If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything. – Verses on the Faith Mind
Yesterday I saw my new book called “self-centered for someone who is all about detachment.” That was hard to let go of.
This morning I called in for an interview on a live radio show and the host said “Pardon my personal view, but for our society to be raised right it takes more than tree hugging.” That was hard to embrace.
As I backed out of the driveway to take my daughter to school, I spotted a ticket on the spare car we keep parked on the curb. The overnight parking permit had expired four months ago, an oversight that was hard to keep from citing someone else for.
This practice is hard, particularly when I don’t practice it. The truth can be hard to admit, although the truth is never hard to see. What truth am I talking about? The truth of what is. Some of us spend our whole lives in a search for truth, and yet the truth is always staring us in the face. We don’t need to do anything to find it, and even less to cover it up.
One of the things that helps me deal with the thorny business of competitiveness, authorship and ownership is my view of the truth. My view of the truth is that it’s not mine, or at least, not mine alone. Wisdom is not mine to manufacture. It’s not in a clever turn of words, a brand, or a trademarked slogan. It’s not even in my unique story. My story isn’t unique. My practice isn’t unique, and if I truly practice, I don’t have anything left to call my own. I don’t deal in anything original. None of us do. read more
Lisa Erickson (
They don’t pay us to write books. They could not pay us enough to write books, and even though they do pay us a cash sum that arrives just in time so we can avoid the late penalties on our delinquencies, in relative terms we write for free. What they pay us for is to sell books. Once I grasped this I understood a lot. Writing has almost nothing to do with the life of a book. Nowadays this does not trouble me. Giving yourself away is a good and necessary practice if you want to have a book to sell. And for that matter, if you want to have a life to share. Giving yourself away is how to enrich your life.
From time to time I hear from a faithful reader in a neighboring town. Today she wrote to me and said that each morning when she arrives at work, the first thing she reads in her inbox is this blog. This post is for her and everyone else who reads their mail.
Have you torn into the kids’ Easter baskets yet? I set aside a secret backstash for myself, although I have to admit that this year I was far more excited about what the bunny brought than my daughter was. She smiled benignly at me and then asked if she could dye a pink streak in her hair. (She’s always one hop ahead of me.)
If you have a moment to spare this weekend, please cycle back to the Huffington Post and catch my first blog post there: 
The other week I turned down the invitation to speak to a preschool. Politely, I hope. I said something like “my recent encounters with preschool groups have had unreliable outcomes.” There’s more (and less) to it, but I’ve applied the rule of three: when things don’t go quite the way you expect three times in a row, it’s a good time to turn in another direction.
That you could spend nearly a thousand dollars we don’t yet have, to save the crippled cause of a poor public school, for a clutch of stuff that you didn’t much want, a blurry galaxy rendered through the bottom of a bottomless champagne glass: a tripod telescope, Dodgers seats, a studio tour and four seats at a TV show taping. That you could pan this fool’s gold and thus deliver our daughter to a stretch of celestial awe beyond the arc of the moon. All to see the stars! The stars!
Chapter One: Full Basket
