First of all, thank you. A good number of you magnificent humans followed the link from the last newsletter in which I asked you to take a look at my book How Not to be Afraid when the world's biggest bookseller priced its inventory to get rid of it :). A large enough number, in fact, that Amazon put the price up about an hour after the email went out...
***
And secondly, It's a funny thing, ranking sales and pricing books and marketing words.
The lovely Mark Silver says that ethical marketing is simply the process of coming alongside someone and witnessing to the good thing you have that they need. If done honestly, not only does it help the person offering the goods and services, it's also a potential antidote to the stories of selfishness, scapegoating, and separation that drive so much bad business - in all senses of the word.
So when I write to you, friends, asking you to take a look at my book, and maybe buy it because the world's biggest bookseller - which needs to be encouraged to act responsibly because it is nearly the world's biggest anything - has decided to reduce its inventory, I really am trying to be in conversation with you about something I have that you might need, could help you or your loved ones, and I want you to know about it. I want to know about what you have that can help me and others too. But when we add algorithms into the mix, it gets complicated.
Of course I'd much rather wander the hills with a knapsack of books, going from inn to inn telling stories, and if at the end of the evening you liked the stories, you might ask for a book and offer me a bed for the night or a decent meal in return. (And if I got really lucky, you might be an aristocrat and give me a writer's lodge on the shores of a lake to live in, with a lifetime's supply of nice paper and a good fountain pen, along with a Criterion Channel subscription and all the kale I could eat*. It would probably help if I knew how to play a mandolin and grow vegetables too - wandering minstrels always seem to have a mandolin, and the wisest people I've encountered are usually pretty good gardeners. I have much progress to make.)
Another problem with the wandering minstrel model, of course, is that you can only fit about three books into the knapsack. I'd have to keep going back to my house for more, which would mean that I would be limited to inns within walking distance of where I lived. If I kept showing up on their doorstep with the same old story, I wouldn't blame my local innkeepers for responding like the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce two thousand years ago. I don't know where medieval wandering yarn-spinners kept their manuscripts, but the problem is the same: how to talk about what we've got without sounding arrogant, how to be humble and curious without hiding our share of light.
I think about this a lot these days.
We're under so much pressure to believe that everything that comes our way is worthy of equal attention - particularly the scary stuff, the stressful stuff, the "bad" stuff.
We're under pressure to have an instant opinion about all of it.
And then we're supposed to publish that opinion as soon as we can, on as many platforms as possible.
Now I'm all for working with the grain of any path that allows for meaningful, life-giving conversation, whether it's in person, in print, or online. But wouldn't it be something if our culture became one in which we consciously valued breathing more than tweets? Where instead of trying to compete for market dominance, that your gift and mine - the good and the service we can each offer - could nod and smile, and dance a little discernment of how each of us can serve the other?
That would be something.
That is something.
Because that world already exists. We are invited to become that world, being born and reborn each day, every time one of us pauses enough to gather ourselves into the light of who we really are: participants in a story far bigger than narrow self-interest, and far smaller than the humblest ego. Love - curious enough to make space for everyone, fierce enough to stand right in front of bulldozing oppression, resilient enough to listen and tend to unimaginable pain, humble enough to not take ourselves too seriously, wise enough to know that our broken and imperfect lives will not be helped by turning our sorrows into catastrophes. All great revolutionaries dance. All spiritual masters laugh. Healthy activists also sleep. And storytellers sometimes remain silent, because stories need to breathe - and other storytellers need to get a word in (maybe that's the hardest part).
We are here for a short time, and the most important choice we will make is whether or not to co-operate with a story that only wants the best for us in the first place.
So if you** have a good or a service to offer, and you really believe it can help others, don't hold back. Tell us about it. Come alongside us, and witness to the good thing you have that we need.
**I think this means all of us, whether or not the service is "validated" in the marketplace. But the economy of the gift, which prioritizes equitable energetic exchange over notions of mere monetary "value", also already exists. All we have to do is choose it.
And for my part, How Not to be Afraid is, of course, still available. I wrote it to help me transform my fear into a bigger story about life. It didn't cure my fear, and it won't cure yours, but I think it will help you feel much less alone on the journey toward discerning which fears are worth paying attention to, and how. It tells stories about some of the hardest and the lightest experiences, shares practices for discovering and co-creating a more creative, connected, courageous life, and offers some blessings for that path. I'd love you to have a copy, or share one with someone else. You can get it here.
And because many of us have a tendency to underestimate the value of our gifts, especially when we compare them with others, here are some words from a couple of my favorite mystics:
From Tina Turner:
I came to realise that the way I saw myself had a strong influence on the way everyone else saw me. When I was young, my perception of myself was quite negative. I didn’t really care for the way I looked, especially how my legs looked, which is funny now because I became almost as famous for my legs as for my talent! [Laughs.] But once I decided that my personal standard of beauty would be my own, and that I’d never compare myself to others, I could finally appreciate myself fully. Then, if a negative thought ever came to mind, I’d replace it by repeating a positive one many times over, which worked wonders.
From John Moriarty:
My problem was that for my first ten years in school, I was at the back of the class. In the end, I came to see myself as my teachers saw me and as everyone in my class saw me. Without knowing it, I made a compact with being last. And when, eventually, my exam results showed that I was first, I regarded it as a fraud. Nothing so trivial as a fact could give the lie to an old sense of myself. Being last, it never occurred to me to put two and two together and conclude that Betty Guiney was fond of me. Even when she was on the bar of my bike and we were alone coming home from a dance in Listowel, and her hair was blowing back in my face, I never once leaned forward into it.
Let's lean forward today.