All about love

O Books sent out 569 announcements of their December-release books (of which The Given Self is one) and 9 review copies. That’s the latest update from them. I ordered 25 books for myself and they arrived like a present just before Christmas. The box remains unopened under my sunroom bookshelf. I’m reading All about love by bell hooks.

All about love has a category of Sociology/Inspiration. Never seen that before. It’s terribly interesting reading about love with a feminist edge. The rhetoric feels a little old and I’m not sure if it’s because the book was written in 2000 or because it’s got an activist style where anger feels comfortable, only lightly veiled, and not opposed to love. I don’t mind it, I’m just noticing some sort of difference that I’d like to describe if not define.

I suppose I’m as fascinated as I am because I’ve been worried about being “negative” and bringing other people down (then of all words to use, my client calls me “negative” for saying his English muffins are moldy…isn’t that the way!). I’ve been reading about negative energy and how it spreads. There's real research that loneliness spreads about as fast as the common cold. Things like that.

But I’m telling you, when someone tells me they’re not too into the holiday season because they’re feeling lonely, I’m not likely to put my hand over my mouth in fear of catching the bug. I’m so thrilled someone’s being honest with me that I silently rejoice. I feel so much love. So much spaciousness. A feeling that I can breathe. Someone…thank you Lord…isn’t putting on a pretense.

How do you reconcile this research and the “common knowledge” that feeling good is better, with dark nights of the soul that bring such beauty with them? How can you not see depression as a way to God when so many have taken that path? How do you support – lovingly support – yourself or others through the hard but profound times when your weakness makes you closer to God? How do you not lose yourself in it all? These are some of the questions of The Given Self.

“Grace is given not to lead us
into another identity . . .
but to reconnect us
to the beauty of our deepest identity.”
J. Philip Newell

What is real?

Many moons ago I bought a boxed set of The Velveteen Rabbit for my daughter Angela. It was Christmas. There was still a small shopping center with a book store near my house. I've been going crazy trying to remember the name of that store, but it hasn't come to me. The boxed set had a small rabbit and a book. We've still got the rabbit.

Knowing that I was missing the book, my daughter Mia bought me a beautiful edition of it and I've carried it to speaking engagements with me to read this passage. Thought I'd share it with you as a holiday greeting. You don't need to have been out shopping for toys to appreciate it.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day…. Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Doest it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Quote from The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.

Taking Notes

The Given Self is on its way to Australia and New Zealand!

My friend in Australia has ordered The Given Self and another friend in New Zealand too. It’s the strangest thing. Not just the geography but the thought of people reading your book.

I’ve actually begun to hear from a few people who are reading The Given Self. A woman in Colorado wrote that she was enjoying it. That made me pause. (Maybe you have to be a writer to understand that one.) Another woman in California wrote that she thought it was an important book for reasons of the encouragement to accept feelings. (That felt better.)

I can’t tell you what I want, what I’d ask for if you were sending your regards and happened to mention that you were reading my book. I’ve been re-reading it when I get in bed at night and I don’t know what I’m looking for from the re-reading either. I found another error, for one thing, which brings the count to five. One is a grievous error, the rest small potatoes. The one I’d missed and found last night was a missing end quote.

This one reviewer said the book was perfect in its imperfections and now it feels as if it was a prediction. There’s no one to blame and no excuse. When I was reading The Hope recently, I noticed the errors and blamed them on Hay House, so maybe other readers are like me and will see it as the publisher’s responsibility. I tracked my big error back, assuming it was a revision error, but I can’t find a revision I made that caused it. It’s just one of those fluky things.

I’ve already written O Books about these errors (there’s a place to submit them – on the database – of course), but the instructions don’t make me hopeful. They talk about how even scholastic publishers never produce a perfect book. I’m afraid a small number of errors will be seen as acceptable. Anyway, now that I’ve said “grievous” error, I’ll define it as a messed up paragraph. If you’d like an errata just drop me a line and I’ll send it.

There are a few hopeful things on the horizon – namely a few speaking invites. It’s a start, but honestly, you feel weird about those too, anxious in the pit of your stomach, excited in a dry-mouthed way. Wracked with doubt and without a clue about what you’ll say. It comes standard with being a writer, but it still makes you wonder why you ever wanted the writing life or any kind of success.

I just asked my son to gift me with a small calendar and notebook to put in my purse. Haven’t needed them before. Now I’ll have to keep notes on my life; a different kind of “note taking” than what appears here!

Still, as a Christmas and New Year’s greeting, I encourage you to broaden your note-taking. Take note of your life and take notes on it. You might be amazed at what you’ll discover, and it might even include a new direction in which you’re moving.

Brilliance

The Given Self is now in Norway!

My daughter Mia was the first person I knew who got enamored by Obama. I’m still pretty proud of her about that. Angie and I followed suit pretty quickly, but Mia’s response came before Obama became widely talked about. It was an intuitive reaction on her part. She said his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 made her cry. She now judges all speeches this way. If they don’t make you cry, they’re not up to par.

As I’ve been following the Nobel events, one of the things that amazes me is that I actually have friends in Norway; that A Course of Love brought them to me, and that at least one Norwegian friend is now in possession of The Given Self. This woman wrote me about the Obama visit. She said she wasn’t sure the prize was a good thing to do and quoted an American journalist cited in her newspaper Aftenposten: "Obama assigned the peace prize - but that is not his fault".

My friend continued: “For all Norwegians love Obama, and find it very exciting that Oslo gets a touch from the real big world these days, as my colleague said.”

I know a lot of people are questioning the prize, especially in light of the build up of troops in Afghanistan. But since it was announced, I’ve felt tremendously uplifted by it. It feels like a recognition of the power of words and of thoughtfulness, and of the brilliance that human beings are capable of even in the midst of all that bogs us down.

I don’t go in for “pie in the sky” uplifting, but the message Obama delivers over and over is one that calls on the best of our humanity to face the worst, and it always give me the feeling that we confront both in ourselves and have the power to choose.

It’s kind of like that great line from the movie “As Good as it Gets,” when Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt are fighting in a restaurant and she says she needs a compliment, and fast, and he says he’s got a great one ready. Then he adjusts himself, and leans in close, and says, “You make me want to be a better man.”

Self-help

My new book -- find it in the "self-help" section

I slept in today. Sometimes you’re just plain tired.

The roads were worse than I imagined they were going to be as I took my grandson Henry to daycare and then did that inevitable stop at the store (parking lot a mess) for the ingredient I forgot yesterday.

Now I’m baking and kind of wishing I hadn’t started with the putziest cookie first. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe I’d just have less energy for it later. They’re called Linger Cookies and the recipe was handwritten and handed down to me from my buddy Lou, who bakes about a thousand cookies every Christmas and then packs them up in tins and gives them to folks like me. The recipe’s on lined paper, and yellowed, and so worn that the blue ink is fading. I’ll have to re-copy it. But I’ll keep the original.

I took a book called Emotional Freedom to bed with me last night. It’s written by Dr. Judith Orloff and I like her style. A few posts back I mentioned that The Given Self was categorized as a self-help book. On the database used by O Books, there were many categories to choose from. From the first, they had The Given Self listed as “Non-duality.” That sounded okay to me. I also chose what I thought would be a few sub-categories. How it ended up with the self-help designator, I’m not sure.

I’ve never been fond of self-help, and I’ve mentioned this before. But here I am, reading a self-help book. Today it strikes me a little like my friend Lou’s recipe, and the fact that just about every year I call her about storage. Her cookies always taste like she just baked them yesterday and I can’t ever recall if she recommends freezing them or putting them in the fridge, or how she wraps them when she does. She’s baked so many cookies that she knows more than me and I’ve had enough cookies grow stale that I’d rather not have it happen again.

So I feel kind of the same way about the Emotional Freedom book. Judith is a psychiatrist and she’s worked with tons of people and she knows more than me about dealing with overflowing emotions – but here’s the most important thing: she doesn’t write like a stranger passing on information. She shares her own emotions and the challenges she’s faced, and she writes personally, and with empathy, so that it’s a little like Lou’s handwritten recipe and the way it speaks to me of more than ingredients and oven temperature.

That said, here’s the excerpt I promised from The Given Self. The spot where I say “this is not about self-help!”:

We are not self-help people in a self-help world. The change we experience has a different meaning than that of self-betterment.

We are in deep. The only ones who can help us navigate these deep waters are those who are there. We have to find each other. It’s not an “answer” we’re seeking, but this identifying.

Each person who has moved on to new knowing shows, through who they are, what they say, and how personally it is said, that they understand this new place in which we find ourselves. Where we find ourselves is not a place of higher consciousness devoid of self, but a place of self imbued with higher consciousness.

When we find each other it is imperative that we recognize the condition in which we are here. This is not a stroll in the park, or a passing fancy. It is a matter of survival: our own, and maybe even that of the planet and whole community of the living. It’s about the survival of the true self and the demise of the ego.

In other words, it’s about being who we are, and I’ve found that as a person makes their way back to themselves, they open their hearts, and often encounter, as I’m encountering, that overflow of emotions that makes you feel raw, or sensitive, or vulnerable. I haven’t got anything against raw, sensitive, or vulnerable, but those kinds of feelings can make walking the path of change that is confronting me and many of us a little more difficult than it needs to be. Anyway, I’m not trying to stop feeling what I feel, just to feel what I feel with a little more grace.

That’s a lot of what The Given Self is about and Emotional Freedom would make a good companion book if you need a little help along these lines.

As good as it gets

The Given Self, my new book, is now available.

I am very tired today. Almost tired enough to be brain-dead and mushy in that way that begins to feel a little profound. Almost.

We had our first snow of consequence start up just about the time I left for work. The elderly gentleman I companion thought it best that we go out for groceries. A blizzard was predicted. The weather is exaggerated as much as the rest of the news, but still, the driving conditions were not optimal and my client’s nerves got on my nerves. Just try driving an older person through the snow or shopping with them when you’ve got to look for the sodium count on every package and you’ll get a front seat view of frustration and have to try pretty hard not to let it be your own.

But oh how like my client I am, deciding I must stop at the grocery store myself on the way home. I’ve got cookie baking on the brain. The perfect thing to do on my day off (tomorrow) two weeks or so before Christmas – right? I actually do like to bake cookies. No one is twisting my arm. I just like to have everything ready in advance. A snowy day, a warm oven, time to putter with cookies at my own pace. Sounds good to me. So I go to the store, forget one thing, as I always do … which I realize as I start chopping nuts and crushing graham crackers. Damn.

Get done with that, do up the dishes, and come to sit down feeling as if I ought to post something – or do something, anything – book related.

I’ve been toying with the idea of putting announcements of The Given Self in with my Christmas cards but it feels kind of smarmy. Like a lot of people I know, my Christmas card sending has dwindled down to almost nothing the last few years. It started the year my dad was dying. I helped him write a few but didn’t get out my own. The next year, I was feeling really conscientious about sending them to his relations. So many of them had been so good to us (that’s the way it got to feel – as if those who visited, helped, supported Dad were supporting “us” – my siblings and me), and keeping that connection felt like something Dad would want me to do. I got those out and few others. That’s the way it’s been going. That dwindling.

One of the strange things about having a book come out just before Christmas is the time element. You think it might be great…at first. I had one friend tell me she’s planning to give the book to five or six women she exchanges with, but other than that, people appear, for the most part, too busy to care. Or maybe that’s me.

So the book launch is scheduled for January. (January 7, 7 pm, Harmar Barnes & Noble in case you’re wondering.) You wait and hope it won’t be 30 degrees below zero or snowing, or with a blizzard predicted. You hope people will get in one of those new year moods when they want to do something for themselves and you hope your book might be the one they choose to gift themselves with. I had a friend who ordered it on-line write me that it got him through a bad night recently. That’s about as good as it gets.

Where our space is our space

The Given Self website is coming!

There’s snow on the ground this morning – or at least I think it’s snow. It’s little more than a frost, but the street is white with it. I saw the white street before I saw the white path to the woods, which is a little unusual. I’m sharing morning care of our grandson with Donny since his mom went back to work Monday. After the first day, we negotiated, he and I. We made a cooperative agreement that allows for me to still get my quiet hours (at least most days). Today isn’t one of them. That’s why I was in the front of the house rather than in the rear. I like it as a metaphor. The front of the house is the more social side; the back the more private.

I’m starting to work on getting a website posted for The Given Self. I’m trying to do it cheaply. I’ve been frustrated with my web designer because she hasn’t been getting back to me about changes to the Course of Love site. Once again, all I needed to do was get her on the phone to work it out. So we made agreements too.

Who knew such things could work? I’d all but forgotten. You talk to people. You say what you need. You come to agreements. Amazing.

These agreements of how we spend our time – that’s basically what they are – turn out to shape the fabric of our days. Like it says in A Course in Miracles and A Course of Love, all that’s needed is willingness. I’m not sure how to proceed when willingness isn’t there (or I can’t get someone on the phone – whichever the case may be). I’m still not sure how to work with stubbornness or people who balk at everything you say, or want to negotiate everything. I think that’s how I fell away from it…getting tired of it.

Sometimes I want to just make up my mind and run with it. There are areas of life where this is necessary, and they’re in those little sections of our lives, those hours of protected time, when our space is our space. Where we’re not up for grabs. Where we’re not dependent on any relationships but our own with ourselves, or with God, or with the muse.

This is a lot of what The Given Self is about.