I’ve been pondering a prank to use for April Fools Day tomorrow. I would email all my author clients and tell them I’m going to close up shop, drop them as clients, let them make their own way through the literary marketing jungle without me to guide and inspire them. Then, I would get serious about living true to my desires by working less and playing, loving, and learning more, and of course the work would be wonderfully fulfilling. Then again, perhaps I’ll just go with something more believable like telling Bob I’m pregnant, cutting off all my hair, becoming a Republican, and moving to the city. Ha, ha, April Fools.

 

Seriously though, we are back at the ranch for the weekend and during my five mile round trip walk up to 4-points I found all my thoughts turning and returning to this website idea called Outside The Boxx. Bob has done a wonderful job of bringing to life the graphic vision I had for it. We finally have some actual pages set up and functioning. I’m writing the occasional journal entry, and I can no longer seem to get my mental energy focused on my book marketing business. It is like once I pick up the pen (metaphorically speaking since reality has me laying fingers to keyboard), writing becomes and addiction. Instead of the 30 minutes a day I’ve allotted to updating my journal or penning a poem, I find myself spewing words for hours. I’m neglecting the paying work. I’m soaring with the creativity that has been stifled for so long and now rises to the surface, canceling out all else.
Having a new digital SLR camera hasn’t helped the situation. It has been 20 years since I considered myself a photographer but with every spare moment I can steal, I find myself embarking on another outdoor adventure, camera and lens strapped on. I stop often along the way to smell the roses, so to speak, or, literally, to notice the light, composition, vibrant colors, and magnificent shapes of nature. I zip off 100 shots then spend the evening culling them instead of catching up on work. Instead of falling like a zombie into the recliner with TV remote in hand, burned out from forcing myself to attend to work that grows increasingly distasteful with each passing day, I’m with my photo-editing program until late into the night. If I end up with two or three good shots out of the hundred photos taken, I consider my day a success. If I set up one more bookstore reading or secure a couple of media events for my clients I think good for them but how, really does all this benefit me.

 

Is money really a big enough motivator It hasn’t been for me since 1990 when I left behind my fancy life in the city as a highly paid sales and marketing guru to live a simple, nature-based life in rural Oregon. The book marketing company has helped pay the bills for sure. I can manage‒ though just barely‒to maintain a mortgage on my little cottage in downtown Bend, and my swath of lovely land in north Klamath County. But I can see the writing on the wall, so to speak. Can you as well I’ve become a slave once again to a material based lifestyle, though to many my standard of living is barely adequate. The point is, I have to get back to creating a lifestyle that reflects my desires and beliefs. I am afraid to do this, of course. I’m afraid to take the risk of giving up a business that has finally become successful. I’m afraid to give up the comforts of my house in town. I’m afraid to give up the respect I now get from the literary industry, family and friends, because I make a decent living doing something that seems like a “romantic” job and I’m my own boss. In fact, book marketing is no different than selling any other product. In the end the processes are the same, only the pay and appreciation is less.

 

Where has this paralyzing fear come from Is it because I’m older and feel the need to prove my life has been of some consequence, using a financial barometer as the means for measurement Is it because I’m softer and want more comforts: to go to the movies a couple times a week, to live with hot running water for a bath each day, to eat at a restaurant once a week, to buy new walking shoes when the tread is gone and before my toes bust through the ends Is it because I’m tired, worn down by the cumulative pressure of a conformist society that incessantly barrages individuals with demands to consume, to compete, to fit in

 

How many people do I know who are truly living the life they would design for themselves; those willing and strong enough, with vision and conviction to shun the pressures of mainstream society and a material based world, to live their dream I can think of a miniscule handful of people who have done this. Most people conform, to some degree or another. What would happen if I gave up the paying job to do the creative work I prefer Would I starve or be ostracized from society Would I be considered irresponsible or lazy or eccentric What, really, would happen if I chose to step outside the box

 

I don’t know the answers because I still here, stuck inside the box. I do know that I took a giant leap away from mainstream America once before, when I left my big house and nice husband behind in southern California in order to live on some land in a tiny log cabin in the wilds of southern Oregon. I do know that I never regretted the leap. I do know that many of the happiest years of my life was the decade I spent living simply, with very little money, in the Yamsi valley and traveling the world. I do know I learned that material assets have very little value compared with spiritual and emotional wealth. I do know‒perhaps for the first time in my life‒that I am more afraid of NOT sharing my writing with others than with keeping it all to myself. I do know that it doesn’t matter enough to me what others think, that it matters more what I think of myself. I do know that if I don’t let the Creative-Dawn have her day in the sun, supplanting the business woman I pretend to be, that the twilight of my life that is rapidly setting upon me will give way to the inevitable darkness of death and I will not have lived an authentic life. This terrifies, and inspires, me.

 

I do know that if I don’t make this change, here and now, tonight as I write in my journal, that tomorrow, April first, the biggest Fool of all will be me.