Acting on my “Coronified” Values
Originally published on March 4, 2021
Book and bookmarks lovingly printed by the Gloo Factory, a small unionized shop in Tucson, AZ.
When I look at my calendar from last year, on March 4th 2020 I was laughing and hugging and learning in a small room with the most wonderful international crowd in Seattle, for one of Lillian Bridge’s treasured master facereading classes. A giant jar of home-made kimchi was the only acknowledgment that there was something nasty brewing and about to hit us. That was my last meaningful, physically intimate social interaction with strangers and felt a bit rushed at the time, because I was gearing up for a busy spring of international lectures and book signings from Canada to the East and West Coast to Germany to Australia! Little did I know how much I would treasure that last weekend in the coming year of being stuck on my island. Seeing the yoga, and tango, and master swim classes, and a live performance dinner party on my calendar for this week from a year ago brings tears to my eyes for all we have lost. I am sure many of you share these feelings of being in a time warp, a cosmic washing machine on the spin cycle.
At the same time, looking back has proven immensely helpful for me in giving me perspective on how much I and we, as a community, country, and global humanity, have learned and grown and, yes, I dare say, benefited, among all the trauma and suffering and upheaval. It is hard to believe that it has only been a year, but my dog’s old-man panting, shaking hind legs, and grey hair remind me every day that time marches on and that change is the nature of this human realm that we chose to appear in.
One of the big changes in my life has been a serious reassessment of my thinking about finances, business, money, and my professional work, driven by the effect of losing the vast majority of my income from basically one day to the next, totally out of the blue. This happened at a time when I was about to release a book and celebrate this accomplishment in style, and it was a real shock to my system. Instead of selling hundreds of books all over the world, I had a total flop and was stuck by myself, in the rainforest, just me and the silent cedars, who it turned out not to be so silent after all. Oh have I learned to treasure my literally and metaphorically “small” simple life and my old skills in feeding myself, body, heart, and soul, from the plants and animals around me! By now, I have learned to settle into a new routine and rhythm, a new livelihood, new ways of meeting my needs, on the surface much more quiet and sedate but at the same time also weirdly more active and public. A couple of weeks after the transition from the Rat to the Ox year, I am working hard on getting out of the Rat Race, jumping out of the spinning hamster wheel, and slowing down to a sustainable steady hard-working oxen’s pace.
Feeling deep exhaustion like probably many of you from a dark, dark winter, both my “outer form” 形 xíng and my “spirit” 神 shén are telling me that this year, I have got to be more nurturing, more caring, both for my individual body and for the social and cosmic body. Running a publishing business in a pandemic has been quite hellish, since like most small businesses, I depend on so many other businesses to function, and most of us just aren’t able to deliver the way we like to right now, for all sorts of reasons. To name just one major complicating factor for me personally, anybody living in the US is probably by now aware of the disaster that the United States Postal Service has become, thanks to politically motivated changes, ill-timed cost-cutting measures, and pandemic complications. As a result, not a day passes when I do not have to deal with lost, damaged, or delayed packages, both of products I need, like packaging or printer cartridges, and products I sell. I am therefore certainly sympathetic to the challenges encountered by the businesses I interact with. And yet, the big corporate Print-On-Demand printer that I have been using for years to produce my books responded to this situation with a lack of transparency, denial, and refusal to be held accountable that just tipped me over the edge. Basically, their phone and chat services disappeared over night, and even now their customer service take at least 2 weeks to respond to any concern or complaint. Their quality control and care in packaging books have been unacceptable, with the result that half the books they produce for me are not sellable. And yes, they do eventually send replacements but what do I do with all these imperfect copies? Haul them to the landfill? And of course, just like the post office employees, the reason their work is so shoddy right now is because their staff are overworked and underpaid and just don’t care about satisfying their loyal customers in this corporate system of brutal cost cutting and profit maximizing, with no room for other values. I am sure you have had your share of experiences like this.
For the past year, one of my lessons from this pandemic has been to look honestly at the cost of “doing business as usual,” especially when reminded by starving orcas, due to disappearing wild salmon stocks, and a horrendous smoke situation for many weeks this fall, due to the forest fires caused by climate change. This brutal year has taught us that we don’t get to pick and choose these changes, which affect each of us differently. I can’t celebrate the silence and lack of pollution in our air and water from the shutdown of commercial airline and cruise ship traffic without also looking at the other ways in which the old system has melted down so that I don’t get my favorite brand of German gummy bears or hug my best friend Debra from New Zealand who I used to meet each year in Germany. So what can I do, individually and professionally, to make sure when the pandemic is over, that we don’t just go back to the old “normal,” which anybody with a heart and soul knows was self-destructive and completely unsustainable? I have had a year of sitting with this question, struggling with my part in all of this.
If there is one thing I know, it is that I do not want the painful lessons of this past year to be in vain. All of us, but especially those, like me, who have been so lucky during this time to have a roof over our heads and a belly full of food and a peaceful place to sleep, we owe it to those who have suffered in ways we cannot imagine, the old folks who have died or gone insane in isolation without their children, the spouses who never got to kiss their partners goodbye at the hospital’s ER entrance, the animals and plants who have burned and drowned and suffocated and starved, the victims of domestic abuse with no safe place to go, the global masses of workers who lost their homes and livelihoods with no social safety net to catch them, we owe it to all of them and the rest of the universe to heed this wake-up call! To mend our ways and make sure that the new “normal” will not revert to what we had before.
For me, money (like so many other things) has taken on a very different meaning, initially terrifying when it just disappeared, but also then becoming increasingly irrelevant compared to the other things that matter so much more. Of course I will tip the guy at the pizza joint extravagantly because after months of going nowhere… oh, the joy of biting into food prepared by somebody else…….!!! The gratitude I feel for this stranger, smiling kindly, as far as I can tell, behind his mask, and for our brief precious human interaction, made possible by his willingness to show up for work in the middle of a pandemic. One of the few restaurants still hanging on when the three other ones nearby have closed. Or the pleasure of sharing and trading food with safely distanced neighbors, leaving salsa and bread on their porch only to come home to a bag of limes or cookies on mine, in a constant give and take where we all just want to support each other. Life is short and full of unpredictable change and suffering, so let’s be grateful and present in the moment! Let me support you just because it makes me happy to do so, and because I know from personal experience how much you probably need it, just as I am gratefully receiving your support. This is the silver lining that I have seen this past year, the love and connection that has only been growing stronger, more palpable, more conscious as the months have ground on. The grinding mills of pandemic suffering have brought out the radiant luster in each of our diamond cores if only we take time to look.
(an old picture of me with seaweed in my hair, taken by Dwight I am pretty sure)
This is easier to see and embody in our personal interactions with family and friends, but what about our business lives? How can we translate this awareness, this gift of insight into the cold world of financial survival in a brutal capitalist system of mortgages and taxes and irreducible monthly bills? In my case, it actually turned out to be surprisingly easy and rewarding in a way that has brought me great joy: I reconnected with an old friend of mine from decades past, when we were young and full of love and life and passion and dreams, like my daughter is now. Well, unlike many of us who left our youthful activism behind, Dwight, the owner of the Gloo Factory (link to their website here) has been “walking the talk” ever since we used to hang out in his dilapidated printshop in downtown Tucson where he printed all the flyers, bumper and bike stickers, pamphlets, journals, T-shirts, and who knows what else for the activist community in Tucson and beyond. I still have my old doctoral dissertation, which he made me a dozen copies of. And my old fiddle case is still decorated with bumper stickers like “Unplug Japan” and “Save Mount Graham,” barely legible after decades and thousands of miles of hard honest work as a street musician.
After all this time, the pandemic slowed us both down long enough to work out a collaboration, which has resulted in the beautiful beautiful book that I now get to present to you as my newest publication, “Celestial Secrets.” To those of you who have received a copy that you ordered through my website, can you see and feel the difference? And while I am paying literally three times the price per copy for each book and had to order a scary large quantity of books (for my very small specialized business), our interaction has been a completely different experience, based on our shared and sincere desire to support each other and meet each other’s needs. What a concept!
Originally motivated by frustration with the corporate printer and more consciousness for where my money goes, I cannot tell you how good it feels to have received boxes of books, each one meticulously printed on high-quality and substantially thicker paper, with sturdier, more radiant covers, hand-bound, and carefully packaged. Beyond the quality of the end product, which you can be the judge of, it makes all the difference for me to know that each book was produced in a unionized shop where every single person receives a fair honorable wage, complete with benefits and respect as a human being. Through buying these books, you too, dear reader, are participating in this circle of mutual giving, rooted in a desire to do what’s right, and ultimately leading to a flourishing local business in a community that flourishes as a result of these ethics. Go see for yourself some time what a special place Tucson is! As their website proudly states:
The Gloo Factory’s employees belong to the Communication Workers of America, Local 7026. We strive to model pro-labor union values by maintaining a diverse work force, sourcing our materials from union companies, and promoting pro-labor ethics. We feel it is important for workers around the world to have the right to organize and work in safe, dignified workplaces without discrimination.
Our shop prides itself in working with the community and supporting a variety of progressive causes, non-profit organizations and activist groups with rapid service and discounted printing. The Gloo Factory does offer internships for design and printing. We also love to host screen printing workshops with student groups, art classes, and youth organizations.
The best experience, perhaps, to compare it to is the mutual pleasure of purchasing the world’s most delicious carrots directly from the farmer/friend/neighbor next door who still has the dirt under her nails from digging them up that morning, when she hands them to you. Not only are the carrots way more tasty and nutritious and good for the ecosystem, but the human connection, that is where the real Medicine, with a capital “M,” is at! That is the Medicine that I personally want to cultivate and embody and support and teach and practice in this new “coronified” world.
Another little side note on this book I should share is a sentence in an email I received along with the invoice, from another person involved in the production of this book. As they told me “A word of explanation: I choose to express my politics (feminism) into financial support for women writers by donating 10% of my services to their projects. I think I hid this in my previous invoices, but it was there.” My first understanding of this statement was, “What a nice person and cool thing to do! This means that they provide free services to women who need it, in addition to paying jobs like mine. I should do the same.” But then I looked at the invoice, found a discount included, and read this:
“This is usually an invisible line: I take 10% off my hours on jobs for women.”
In other words, they took an additional 10% off their already very reasonable rate they charged me! So you see, this book really is special in so many ways that you would never know if I didn’t tell you about it.
I wanted to share the story of this book with you because it fills me with hope for a new post-pandemic way of life, and because, ultimately, these are all simple things to do. Most of you, the readers of my blog, are healers and as such are involved with physical medicine, with alleviating the suffering of the physical bodies in the community around you. I invite you, through this little story, to contemplate what each of us can do to try and embody the lofty ideal of classical Chinese medicine in harmonizing Heaven and Earth, in cultivating the virtue-power 德 dé that comes from being in alignment with the Dào 道, the cosmic Way. In these trying times, I want to ask myself each day what I can do to “be the change I want to see in the world.” What about you?
Update: I also forgot to mention that I switched my packaging supplier from a company that was proudly supporting a certain orange menace that puts kids in cages, to a small business that has been a joy to interact with and uses environmentally friendly materials. AND that any time you buy a book through HappyGoatProductions in the US, instead of through Amazon, it’s little old me who packages the books (and adds one of those beautiful bookmarks also printed by the Gloo Factory) instead of a stressed out desperate worker in one of Amazon’s warehouses who is having to hold down three jobs to feed their family and keep a roof over their head. To encourage you to stay away from Amazon, I am offering my books at a considerable discount on my website. Unfortunately the big corporate printer (who I have to use to fill orders in Europe and Australia etc) continues to sell my books on Amazon and it’s a sore subject. And when you buy my books on Amazon, they are not the same quality but printed on demand.
