Attracting the contributors to manifest this project.

I am an avid believer in the Law of Attraction. I didn’t discover it like many of the people around the world who are currently touting its wonders. I was born to the belief and awareness of it, in a manner of speaking.

My childhood was unique in many ways, especially the way I was taught to see and perceive the world around me and my place in it.

If I heard the phrase “you always have two choices” from my father once, I heard it ten thousand times in my life. As I got older I understood it differently and put it into practice in more and different areas of my life.

I also heard things like “At some point you need to accept that some people WANT to be miserable.” My father taught me that even feeling miserable is a choice. In between the lines was the question of whether I wanted to be one of those miserable people.

I did not, and so I have dedicated my life to choosing to be happy and grateful for everything, everyone, and every experience life presents as I travel through my life journey.

You may very well be wondering what all of this has to do with cookbooks or this authentic cookbook project. If you will allow me to, I will try put the pieces into place for you.

Everything in life is a choice. This is one of the premise on which the Law of Attraction is based.The ultimate choice being how you see things and what you choose to feel about every experience.

Another premise is that everything you need and want already exists in the world. In the case of this project all of these people and their love of cooking already existed. I just needed to ask for them, and they manifested themselves in my life. It is no coincedence that most, if not all, of them also dreamed of writing a cookbook at some point in their lives.

Now I will explain how choice comes into play with this project to present and preserve authentic cuisine and ethnic traditions.

Because of all the years I dreamed about creating this project I was able to attract the people, experiences, knowledge, and information into my life which have helped me to get it to this point. The “good vibration” from me when i think about or am working on it translates and trickles down to the other contributors. They pass that to others who appear, and become a part of this project as it grows and develops.

The journey atarted in St. Louis where I was born. I was connected by birth to one of our contributors, and to his partner who is our herbal guru and our “tea party” guide.

The journey then carried me to New Orleans where I met my partner. My partner was the catalyst for almost every other connection in this project.

He introduced me to our resident wine guru and his wife who is one of the contributors for the Dominican cookbook. The other Dominican cookbook contributor also came into my life in New Orleans through my friendship with her husband, also a connection with my partner.

Of course, our New Orleans contributors appeared in that period of my life also through social connections, as did our “Scratch Baking” contributor. Both of those connections started because I went with my partner to a local watering hole where those connections were made.

Our German cookbook and healthy baking contributor is my partner’s ex-wife. Our Lithuanian contributor is my partner’s daughter-in-law.

Next stop on my life’s journey was Orlando, Florida following Hurricane Katrina and our need to be able to sustain ourselves financically. We chose Orlando because many of our connections from New Orleans had moved here already years before Hurrican Katrina.

It was in Orlando that the pieces of this dream finally began to take real shape and form and interlock.

Our wine guru who is Argentine introduced me to our Argentine cookbook contributor and our Costa Rican contributor. Those connections all started with my partner too because he brought the wine guru into my life. Our wine guru and his wife were part of the reason we came to Orlando, since they were already here and established.

Our Moroccan contributor also came into my life because of my partner through business and social connections. She will also be contributing Israeli recipes as well as other North African cuisines and authentic French recipes.

Our Yemen contributor appeared during a visit from a member of my partner’s family, who brought her friend to stay with us. The friend who came to visit is our Yemen contributor.

One of our vegetarian recipe contributors is also our Mexican recipe connection and she came through our friends from Argentina and Dominican Republic.

So except for me, my brother, and my brother’s partner each piece of this grand puzzle came from that meeting with my partner all those years ago. And although I knew of, and had visited Morocco long before I knew my partner existed; cooking for him was how I learned the things I know about authentic Moroccan cuisine.

Other’s might look at our group and not see the connections or even see how this was a manifestation of a dream I’ve held for more than 15 years. That is a choice. I choose to see that life has brought me everything I needed and wanted in a single moment. Even the professional things I have done in my adult life brought me knowledge that will help make this project everything I dreamt it would be all of these years while it germinated inside my head.

My next post will have less to do with the quantum aspects of life, and more to do with the cookbooks and recipes. At least that’s the plan