A Little Help From My Friends

Sold a copy of A Guru in the Guest Room on Kindle. Yay! If any of you can help me spread the word about it, send me a message via Comments. It is hard to market online if you are not very, very savvy, which I am not. Maybe you could rave about it on Facebook or just tell one good friend that you know the writer and recommend it.

It is easy to get discouraged when you self-publish. There are lots of forums about how to promote your books, but frankly, this is not something that spiritual writers are good at. I write because it is my calling. One reason I left Facebook for a while is that everyone was reading my Notes but that wasn’t helping my books sales at all.

Also, if anyone is interested, I sign and mail copies within the U.S. and Canada. If you are interested in a pdf of either Life With A Hole In It or A Guru in the Guest Room, for a five dollar donation to the website, I will email it to you right away. That’s a great deal.

Those of you who do energy work, you might send some light to my little books. Visualize them gettting to where they will do the most good.

Love, Vicki

 

 

I have this scribbled on an index card. I wrote it down quickly when someone on TV said it: “You try too hard. Just say ‘I suck!’ The minute you let go, you get better.” Okay. I suck at selling books. I am a shy-violet, hard-core introvert. I have been invited to do a book signing and the very idea paralyzes me. Okay. I suck at signing books. I’m ALREADY better at it, according to this person whose name I can’t remember. I SUCK at remembering names, too. Does that mean I immediately get better at it, Mr. Bloombottom I mean….Mr. Boombutt…I mean Mr. Buttbloomer. Oh, screw sucking at stuff. No, seriously, I suck at anything requiring a personality. I let go of my ego and immediately I get better. I immediately get a sort of pie-in-the-sky enlightenment with CoolWhip Clouds on top and edible underwear on Jesus. Jesus, that was a tacky thing to write. I am just now getting better. Jesus does not, I repeat, does not wear edible underwear. If He did, He would be SuperMegaJesus. I suck.

More from Leonard Cohen

…You are playing to people who have experienced a catastrophe.
This should make you very quiet.
Speak the words, convey the data, step aside.
Everyone knows you are in pain.
You cannot tell the audience everything you know about love
in every line of love you speak.
Step aside and they will know what you know
because they know it already.
You have nothing to teach them…

How to Speak Poetry
Death of a Lady’s Man
& Stranger Music

 

So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear.
Though all the maps of blood and flesh
Are posted on the door,
There’s no one who has told us yet
What Boogie Street is for.

Boogie Street
Ten New Songs

On the Nature of Writing—Leonard Cohen

LC: I think that the nature of writing is being thrown back to point zero. You look at the blank page in the morning and what next? And I think that in maintaining our associations with people, we have to have a sense of that point zero because we’re all very fragile and the backlog that we depend on can evaporate. Two or three bad moments with a friend and the whole backlog of experience can be annihilated. So we must be careful in our associations and continually review them. It’s been my experience that things can be destroyed quite easily. It’s like with a virtue. You can work on a virtue and it’s like carrying a heavy stone to the top of a hill. You can roll it down in a second but it takes a lot of work to get it up there.

Reclaiming the Land

This is a time for reclaiming the land—the Eden of my own consciousness. The world tempts us to find our pleasures within its aching acreage. It floods us with mechanical desires and worthless trinkets of admiration and flattery. And we begin to totter, to falter, eventually to lie face down in the ad(mire).

The briars of this world bleed us out in one way or another. The mechanical mind never ceases to tempt us to work our way out of the current mess (and there is always a mess.) Surrender is just a word in the worldly dictionary.  To actually do it, things must get dire indeed. We must get at least halfway out of the muck before we can realize we are in it.

Then, if we are good spiritual students, we say, “I have created this problem to learn something. I don’t know what it is, but I know who it is. It’s ME. It’s a me-mess. And as you know, often the me-mess becomes a meanness. So in the middle of the mess, we have to repent (turn to the God within.) I call myself a psalmist of the everyday, a singer in the valley.

“Oh, Lord, heal me of my own iniquities,

Calm my pounding heart.

Lead me back home to silence.

There only will I find reconciliation

of my shattered Self.

 

Let there be a party for my tender lamb-like

Self. May I be served as food for many

and die to the idea that there is anything

but the One.”

~Vicki Woodyard

A Fruitful Valley

If you are in the valley, make it a fruitful one.

Let the valley teach you even as it lays you low.

Let it sing its dirges and moan its depressions.

Make it a restful time.

I have been brought low in this valley of life.

And I have learned to be a psalmist of the everyday.

Singing at the keyboard as the waters roll over me.

Green sprouts arise in this valley.

Not that I consciously planted them.

They just seem to arise along with the utterances,

“Lord, show me They tender mercies because

I have none of my own to bestow.”

If you are in the valley, become the valley.

Teach yourself how to let the voice of the valley

become yours.

Make music in the valley. Make the mountains ring.