me, especially when it comes to how much time I have to devote to recovery. Clubfeet in small children is easier to treat because their bones and tissues are not fully formed yet, but in adults, it’s a longer, more difficult recovery period and the results might not be as good. I’ve talked about this before but I can’t keep putting it off because I’m only making myself suffer. I can’t wear shoes for more than an hour without experiencing pain. I can’t put any pressure on my feet without experiencing pain. I can barely wash my feet without experiencing pain. Something has to change.

I’m not a little girl anymore though and the thought of giving up time to doctors, hospital stays, recovery and therapy for a year or more has me awfully nervous and reflective on my age. I’ve read things from adult clubfeet patients who have endured multiple surgeries to try and correct their deformities. One woman in particular is 31 and has had 15 surgeries on her feet alone. I’m 28 and pushing 20 surgeries in my lifetime. I’m tired. Thinking about going through it again makes me even more tired. The surgeries involve cutting ligaments and tendons and breaking and resetting bones. Surgeons basically rebuild the structure of the feet but there isn’t any function in them after it’s done. Some of my ligaments and tendons have already been cut in a previous surgery and I can no longer pull my toes up. The corrective surgeries are to eliminate as much pain as possible and to make life as easy as possible but there will be no more function and the road to the best result is extremely trying and painful.

Needless to say, I quit researching not long after I started today. I couldn’t stomach it. I asked my uncle to find a surgeon for me.

Time has a funny way of haunting you as you get older. When you’re young, you always think there will be more time and you can do this or that later. The idea of giving up a year of my life to surgery never bothered me before but it certainly does now. I never feel like there’s enough time. I want to go to Paris for my 30th birthday. Depending on the timing of things, I might be in recovery. That means no traveling, no going out to the mall for hours with friends, no museums, no movie theaters, none of it. I don’t tolerate pain as well as I used to and I know my limits. My feet keep me from doing a lot now, so I can’t imagine what I will feel like for the first several post-op months.

It’s not just my surgery that has me thinking about how time affects us as we get older. Several people in my life have had loved ones die in the last few months. A few friends have children with terminal illnesses. Some are facing legal issues. My stepfather was diagnosed with cancer and died that same year. Life can turn you upside down in the blink of an eye. The things that challenge us can either break us or make us stronger but the universal truth is challenges of this nature always put things into perspective. Sometimes I see people complaining about things that really don’t need so much energy and I wonder if they even know how blessed they are in their lives. We all only get so much energy and I see so much misdirection of it that I want to grab people by the shoulders and shake some sense into them.

It takes a a real life challenge to show some that the little everyday tragedies aren’t so tragic after all.

There are people, I’m sure, who interpret my use of humor as too silly or too frivolous or even seeking attention. I’ve felt and seen myself getting misunderstood more times than I can count in my life. I have used humor and supposedly frivolous interests as a way to escape since I was a child simply because if I focused too much on my struggles, I would lose my mind. My job every day is to tell people about their struggles, agonies, tragedies and so forth, and I have a really difficult time not absorbing that pain. Living with my own emotional and physical pain is enough, let alone taking on the world. Yet when I think about giving up that path in life, I feel very lost and like I’m shirking my purpose. I need silliness and fun in my daily life to balance out the bad.

Most of the time, life is not as bad as people think. There are always things to be grateful for and it’s a bad idea to constantly harp on the bad things happening around you. While I’m not looking forward to the possibility of major surgery, or maybe more than one, I am blessed to have great friends, family and a sense of purpose in life. Without those things, everything would be hopeless. With those things, worrying about concerts and he said/she said nonsense seems rather trivial. I love going to concerts and going out with my friends. I’m not going to stop being who I am, nor will I apologize for it. I may be in a bit of a dark moment right now with fear and depression but I always make an effort to look ahead to positive things and continuing to fulfill my purpose. There are lessons to be learned in all things. Maybe this surgery is supposed to get me to slow down and come up with new ideas in my recovery period. I don’t know yet. We’ll just have to see what happens down the road. One step at a time.

What would you say if you were talking yourself out of a slump? What’s really important to you?

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>Ever wondered about your spirit guide?

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As things get worse in the world and people struggle to make ends meet, the prevailing questions people ask me are in regards to their spirit guides, who they are, if they have any messages, and so forth. I believe people look for spiritual answers when the material world fails them but ignore the guidance the universe and spirit guides have to offer when things are going in their favor. This is a mistake. There are often warning signs or different opportunities presented before things go bad that people should be paying attention to as a preventative measure. Most often, I have people telling me, “I had a bad feeling about that,” or, “I knew I shouldn’t have done that,” but they make those mistakes anyway. To break that habit, one should stop and ask oneself from where exactly those “bad feelings” or intuitive knowledge come. I usually tell people in these cases that the voice of conscience throwing up little red flags or telling you certain things is actually the voice of your spirit guide.

The relationship between a person and their spirit guide can be the most deeply personal in that lifetime. This is the soul that knows the most about you and what you’re hoping to achieve with the present lifetime, and they exist in order to guide you toward your lifetime goals. There is a difference between a spirit guide and an entity of protection, however. A spirit guide typically does not intervene in cases of emergency where one’s life is in danger. Those instances are when ancestral entities or angels (if you believe in angels) intervene to protect you if it’s not your “scheduled time of departure” to word death mildly. I describe it as a spirit guide will warn you before going into a dangerous situation or try to make it difficult for you to get there, but if you ignore it and do it anyway, the angels or ancestral entities will throw proverbial weight around like bodyguards unless it really is your time to depart. There are also different types of spirit guides. They can be human souls who are no longer reincarnating (the majority), or they can be totems, animal spirits, or other nature spirits. I’ve seen most people have a human spirit guide and some type of animal spirit guide. My mother has a cat as hers, for example.

A big misconception about spirit guides is goes like this: “My grandmother died when I was a little kid and I think she’s my spirit guide now.” Sorry, but no, that’s not the case. A spirit guide is with a person since gestation and therefore could not possibly be living in the person’s lifetime at all. Spirits of family members departed within a person’s lifetime are just that — spirits of family members. Yes, they check in and visit you, and some may act in roles of protection, but they will not step into your spirit guide’s job description. That position was agreed upon by your soul and the guide’s soul before you were born into this life. In most cases, you have been through past lives with your spirit guide, but rarely do I encounter a spirit guide that has reincarnated recently. In order to achieve that kind of level of responsibility, it has to be a very old soul and most likely finished with reincarnating altogether.

My spirit guide was a Native American in her last lifetime, so that is how she presents herself now. All entities will show themselves in the most recognizable way to you. Her last lifetime was the early 1700s and she was the equivalent of a midwife in the region of what southern Mexico is now. I was a rather young mother-to-be within her community (young for today’s standards) at age fifteen. Unfortunately, I languished in childbirth for a very long time and died under her care, my child dying with me. That relationship of caregiver and patient in my worst moment at that time was what planted the seed for her becoming my spirit guide in this present lifetime, which is so filled with health challenges, including the loss of a child. I have also been very drawn to maternal figures throughout my life such as the Virgin Mary and the goddess Isis. I count my spirit guide among the most influential maternal figures. Her name at that time was Nauwa, which I found out later is a word meaning drum. Calling on her during meditation affords me an opportunity to receive guidance and advice that I would totally miss if I was ignoring her presence in my life.

What Nauwa is to me is a preexisting relationship ready for the taking between each of you and your spirit guides. They are the universe’s way of giving you a built-in therapist and guidance counselor. People who have good connections with their spirit guides tend to live happier lives with a better idea of where they’re going and how to move toward their goals. Simply knowing that you’ve always had and always will have someone on your side is a big relief for some people.

I have been getting several special requests for readings about spirit guides in the last year. For a long time, I was only doing it by special request because I wanted to be sure I was connecting in a way that was helpful to both the client and the spirit guide. Now that I’ve become more comfortable connecting to this type of reading, I have decided to include it in my regular selection of readings on my website. My goal is to help people establish a connection with their spirit guides and then teach them how to maintain a regular connection so that an intuitive like me no longer becomes necessary. The job of every intuitive should be to teach their clients how to awaken their own spirituality. While we do need to make a living, the bigger picture is really about giving the world its own spiritual tools. To explain the two new readings I’m offering:

Who Is Your Spirit Guide – $30.00 & $60.00 price tiers – This reading will give you the name your guide presently uses, a physical description of how he/she presents him/herself, a description of a previous life in which you were together, and any specific messages that might come through for you from them. Additionally, I will begin teaching you techniques to establish and maintain a healthy, conscious connection with your guide and follow up on your progress. Click here to go to the readings ordering page.

Your Spirit Guide Plus Portrait – $90.00 price tier & above – This is a unique reading because it utilizes my skills in psychic drawing, which is related to automatic writing. Automatic writing is the process, or product, of writing material that does not come from the conscious thoughts of the writer. The writer’s hand forms the message, and the person is unaware of what will be written. It is sometimes done in a trance state. Other times the writer is aware (not in a trance) of their surroundings, but the actions of their writing hand. Psychic drawing is the same concept except the intuitive (me) sketches images instead of writing words. So by purchasing this reading, you will receive everything in the Who Is Your Spirit Guide reading, plus you will receive an 8×10 (inches) charcoal portrait of your spirit guide. I can do color portraits but the price will have to be negotiated. A visual image of your spirit guide allows for a stronger connection during the meditation process. Click here to go to the readings ordering page.

Also, click here to see my art.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email at jessicajones9828@gmail.com

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