A letter I received a week or so ago announcing a wellness seminar to be held in our community contained a quote that really got my attention.

Anything or anyone that does not bring you
alive is too small for you.
–David Whyte

(The author of this quote is a poet whose poetry and writing are wonderful. If you have a chance, catch up on his recent work.)

This quote really made me think. Of course, as with all single statements of this sort, we have to put it in context. We all know that there are a lot of things we have to do in life that checking to see if these activities make us feel alive would be silly. I think of taking the dishes out of the dishwasher or rolling the heavy garbage cans out to the road or a dozen other similar things I do in life that don’t have anything to do with whether or not they are too small for me or whether or not they make me feel alive! (more…)

Hello, everyone. Last month I introduced you to Dr. Sharon Moore, and you read about her commitment to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro to raise money for an Alzheimer’s non-profit organization in Alberta, Canada, where she lives.

Well, as you will read below, Sharon made it to the top!! You will be
moved, thrilled, and inspired as you read the letter I got from her a few days ago.

If you are inspired for your own life in someway by Sharon’s actions and words, send me a note. I’d love to hear from you.

Love,
Elizabeth

Hi Elizabeth:

What an amazing journey so far. Hope you are well and that you got updates on the climb from Sue. It was a wonderful experience. Tough for the whole team. We had 12 people doing the climb and 37 people to look after us (2 head guides, 3 assistant guides, porters, and cooks). This is a really well run climb. Our team doctor from Vancouver treated our water every morning (the guides would not take responsibility for the water). We took the Rongai Route up the mountain which is one of the longer routes and has more climbing and some rock scrambling. We took 5 days going up and two down (took a route down that is much more maintained trail and more of a walk than a climb). (more…)

A couple of years ago, while speaking at a conference in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, I met a phenomenal woman, Dr. Sharon Moore. A university professor, author, speaker, photographer, quilter, wife, mother, Sharon inspired me by her verve for life—and the most current topic of her research: hope. Since then Sharon and I have kept in touch. She received her PhD from University of Texas at Austin, where I live, and loves the city. I was privileged a while back to open an unexpected package from Sharon and find a lovely photograph she had made which she reported she was inspired to make after reading a particular section of one of my books, Seven Choices.

Moore on the Mountain - You Gotta Have Hope
30 May 2005If the mountain won’t come to Moore…Dr. Sharon Moore, wife, mother, nurse, psychologist and AU professor, will attempt to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro this fall to raise funds for Alzheimer research. (more…)

If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

I choose this photograph of me having fun sitting in the storyteller’s chair at the fabulous Telluride, Colorado, public library because I wanted to write this month’s newsletter about the power of silliness! (If you ever get to Telluride, don’t miss this amazing library!)

The power of silliness?

Yes, that’s what I meant to say.

I’ll illustrate with a story of something that happened this past month.

As all of you regular readers of the website know, I have two new books out this year. Tough Transitions came out in June and the paperback edition of A Sacred Primer will be out in September. The publication is exciting, and I am deeply grateful to Warner Books and Abingdon Press for believing in my work and making it available to the public.

And there are also months following publication that are tense and tough for any author. What can I do to let as many people as possible know about the books so they can make a choice about whether to buy or not? (“If people don’t know a book exists, how can they know whether or not they want to buy it?” This is the concern of all authors.)

The rub is that most of us authors are not marketing types. We don’t naturally think that way. The very nature of our personality that leads us to do such a solitary thing as spend years writing a book seems somehow incompatible with being smart, quick marketers. But all of us authors are aware in today’s market that we are expected to assist the publisher in every way possible to let people know about new books.

I can tell you personally that this post-publication work can almost paralyze me when I’m trying to think of what to do that is consistent with who I am and what I’m about in my life and that still shows collaboration with and support for my publishers. I can get so serious about this. So deep in concern that I don’t have the energy left even to do what I might think up to do!

Imagine my joy in reading an article in The New York Times a few weeks ago about another author who had similar concerns. John Wray had spent five years writing a new novel, “Canaan’s Tongue.” He desperately wants the novel to sell because he loves to write and wants to be able to write novels as his life’s work. So he decided to do something drastic to publicize his book: he went to Home Depot, bought materials, and built a raft! He and two buddies then got on this homemade raft to float down the Mississippi River. John’s idea was that he would pull up on the banks of the Mississippi from time to time and do a book reading. (The Mississippi River figures in the novel.) Well, according to the NYTimes article, the book signings have been pretty much a bust, but the float down the Mississippi has gotten a lot of attention. They’ve been almost run over; they’ve gotten stuck in mud; people have parked their SUVs on the banks and stood to laugh at them as they passed in their crude contraption of a raft.

What tickled me about this article was seeing the creativity to which this author went to let people know about his book and generate interest in it. It also told me how self-starting and creative all of us authors need to be! Whether it works or not! But I was glad to see the pictures and read the text that gave evidence that John had fun on this jaunt, even if his book signings didn’t draw a crowd (or anyone! at some signings.)

So I started being silly.

What could I do that was like building a raft and going down the Mississippi? Well, maybe I could sell cosmetics in homes and give my books away as door prizes! Maybe I could win a car with my sales and have plenty of room in the trunk to carry all my books around! My husband, some friends of ours, and I had great fun on July 4th weekend imagining all the things I might do to make my books known.

Although this was all jesting, the silliness had an amazing effect! When I got silly about this “serious” subject, I suddenly began to have some good ideas! One was so practical I couldn’t imagine why in the world I hadn’t done it decades ago since I’ve been writing books for a long time. I’d make a notebook that had a section for each speaking engagement or book signing I had where I would keep in one place all details for that event—who I was in contact with, where the event was located, when, what I needed to send ahead of time, etc., etc., etc. I know, this is so elementary. But, you know, I’d never done it before. And part of the headache of post-publication for me had been all the details, all the fragments I had to pull together, all the things I had to remember. These were usually in different folders in different drawers in different cabinets, sometimes in different rooms!

And the silliness also opened up new possibilities in my thinking. I decided I would enjoy all these events, focus on the people I’ll get to see again and the new people I’ll meet. I would think of places I’d enjoy going and then see how creative I could be about getting to that place. I thought of people I hadn’t thought of in years, people who were always welcoming in the past. The whole thing became much more exciting.

I won’t go as far as to say post-publication activities have become my favorite thing in the world, but I can say that the heaviness is gone. The seriousness of it all. Lightness is in! Fun is in! Creativity is in! (I even got silly with fabric for pillows for our front porch—grinning monkeys hanging from trees—and with cheap, tiny little animals my mother used to put in her flower pots: I put them out like art objects on our book shelf!)

Let us all celebrate silliness!

We all know that music can be relaxing, uplifting, memory-stirring, and energizing. But music as a health tonic? Science now tells us much about the power of music to heal our bodies, lessen anxieties, and relieve stress. This last month I read about a new hospital recently built in Lafayette, Colorado, that has music designed into every part of the medical complex…from birdsongs or wind sounds when you leave the parking lot to soothing piano music in the reception area to an Irish harp piece in the emergency room. Every piece of music—and there are 9000 of them in all, so that you never hear the same piece during the day—has been specifically chosen for the part of the hospital where it is heard and for the time of day it is heard. This hospital is in the forefront of a revolution in health. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2004 released a report covering 600 studies that showed that design in hospitals—including sound and light—can have a dramatic effect on how fast and how well patients recover from illness.

I say that what is good for patients and visitors in hospitals is good for us at home…why not design our own environments with sounds that help relieve our anxieties or speed recovery from a cold? What about Mozart’s Violin Concertos when we feel blue? What about Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings if our blood pressure elevates? What about the CD “Mozart on the Go” when we want more pep and stimulation? This music can be adjuncts to the other things we do to take care of ourselves…and what a pleasurable antidote!

Mozart’s music, in particular, offers something for just about every ailment or need we might have, according to research. For anxiety, the recommendation is Mozart’s “Laudate Dominum.” For waiting time, Mozart’s String Quartets. For getting started in the morning, Mozart’s “Andante, Symphony #17.” Three Mozart CDs which we have had in our home for years and play over and over are Music for The Mozart Effect CDs: Vol. 1, Strengthen the Mind; Vol. 2, Heal the Body; Vol. 3, Unlock the Creative Spirit.

When I was writing Tough Transitions, my new book that will be out in June, I wondered why music seemed to be so helpful when we are going through hard times. Here is what I wrote in Tough Transitions:

How does music help? I’m sure we could read all sorts of sophisticated explanations, but I settle for something quite simple. This is something I learned from one of my early music teachers: that when you press down a key on the piano, you think you are hearing one note, but you are really hearing the key you have pressed plus all its overtones. These overtones—higher and higher sounds on the piano—that you hear at the same time you press the key down produce the note you hear just as all the colors in the spectrum produce the color white you are seeing when you look at a cloud. And what was so amazing that I remember it to this day was my teacher’s assertion that the overtones of a note in music are mathematical, that they occur in specific ratios, that they always occur in the same progression, and that they never change because they are a part of the physical universe. What the ancients called the music of the spheres is related to these set-in-nature harmonics.

So, in my amateur understanding of why I feel better after I listen to Barber’s Adagio for Strings is that I’ve heard order. I’ve heard the natural harmonics of notes and overtones. I’ve heard sound which conforms to a progression of ratios set in the universe. And somehow, in listening to this music, I am returned to balance, to internal order, to a sense of more harmony in my own life.

Music also helps me when I’m spent during times of tough transitions by taking me out of my verbal rational world into a creative, symbolic experience. Beethoven once said that music is the mediator between the life of the spirit and the life of the senses. So here I am trying to figure out how to get my aged parents to pick up meals at the community senior center, and I sit down to listen to Beethoven’s 9th. I am transported to another realm of experience. The music lifts my spirits. I am in this moment cavorting with my imagination, my intuition, my wordless self.

Then there’s the power of the emotion in songs I listen to when I’m disconcerted and trying to find solid earth to stand on. When Emmy Lou Harris sings, “I would walk…from Boulder to Birmingham…just to see your face,” and I’m grieving for a relationship that can be no more, there’s a correspondence, a fit. When I’m despairing over the challenges of a career change and listen to Elvis sing “I Believe,” I am quickened by hope; and when Barbra Streisand sings “We Are Standing on Holy Ground” I am touched by grace. I find a place for my emotions in these singers’ emotions. I experience recognition, relationship, and a deep sense of release.

National Geographic magazine recently wrote about a new documentary called “The Story of the Weeping Camel.” In this film nomadic Mongolians who have a camel that has rejected her newborn bring in a musician. This musician plays a song that brings tears to the mother camel’s eyes and results in her taking care of her new calf. One of the filmmakers says, “The nomads have ways of communicating with their animals by singing and playing instruments. Music can convey emotions and show affection, things an animal can sense.” Animals, human beings…we are all touched and changed by music. (From Tough Transitions: Navigating Your Way Through Difficult Times. You can preorder at Amazon.com now.)

So, on these early April days, may I suggest that we all brew a lovely cup of fragrant tea, sit, and listen to music that will uplift, heal, and invigorate us. Goodbye, winter. Hello, spring.

Love,