Authors: ESTHER AND JERRY HICKS
SARA,
Book 2
Solomon’s Fine Featherless Friends
Other Hay House Titles by Esther and Jerry Hicks
Books, Calendar, and Card Decks
The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent
(also available in Spanish)
Ask and It Is Given
(also available in Spanish)
Ask and It Is Given Cards
Ask and It Is Given Perpetual Flip Calendar
The Astonishing Power of Emotions
(available in Spanish in 2009)
The Law of Attraction
(will also be
available in Spanish in October 2008)
The
Law of
Attraction
Cards
(coming in 2008)
Manifest Your
Desires
(available June 2008)
Money, and the Law of Attraction
(book; 5-CD set—both available March 2008)
Relationships,
and the Law of Attraction
(book; 5-CD set—both
available September 2008)
Sara, Book 1: Sara Learns the
Secret about the
Law of Attraction
Sara, Book 3: A Talking
Owl Is Worth a Thousand Words!
(available April
2008)
Spirituality, and the Law of Attraction
(book; 5-CD
set—both available March 2009)
The Teachings
of Abraham Well-Being Cards
Additional CD Programs
The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent
(Parts I and II: two 4-CD sets)
Ask and It Is Given
(Parts I and II: two 4-CD sets)
The Astonishing Power of Emotions
(8-CD set)
The Law of Attraction
(4-CD set)
Sara, Book 1
(unabridged audio book; 3-CD set)
DVD Programs
The Law of Attraction in Action, Episode 1
(2-DVD set)
The Secret Behind “The Secret”?
(Abraham) (2-DVD set)
All of the above are available at your local bookstore, or may be ordered by visiting: Hay House USA:
www.hayhouse.com
®
;
Hay House Australia:
www.hayhouse.com.au
;
Hay House
UK:
www.hayhouse.co.uk
;
Hay House
South Africa:
www.hayhouse.co.za
;
Hay House
India:
www.hayhouse.co.in
SARA,
Book 2
Solomon’s Fine Featherless Friends
Esther and Jerry Hicks
Illustrated by Caroline S. Garrett
Hay House, Inc.
Carlsbad, California • New York City
London • Sydney • Johannesburg
Vancouver • Hong Kong • New Delhi
Copyright © 1999 by Esther and Jerry Hicks
Published and distributed in the United States by:
Hay House, Inc.:
www.hayhouse.com
•
Published and distributed in Australia by:
Hay House Australia Pty. Ltd.:
www.hayhouse.com.au
•
Published
and distributed in the United Kingdom by:
Hay House UK, Ltd.:
www.hayhouse.co.uk
•
Published and distributed in the Republic
of South Africa by:
Hay House SA (Pty), Ltd.:
www.hayhouse
. co.za •
Distributed in Canada by:
Raincoast:
www.raincoast.com
•
Published in India by:
Hay House Publishers India:
www.hayhouse.co.in
Illustrations:
© 1999 Caroline S. Garrett
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in
the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for
public or private use—other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews—without prior written
permission of the publisher. The intent of the authors is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your
quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which
is your constitutional right, the authors and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.
Originally published by Abraham-Hicks Publications:
ISBN:
0-9621219-7-5
Library of Congress Control No.:
2006924805
m
ISBN:
978-1-4019-1159-1
10 09 08 07 4 3 2 1
1st edition, October 2007
Printed in the United States of America
C
ONTENTS
Chapter 1:
Reaching for Happiness
Chapter 5:
Seth Has Found Thacker’s Trail
Chapter 6:
Coming Back to Life?
Chapter 9:
Geronimooooo . . . Splat!
Chapter 10:
Snakes Won’t Bother You
Chapter 11:
Practice in Your Mind?
Chapter 12:
Weird in a Good Way
Chapter 13:
Friends of a Feather
Chapter 14:
Searching for Caves
Chapter 17:
Are These Good Kids?
Chapter 18:
A Forever Friendship
Chapter 19:
Dead . . . or Alive?
Chapter 23:
The Law of Attraction
Chapter 24:
Attention to Vibrations
Chapter 26:
A Magical Vibrational Match
Chapter 28:
There’s No Injustice
Chapter 29:
Trusting the Law of Attraction
Chapter 30:
A Trespassing Kitten
There is rarely anything that I read that can cause me to laugh right out loud. But as I’ve been proofreading this latest
Sara
novel, Esther frequently calls out to me from her office, “What made you laugh?” as I get caught again and again by the intellectual
humor of my old friend, Solomon, and Sara’s bright new friend, Seth.
Solomon’s Fine Featherless Friends
is the book that promises to take you on an emotional joyride to heights of understanding and well-being that will repeatedly
and forever thrill and delight you.
The fun you will have with Sara and Seth while you discover the pure and practical formula for fulfilling your life’s purpose
will be an experience you can share with everyone you love. No matter how good you’re feeling right now, you’ll feel even
better once you experience this newest
Sara
book. We guarantee that you will delight in this next giant step in your journey of more joyous becoming.
— Jerry Hicks
Reaching for Happiness
“S
eth, your house is on fire!”
“Yeah, right,” Seth scoffed, tensing against another barrage of mockery at his expense. The five-mile ride home on the school
bus felt like a hundred miles. The teasing always began the very moment he stepped foot on the bus and lasted without letup
until he dragged himself off.
It had begun last March on his very first day in this new school, when his family had moved into the old Johnson place up
on the hill. The house had been vacant for some time before they moved in. And even though they had now lived in the home
for several months, it didn’t look much different now than it had when no one was living there. The same raggedy curtains
hung in the kitchen window, the only window that had any curtains at all. The wooden floors were rough and worn, and the walls
were covered with marks and cracks and nail holes and all kinds of evidence of several short-term tenants who had lived there
before.
No one in the family seemed to mind the way the house looked anyway. They hadn’t minded the last one either, or the one before
that. It was the
land
his parents were most interested in. Land for gardens and milk cows and goats. Land requiring constant, never-ending work.
Land that produced little more than enough for the family to survive.
Seth did not sit up. He continued to lie on his back, nestled tightly on the small bus seat with his sweater over his face,
pretending to be asleep.
He no longer flinched at Patrick’s rubber snake. You can only jump out of your skin so many times over the same dumb trick.
Not since the first or second day on the bus had Seth sat on something sharp or wet. With enough experience, you learn to
watch where you’re sitting and stepping. (Only once did he fall back recklessly on his seat expecting it to hold him, as every
bus seat before had done, only to discover—as his seat tipped over backward, crushing the knees of the angry, yelping girls
sitting behind him—that his malicious bus-mates had worked the full length of the bus ride to school that morning to unbolt
the seat and then had plotted to leave it open and available for Seth’s return ride home at the end of the day.)
From fake spiders to real spiders, from puddles of water in his seat to puddles of honey, Seth now believed he had lived to
discover the limited and unimaginative arsenal of these silly goons’ tricks. And these bus rides, while certainly far from
pleasant, no longer produced much real emotion in him at all.
“Seth, your house
is
on fire! Really, Seth,
look!
”
Seth continued to lie on his seat, eyes closed, smiling, enjoying that, for once, it seemed, he had the upper hand of things.
He could hear something new in their voices. They really, really wanted something from him that he could now withhold. Maybe
things were beginning to turn. Maybe his father had been right and time had made it better.
“Seth!” The bus driver’s voice boomed out, “Get up. Your house
is
on fire!”
Seth’s heart stopped. He did not hesitate any longer. He sat up and looked up the hillside and saw his home, such as it was,
completely engulfed in flames.
The bus driver pulled over to the side of the road and opened the door of the bus. Seth sat frozen, looking out the window
at the smoke billowing up. The smoke was so thick he couldn’t see how much damage had been done, and he couldn’t see anyone
around. There was no fire truck rushing to the rescue and no neighbors clamoring to help. Everything around looked pretty
much like it always did. The cows continued to graze, the old goat stood tied to the tree, and the chickens scratched in the
front yard while the house burned.
Trixie, the oldest and friendliest of the family’s three dogs, ran down the hill and crawled under the gate to greet Seth.
She licked his fingers and then nuzzled his pocket looking for a treat. But Seth didn’t notice her. He stood in a daze watching
the house burn.
The bus driver drove off, telling Seth that he would call for help at the next stop, and Seth waved back limply. There was
really no point in calling anyone for help. He could see as the wind changed and the smoke moved away that the house had burned
completely to the ground. The only thing left standing was a column of bricks that had been a fireplace and chimney. Seth
could hear the soft crackle of some timbers still burning and an occasional pop, pop, as a can of something or other exploded
in the rubble.
Seth felt odd as he stood watching the remaining smoldering pieces of wood. What he was feeling wasn’t sadness—not even a
great sense of loss that one would expect in a situation like this—just an odd feeling of emptiness. There was no reason for
any real sense of loss because, in truth, not much had actually been lost. He wasn’t fearful that any member of his family
was trapped inside because his parents were at the vegetable market every Tuesday and Wednesday; and Samuel, his little brother,
had been with him on the bus until he got off at Mrs. Whitaker’s place to work in her yard. And there was no feeling of loss
of valuable possessions because there weren’t any of those. There was a library book that had been checked out and not returned,
and Seth felt a pang of guilt that now he couldn’t return it.
While he couldn’t identify it clearly for himself, in this traumatic moment, what Seth was feeling was more a sense of loss
that there had been nothing
to
lose. This extreme experience of bad luck was not, by any means, an isolated incident in the Morris family. It seemed that
things usually turned out badly, sooner or later.
Seth sat down on the tree stump with his back to the afternoon sun as the long shadow of his silhouette traveled across the
front yard almost all the way up to where the house once stood. He wondered why it was taking so long for anyone to respond
to the report from the bus driver that the house was on fire. He wished that his parents would come home.
As he sat there feeling empty and lonely, he began to recall the string of bad luck his family had experienced. In his short
life, his family had lived in more than two dozen homes, mostly small farms, and most lacking in any of the modern comforts
of life; most didn’t have indoor plumbing, and some didn’t even have electricity. His family moved from farm to farm, growing
what they could, eating whatever they could grow or kill, and selling whatever people in various nearby towns would buy in
order to purchase things they couldn’t grow. His parents, while still quite young, seemed old, and he couldn’t remember the
last time either of them seemed happy about anything.
It seemed to Seth that he and his younger brother, Samuel, were always in trouble over something. Seth often wondered if the
primary source of their trouble was that they wanted to be happy in a world that their parents had decided was
not
happy. It was as if their parents were determined to properly prepare them for the unhappy plight of their future, and the
sooner they could get to a morbid dissatisfaction with life, the easier it would be on them. No dreams were ever encouraged,
fun was barely tolerated, and nothing frivolous was allowed.
But every now and again circumstances would simply demand it, and the boys—who were boys, after all—acted up while their parents
looked on with disapproval.
As the ashes smoldered, Seth stared blankly into the smoke remembering the last farm. It was, maybe, the worst place they
had ever lived. The house wasn’t really a house at all but an old barn with no windows and one very big door. The floor was
wooden, raised a few inches off the dirt beneath it, and the cracks in the floor were so wide that large rodents had no trouble
at all coming and going, and did so frequently. In time, effort was no longer made to control them; the family grew accustomed
to seeing them, and they were just part of life.
Since the house, or barn, or whatever you wanted to call it, was the only structure on the property, everything that was seen
as valuable was kept inside; even sacks of feed for the animals were stacked along one wall near the big door. One day while
no one was at home, the family mule literally kicked down the front door and happily devoured the flour, molasses, and oats.
She managed to do so much damage to the doorway and frame that the front end of the house was left sagging and dangerous.
And so, the family moved into a tent while repairs to the old barn could be made.
Seth remembered being glad they were out of the smelly old barn and wishing the whole thing would have fallen down. During
the night, while they were sleeping in the tent, he got his wish: The building caught fire, no one knows how, and burned quickly
to the ground.
Geez, what is it with us and old houses burning
down?
Seth thought as he sat perched on his stump watching the smoke billowing up. The wind shifted and the smoke from the smoldering
rubble surrounded Seth, making his eyes water. He moved out of the smoke and sat down on a log under the big tree at the side
of the house and continued to remember his dismal past.
The tent, it had turned out, provided a much less-than-satisfactory haven for the family because Judy, the family’s mule,
found it even easier than the barn to plunder for oats. In a space of two weeks, she tore the tent down five times and Seth’s
parents went searching for a new plan. And Judy, important to the farm because she pulled the plow and the wagon, wasn’t shot,
although Seth’s mother had threatened it many times.
That’s how Seth and his family ended up living in the cave. Seth and his brother had been aware of the old cave for months.
They often went there to escape from the endless chores their parents seemed to think of. There was never a time that any
member of the family just sat around, unproductively, to just
be.
That was seen as wasteful as squandering flour, soap, or money. Even water was handled carefully, since it was hauled in a
barrel on a wagon behind Judy. No waste was allowed. And no time was wasted.
But the boys had discovered the cave one afternoon while they were looking for Judy, who was missing again. It was on the
back side of the property, close to the field used for planting oats, but not in plain view from the field. You had to know
that the cave was there to find it, for tall weeds and bushes completely covered the entrance. Seth and Samuel had kept the
cave as a secret, promising each other that, no matter what, it would remain their special haven. They often talked about
how lucky they were to have discovered such a neat place to hide out. And while they seldom went to the cave, and hardly ever
went together, they both knew it was there, and they both loved
knowing
that it was there.
“You boys ever seen a cave on this land?” Seth’s father growled.
Seth’s eyes immediately looked down, and he held his breath, hoping that Samuel wouldn’t give up their precious secret. He
bent down and picked up a nail from the dirt and fiddled with it in his fingers as if it were so important that he couldn’t
possibly focus on his father’s words and do this important thing at the same time.
Samuel was quiet. His eyes darted to Seth’s, and Seth tried to be cool.
“Ed Smith says there’s an old cave on the back 40 up in the brush at the base of the cliff,” his father continued. “He says
it’s pretty good sized and would make a good shelter. You boys seen it?”
Seth thought about denying that they knew anything about the cave because surely they would be in trouble for keeping such
a secret, for it was certainly evidence that they had wasted time. (On the other hand, when their father did find the cave,
and it was certain that he would, if they had denied knowing about it and their father found their rock piles and Judy’s old,
worn saddle blanket that had mysteriously vanished a few weeks back and had provided a rather comfortable resting pad for
the boys, along with a variety of magazines and trinkets they had gathered and left there, there would be really big trouble.
The kind of trouble Seth had never told anyone about. The kind of trouble he didn’t even like to think about.)
“Yeah, we’ve seen it,” Seth said, faking little interest. “It’s pretty creepy.”
Samuel’s body lurched in his surprise that his big brother had given in so easily. He looked at Seth in amazement and then
looked down so no one would notice that his eyes were filling up with tears. This secret cave was so very important to both
boys. Now the secret was out, and their haven was gone.
“I can show you if you like, but you won’t like it. It’s dark and stinky. And who knows what kind of animals live back in
there.”
“I don’t care how creepy it is,” his father growled. “It’ll take weeks to rebuild the house, and the damn mule keeps uprooting
the tent. The cave is a good idea. It’ll be warmer, we won’t get rained on, and it’s already built. Where is it?”
“You wanna go now?” Seth questioned, inwardly trembling in fear. He needed some time to get out there and hide the telling
evidence of just how involved in this cave they had actually been.
“There’s no time like the present,” his father said, taking a long drink of water from the barrel with the dipper and wiping
his face on his sleeve. “Let’s go.”
Seth and Samuel looked at each other and then followed behind their father.
I am going to die,
Seth thought as he followed. His knees felt weak, and he felt sick to his stomach. His mind was racing.
What am I going to do?
A truck came skidding to a stop down by the gate, and an angry farmer laid heavily on the horn. He stood out on the running
board and shouted up the hillside at Seth’s father, “Your damn bull has tore up my fence again! I’ve told you, I’d just as
soon shoot the damn thing as look at it. You better get him out of my pasture,
now!
And I want that fence fixed, too!”
Seth’s eyes danced and his heart began to sing. That “damn bull,” as his neighbor had called him, had pretty much just saved
Seth’s life.
Seth’s father stopped where he was, said something under his breath, and then headed for the tool shed for bailing wire and
tools.