BIO OF BARBARA O. JACOBSEN
(PROJECT. C.U.R.E.’S ANGEL AMBASSADOR)
WHO IS THIS CRAZY OLD GAL JUMPING OFF THE PAGE TO MEET YOU TODAY?
Though born in 1929, she’s sometimes described as a runner through life, not a marathoner, but a liver of life every moment to the max, with her whole being at warp speed.
Barbara is lovingly called “GG” to kids around the world to whom she weaves her fanciful tales from her books and CD’s.
By adult readers she is known as the wise woman elder of our global tribe, striving to love and understand one another.
But Project C.U.R.E. calls her their Angel Ambassador, as she now presents Project C.U.R.E. to everyone she meets, everywhere she goes.
WHEREVER I AM, I’M HOME
The name, Barbara, means ‘stranger in the land,’ but not to this Barbara. She was born on St. Barbara’s Day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with a pencil in her hand, but used the eraser end most. Her first twenty-five years she lived in twenty-nine homes from the banks of Minnehaha Creek to the shores of Lake Minnetonka; so she had many opportunities to erase mistakes and start with a clean sheet of paper.
Her adaptability makes her as much at home setting up medical clinics in Bolivia, China, and many African countries, as writing contentedly on her mother’s old chaise while watching the water fowl outside her home in Littleton, Colorado. She follows in the footsteps of a long line of pioneering visionaries -- men and women ahead of their times.
WHATEVER’S CALLED WORK, IS PLAY
Her colorful work-life potpourri included selling tickets and concessions at theaters, training hunting dogs and Great Danes, working as a receptionist and switch board operator, loving being a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, performing and singing on many stages, promoting ecumenicity in several churches, working as a secretary of a county fair, a legal secretary in Aspen and in West Texas oil country, owning and operating an organic and hydroponic greenhouse, an order editor for a large corporation, a real estate broker in New Mexico and Colorado, owner and property manager of more than fifty rentals, a doctor’s assistant, medical office manager, and President of Rotary Club of Littleton’s “Rotaryannes.” She is now a volunteer and fund raiser for Project. C.U.R.E., an inspirational fiction writer, poet, public speaker, teacher, story teller, and humanitarian. Whew!
She attended St. Mary’s Hall in Faribault, Minnesota, MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois, and graduated from the University of Minnesota with five major/minors in liberal arts.
She likes to dress for the stage she’s on, has loved every role she’s played in life and is looking forward to the next ones.
She is currently 'working on' a book of poetry, whimsical stories and poems about her locale an autobiographical novel and playing around the world with her husband, Merl.
WHATEVER I DO, IS TO LEARN LOVE
She is a family-oriented woman of joy. With her jovial Danish/American husband, they have six children between them (all married, so really twelve, in her mind), twelve ‘grands’ and five ‘greats.’ They have graced her life with forgiveness and love and are the stars in her crown, if indeed she has one.
She has been through feast and famine, marriages and divorces, births and deaths, joys and heartaches; but in each case she has found herself cupped in God’s healing hand.
Over and over through the years, spiritual leaders who did not know Barbara told her that she was meant to be a writer. Other than copious lists, notes and correspondence, she paid little attention until while dozing on her mother’s chaise lounge one day, stories from the universe began to flow through her.
Since then, she does not know when or where the inspirations will come, but is grateful for all such gifts. The muses pop in during the middle of the night, while driving down the road, overhearing bits of conversations, seeing things that others don’t see. Some stories are influenced by personal experience, chance remarks of friends, conversing with “angels” and animals she meets on walks around the lake in front of their home, and others from dreams, visions and even pictures in the marble tiles of her bathroom floor, but all seem like holy gifts through her Everland.
Listening to that still small voice within, she never knows who the characters will be or how they will get out of their messes. As the fictional characters write their own stories, their lives astonish her as much as her own. She lives in awe of life itself!
Barbara feels her stories are her mission but readers consider them guides to their own compassion and authority.
Her stories are spiritual gifts through her to you, so accept and enjoy them in Loveness (Her coined word meaning Love + Oneness.)
