The Upper Realm Answers Questions About Earth - Linda J. Brown grew up in Winter Haven, Florida and graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in Journalism and Communications. She was active in campus leadership as an officer in Mortarboard, (national university women's leadership honorary); Women's Student Association, and the Blue Key Speaker's Bureau. She married a physician and raised two children, later becoming involved in the Citizen Diplomacy movement at the opening of the Soviet Union in 1990, leading a number of grassroots tours to encourage people-to-people friendship and to increase the prospects of world peace. She spent a total of eighteen months within Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Siberia. Brown was raised in the Episcopal Church, then spent thirty-three years as a member of The Baha'i Faith, resigning in 1997 to pursue her own inner spiritual life. Her first book is HEY BOOMERS, DUST OFF YOUR BACKPACKS: Travel The World On A Limited Budget (Amazon.com). It tells of her adventures on the around-the-world backpacking trail as she circled the globe for a year, alone, using only her social security income. She turned sixty-eight-years-old in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Brown targets the leading edge U.S. Baby Boomers, who become eligible for full-time Social Security in 2011, but really, it's a good read for anybody - traveler or not...old or not. Her extensive travels continue whenever she can find time to hoist a backpack; most recently in January, 2009, when at age seventy-two, she took four months to explore the unique spinal column formed by the Andean Mountain Chain - from Bogota, Colombia to Ushuaia, Argentian in Tierra del Fuego - from top to tip of South America. She likes to say that she performed chiropractic on the backbone of the world." To continue with stuff that's not in the book bio: Linda Brown took on the spiritual name of Linda Layli, Layli Linda when she began to communicate one-on-one with The Holy Spirit. This was before the days of making up names for internet presence and she was a tiny bit stumped when asked to create her own moniker. Then she remembered that she had been told of an earlier reincarnation where she was named Layli Gundrich... (Teh Holy Spirit:: "Oh My God....Layli? Is that YOU? Where have you been all this time?") It was all news to her, but she just pasted her present name of Linda onto Layli, and then couldn't decide which way she liked it best, so kept both.. So, that's what she's called by the Upstairs Gang. Though she wasn't at the time, Linda Brown is now pretty pleased that some dumb psychiatrist once slapped her with the Schizophrenic label. Ha! She showed him! But it underlines what she suspects is an all-too-common problem, though she has had no opportunity, whatsoever, to find out if this has happened to others. - www.heyboomers.com