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The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.
-Rumi
Dear Friend,
I began this project without really knowing what I wanted to write, or even if anyone wanted to read what I wrote. I had many false starts that ended with me shaking my head, deleting the document and trying to bury the idea away forever. Yet it kept coming back, filling my mind and urging me to try again, and again, and again. I ignored that voice for a while, as I went about “real life”, striving to achieve something that seemed somewhat more practical. You see, I saw this project as, well, as very unrealistic. I looked at this project as if were an ethereal thought playing at the edges of my mind, but never as something I dare seriously pursue.
In the end, that practicality didn’t matter.
All that mattered was that little nagging voice inside me that kept reminding me of the true work I had to do while on this earth. That thought kept ringing through my mind, urging me to try yet again. That voice inside kept assuring me that the effort I was making was in preparation for something more. That the failures, rejections, successes and accomplishments were all shaping me in a way that would get me ready for my true task ahead. But what if I had nothing important to say and that even if I did, who was I to say it? There were others more qualified, more experienced and more knowledgeable than I.
You write a book and while you write it you are ashamed for everyone must think you are a silly or a crazy one and yet you write it and you are ashamed, you know it will be laughed at or pitied by every one and you are not very certain and you go on writing. Then someone says yes to it...and then never again can you have completely such a feeling of being afraid and ashamed.
~Gertrude Stein
How dare I think sharing my thoughts with the world would accomplish anything or help anyone? How dare I think anyone wanted to hear about, much less listen to me? Yet that persistently urgent voice remained with me always and came out in different ways over the course of several years. It came bursting out in a monthly essay I started writing in 2003 more for myself than anyone else. A simple reflective essay, I started sending my Monthly Garden out over the internet to just a few friends. Then it became a few more, then a few more, until my Monthly Garden Newsletter eventually grew to reach thousands in different countries around the world.
Still I questioned that voice inside me.
I continued writing romance, feeling that was the most practical way to express myself. But an evolution in the plots and ideas behind my books began to grow without me noticing at first. Without me being consciously aware of it, my fiction started incorporating those thoughts and perspectives that the voice whispering inside my head and heart wanted to share with others.
I slowly but surely began to see this pattern in my writing and finally realized that I needed to face this voice and the urgings in my head straight on. I had to stop circling around what I really wanted to do, what I was driven to do, and actually just do it.
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still
in them.
Henry David Thoreau
And so here I am…not even sure about what I want to write, or if I actually have anything meaningful to say. But my fingers are twitching and I can’t stop them from frantically, anxiously flittering across the keyboard as my thoughts come at me hard and fast. I have so much to share. It’s almost as if someone else is guiding my hand, directing the passion I feel so strongly and fervently, insistently and ceaselessly pushing the thoughts out of my brain.
Yes, I feel quite certain that someone is showing me the way and that I have a purpose.
This compilation is like a garden, made up of different parts that all contribute to a larger whole. My wish is that these fresh from my Monthly Garden ingredients will come together to provide you with something you can hold onto; something that might make you smile, make you cry, make you sit up straighter in your chair or make you widen your eyes in understanding, as if the words were jumping off of the page, zinging around your mind and shooting straight into your heart.
Some may call it simplistic, but I truly believe that the simplest things often come together to create something much larger and more meaningful. I hope this book, this blooming, growing, thriving garden fills your mind, body, and soul with joy and inspiration and wakes you up to the world both around and inside you.
Just Believe,
One last thought…
I think one of the first things to go as people’s lives start to go down is their dreams.
Dreams should be the last thing to go—dreams are the things you go down with.
If you’re left clinging to a piece of driftwood in the middle of the ocean, I’d put on it the word dreams.
~Kevin Costner
