I’m a sucker for inspirational quotations, and that’s how Tiny Buddha got started: with the Twitter account @Tiny Buddha, offering one inspirational saying a day. Not a lot of noise and chatter, but one thought. I was hooked—and so are more than 237,000 other people who follow it. The website and Facebook (about 70,000 strong) came next.

What I still love best, in whichever medium, and in “Tiny Buddha: Simple Wisdom for Life’s Hard Questions”–the sayings, and the lists. Like the one called “50 Things You Can Control Right Now” that closes the final chapter, and includes things like: “Whether you listen or wait to talk.” And, “How nice you are to yourself in your own head.” Or, “How quickly you try again after you fall.”

LET LORI DESCHENE tell you more herself about her book and her life philosophy, in this Q&A interview:

Q. I have heard you explain that your stated goal when starting Tiny Buddha was to form a community, but you started the Twitter account @TinyBuddha, and then the website a year and a half later, anonymously—merely calling yourself the “founder,” not giving your name. So who is Lori—what should we know about her today most of all?

A: Yes, it was all very ironic! When I started tweeting quotes, my initial goal to do something meaningful online with the time I had in my schedule. When I decided to launch a community blog around those ideas, I thought that if I didn’t identify myself as the founder, it would allow the spotlight to stay on everyone, not me personally. Then I realized the irony: you can’t lead a community if you aren’t willing to acknowledge your role in it!

I would describe myself as a deep thinker who wears my heart on my sleeve. I am someone who’d rather have a few close friends than many acquaintances because I like to go under the surface in my relationships. I also prefer to do less and earn less if it gives me more space to simply be.

Once upon a time, I weighed my worth in accomplishments. These days, I just want to have enough and enjoy my time with the people I love. That’s what feels meaningful to me, so that’s how I live my life.

Q. Of course, “Tiny Buddha: Simple Wisdom for Life’s Hard Questions” is not a gardening book. But that didn’t stop me from seeing in it a set of lessons that would make as great a Gardening 101 as a Living 101, since for me gardening is a spiritual pursuit. So for instance you say:

• Let yourself get messy.
• Embrace the chaos of life.
• Go outside your comfort zone.
• See the new in the familiar.
• Cultivate mental quiet.
• Create childlike presence.

Are there a few key aphorisms that steer your days? (For me: “Progress, not perfection”–which I see is in your book, too!–would be one.)

A: The mantra I repeat most often is “Let go.” Whenever I feel detached from the moment, you can bet I am holding onto something that doesn’t serve me! I remind myself to let go whenever I start dwelling on a mistake a made, a future outcome I’m worried about, or something someone else did. “Let go” always helps me find peace with what is.

Another mantra I repeat often is “You and this moment are worthy.” As I explored in my book, I spent the first two decades of my life feeling inferior to everyone else. While I’ve put a lot of effort into learning to love myself, I sometimes need this reminder. I include “this moment” to remember that at any time, I can choose to fully see and enjoy what is, regardless of my circumstances.

Q: You remind me of a Jack(ie)-in-the-Beanstalk type—so prolific even in a short time on earth, and even when grown in less-than-ideal soil (as you reveal when you recount various rocky moments, from issues with eating and esteem, to some tricky relationships). Forgive this age-ist question, but how did you accomplish so much? What asset do you draw upon—where does your hunger come from?

A: Forgiven! And thank you. It’s funny because I wouldn’t have thought of myself as someone who has accomplished a lot, or quickly. I career hopped all through my 20s, meaning I didn’t commit to anything long enough to really achieve anything.

With Tiny Buddha, I haven’t focused on the traditional goals many bloggers pursue. I haven’t launched an eCourse. I don’t run seminars or webinars. I don’t do much public speaking. I don’t offer coaching or mentoring.

What I have done is focus on what I enjoy—sharing stories and writing about the ideas that lead to emotional freedom, like forgiveness and acceptance. I do this because it allows me to recycle my former pain into something that feels useful to other people; and it also helps me learn to deal with pain better, so that I create less unnecessary suffering for myself.

I’m especially motivated by the conversations that take place within the community—around my posts and posts other bloggers submit. They remind me that I am never alone with my struggles, and that I am part of something bigger than myself.

Plainly and simply, I keep writing and sharing through Tiny Buddha because it is simultaneously my greatest joy and my deepest need.

Q. When I wrote “And I Shall Have Some Peace There,” about my move from city fast lane to rural solitude, the “there” meant close to nature. What’s your “there”—your place of peace?

A. I suspect this will sound cliché, but it’s inside me. I’ve lived in many different locations, and I’ve traveled through every state in the U.S. looking for that place of peace. It was always just a train, plane, or car ride away—and it definitely wasn’t where I grew up and dealt with a lot of pain and shame.

I’ve learned that wherever I go, I take myself with me, so if I want to know peace, I need to choose it one moment at a time, wherever I happen to be.

Q. What about fear? It’s not one of the book’s chapter titles (Pain is, as are Meaning, Change, Hate, Happiness, Love, Money, Possibilities, and Control…all juicy topics, to be sure). Are there times when fear has taken over, or does now, and how do you get past it?

A: Absolutely! I feel scared of something every day. I’ve decided to view this as a barometer that I’m alive. Sometimes I let my fear hold me back, but I look at everything in life as a ratio. There will be times when I am afraid to take a risk, and then I do nothing because of it. If I can act in spite of my fear more often than not—and work to increase that ratio day by day—I feel proud of myself.

Q. I have to ask, because some of the personal stories I have told in my own writing have come back to bite me here and there, at least a little. Anything in this extremely candid book you wish you’d left out?

A: Well, this goes back to that fear question! I’ve second-guessed some of the stories I shared pertaining to relationships. They’re not the most flattering, and somewhat embarrassing. But I know I shared them for a reason—I thought they might help people.

There’s a big part of me that fears being judged, but the part of me that wants to be honest is greater. In the end, I’d rather be disliked for something that’s true than liked for something that’s not.

Ultimately, I shared the stories I wanted to share, and, for the most part, I kept my loved ones out of it. That was the most important thing for me. I signed up for public confession; they did not.

Q. I am especially interested in the section titled “Do You Need Money to Be Happy?” What do you do when thoughts—worries—of money (which I think we all have, especially these days), want to take the front seat in your head? Any tips?

A: When I worry that I might not have enough money, I do one of two things: I dream and I distill. By dreaming, I mean I visualize how Tiny Buddha can expand in a way that feels right for me, so that I can keep planning and creating. I don’t know how it will evolve; but I trust that if I keep following my instincts and adding value to people’s lives, I will continue to find a way to sustain myself, as I have up until now.

By distilling, I mean that I narrow down my needs to the basics to remember how little money I actually require to live. This usually helps me realize that no matter what happens I will be okay. I can always downsize, or change my living situation, or make sacrifices—I’ve done it many times before, and each time I’ve gained far more than I’ve lost.

Q. I’ve read a lot of woo-woo books over many decades, and I wonder: What are your favorite inspirational books, ones that have made a big difference, and what else would be on your recommended reading list—fiction, non-fiction, you name it?

A: I’ve read countless self-help books over the years, but the books I find most inspiring are memoirs about overcoming adversity and surviving dysfunction, like Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted and Augusten Burroughs’s Dry.

The self-help book I most frequently recommend is Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now.” Some of my recent favorites are “Waiting for Jack” (by Kristen Moeller) and Lynn Zavaro’s “The Game of You,” an interactive book and card game set that I find incredibly insightful.

If you’re into the true crime books, I could recommend a ton of those! Really, I’m just fascinated by psychology and what leads some people to make healthy, life-affirming choices and others to make unhealthy destructive ones. At the core, that’s what my book is about: the different empowering choices we can make based on what know and what we don’t.

how to win a copy of ‘tiny buddha’

TO ENTER TO WIN one of two copies of “Tiny Buddha” I’ve bought to share with you, simply comment below suggesting your own answer to that last question I asked Lori: What self-help or other inspirational book(s) are your top picks?

Feeling shy? Just say, “Count me in” or “I want to win,” and I’ll include your entry in the drawing anyhow, but better yet: suggest a book! (If you need hints, my friend and fellow author Katrina Kenison and I did this some time ago, and came up with a list of “books for the journey” that might interest or even inspire you.)

I’ll draw the two winners at random after entries close at midnight, Thursday, December 15. Good luck to all!

Of course you can buy a copy of “Tiny Buddha” now, or visit the Tiny Buddha website, or join in on the conversation on Twitter, or on Facebook.

postscript: my interview on tiny buddha

YOU MIGHT RECALL the interview Lori did with me a few months back, when she was reading my book “And I Shall Have Some Peace There.” If you have never visited the Tiny Buddha website, a community effort of personal stories, inspirational quotations and more, that might be a place to start. Or the homepage.

(Disclaimer: For any products bought via Amazon links on this post, I receive a small commission that I use to buy more books for future giveaways.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

He is also someone I quoted in my book “And I Shall Have Some Peace There;” someone I re-read and re-read to keep things moving forward, because he says things like this:

“Whenever other worlds invite us, whenever we are balancing on the boundaries of our limited human condition, that’s where life starts, that’s where you start feeling yourself living.” And this: “It’s impossible….but I’ll do it.”

SEPTEMBER 11, 2011–Ten years ago today, I raced out of Manhattan after watching through my office window as the second plane hit the Trade Center. “Thousands of people have just died,” I said to my colleague, seeing the impact and the immediate flames. I don’t know where that came from, but it was how it looked to me right then.

Let this excerpt from my recent book, “And I Shall Have Some Peace There,” tell the rest of  the story of what happened next as I drove faster and faster north toward my weekend home, the place I now live fulltime, a story of finding some measure of peace and comfort even in unspeakably uncomfortable times:

FRANTIC AT THE BULLETINS and the chopper noise and all of it, I said good-bye [to the city] and hurried onward, farther north, as if there would be solace if I just kept running.

What there was instead was a large black cat, a cat I’d seen just once before but who was standing in the eerie, stunning sunlight of that day, who rolled delightedly in the warm driveway gravel of my weekend home and bared his belly as if we’d known each other for a lifetime, as if to say, Welcome home.  Our one previous meeting had been three months earlier, when in the middle of a birthday party I’d given for myself, a party with a boisterous group of forty-five margarita-filled adults spilling out into the yard in all directions from the tiny house, he’d apparently just walked in and shown himself to a real cat person in the group, who (a bit tipsy herself) had carried him inside to me.

I was at the stove, the oven door ajar, serving up still-hot shortcake biscuits with strawberries and cream at that very moment, engineering an assembly line of homemade dessert for nearly four dozen. There had just been a small mishap with the handheld electric beater, sending foamy cream-colored splatters everywhere, but people were holding out plates to get them filled, as if they didn’t notice the spray of recently airborne cream on me, the wall, the appliances—or simply didn’t care.  That was when I first met the black cat, and promptly asked that Susan, the person presenting him to me in the midst of this drunken, whipped-cream chaos, please get him out of here. I am, you see, not a cat person.

I am a bird person, and cats are a leading enemy of songbirds.  After collisions with window glass, which is the top killer of songbirds in residential environments, cats rate next on the lethal list, killing hundreds of millions of birds a year in the United States alone, says the Audubon Society. I have spent my adulthood reading about and watching birds as a passionate amateur hobby, if not an obsession, and making a garden specifically geared to welcoming them year-round. I know better than to want a cat here with me, unless it was a cat who wanted to live indoors, a truly domesticated cat, the couch-and-bed type. Did I mention how much I dislike pet hair on my floors and furniture and clothing?

This very large black and white male cat—a fur pattern for obvious reason referred to as tuxedo—being held out like a live offering in my direction from Susan’s arms was that tricky mix of wild and tame that I’d known in too many men already (always ones carefully chosen for their low body-hair count, I might add, so that at least that one thing about them would not rankle me, or cause me extra work).  Get him out of here. Of course, he never did get out, but apparently kept an eye on me, gauging the right moment to make his next move toward his version of domestic bliss. He was christened Jack a few months hence, when he joined me for good the morning of September 11 and parked himself in a wooden box on the back porch, basking in the deceptive light and warmth of that darkest of mid-September days. “Jack in the Box,” said Susan’s longtime partner, Harry, after she’d told him of coming back a few days later to find us—me, and this cat—still sitting out there with NPR playing on the boombox, trying to fathom the world’s new landscape.  And so it was: Jack.

Be grateful to everyone.

At nearly sixteen pounds, the vet called Jack “big boned” when Susan took him in a week or two thereafter, and in fact he was not fat but wildly muscular, built like a miniature black panther and with all the moves, lowering himself to ground level and waiting, completely still, sometimes for half an hour until the very moment to positively race and then pounce upon his prey with shocking accuracy. Owing to his evolutionary ancestors, Jack sleeps most of the day and hunts at night. Fierce as he is, I should have named him Huey (for Newton) or Bobby (Seale), perhaps; he has certainly caused a revolution in my life.  We also learned that he was about two years old, and had been neutered; probably, the vet said, a cat someone had not wanted anymore, a trade-in. Or maybe he had just grown sick of his old life and walked out one day.

It was Susan, who helps me in the garden and who in my city years was also the de facto caretaker here, whom Jack regarded as his owner, I think, at least at first, and to this day only Susan has ever done the vet appointments, tossing him into the pickup (no pet carrier or cage will ever know this cat) in the same madcap way she pulls him around on her tarp through the garden, a pile of trimmings or weeds and a heap of doglike Jack. She calls him Pum-kin, no “p” discernible in the middle. I call him something else: I call him Potentate.

In our years together this animal, himself an offering I’d at first refused ( do not look a gift cat in the mouth? ) and then inadvertently adopted, has brought me many offerings. There have been mouse ass-ends, tail attached; mouse ass-ends, tail missing; mouse tails, no ass attached; moles and chipmunks, limp but outwardly undamaged (not good eating, apparently); young rabbits and possums, their spines slack, with portions of their fuselage missing; the distinctive furry tails of countless weasels (an animal I wish he didn’t have such a taste for, as important as they are in keeping order in the native food chain); and so many parts whose origin was unknown—gizzardlike hard bits, occasional smears of whole intestines, and mostly just not-yet-quite-dried pools of red blood on my green back-porch floor.  Merry Christmas?  Did I fail to mention that I have been a vegetarian for more than thirty years?

And yes, of course, the marauding carnivore that is Jack had even delivered the occasional bird, and once or twice in the first years together, one of my beloved frogs.  We have not always done so well, wild man Jack and I, Jack the Demon Cat; there have been dark days between us, days when we did not speak. I was, after all, the Accidental Pet Owner, and (remember) not a cat person.

And he had been living in the woods before we dubbed him Jack. Alone in the woods [like I am now].

“I heard that black cat who’s been hanging around the woods is with you now,” Deb, one half of the cat-loving couple who live a steep and rugged mile’s distance up the adjacent road, said later that fall. News of my liaison, my broken resolve to live forever petless, had spread. People here have multiple serious pets with a purpose—barn cats, or mousers; dogs that hunt or retrieve fowl—and also farm animals. I had none, and was happy that way. “He was up here for a while,” she said, “but then he disappeared, and we saw him darting in and out of the woods down by you all these last months. We wondered where he’d gone to lately.”

When we pieced it together, it seems that apparently Jack-to-be had been fending for himself for probably half a year or longer, with three or more of those months spent watching me: the house with no animals, the place where he could maybe make a go of it. He had lived in a wild tangle of second-growth forest and adjacent field that is also the domain of bears and coyotes, bobcats and mountain lions—and to a lesser issue if you are a cat the size of Jack, of deer, gray and red foxes, possums and raccoons, porcupines and skunks, weasels and woodchucks, and every manner of smaller vertebrate and many species of snakes.  He had lived on whatever moved and wasn’t bigger or rougher or faster than he was.

And so from the glimpse on my birthday in June to the 9/11 morning in the driveway and into the wooden box out back, and then, before long, into a whole cottage of his own (a heated shed behind my house that became Jack’s, cat door and all), before winter wrapped itself around us that year, my days with Jack began.

Reprinted from “And I Shall Have Some Peace There,” copyright 2011 by Margaret Roach.

Postscript:

BLOODLETTING HAS ALWAYS BEEN n one of Jack’s trademarks. It was many years, at least the first seven or eight together, before he stopped attacking me and drawing blood, seemingly for no reason other than to show who was boss.

Then, after a middle-of-the-night injury one year ago this month inflicted by some prey he thought he’d subdued but hadn’t quite—the first nick of his long, violent hunting career—Jack had to stay inside for a month while a shredded paw healed after surgery.  It was the first time he’d ever spent more than a few hours in the house, a bit uncomfortable for both of us.

At first.

Then he caught on: on-demand meal service, lots of upholstered furniture to plunder and add to his territory, not one but five pod-shaped cat beds beyond that (me=sucker), central heating. Why leave? He didn’t, except to use the rest room (and no, litter boxes are not for this cat—he will let you know, like a dog, when it’s time. You had better stay alert.)

These days, it is Margaret who spends time in Jack’s shed—which is now my office.

All my household furniture is covered in sheets and towels—my only shred of self-defense against the new tenant.

And most of all:

I am a cat person, or at least a Jack person, and immensely grateful to this once-wild beast for the comfort and distraction he has provided me every day of the last tumultuous decade.

May each of us on earth find some but of solace, and love, in this crazy spinning world. May each of us find at least a little peace.

For July only, get an additional 10 percent off each book that you order—and remember, even before the discount, I was selling them below the cover price! Now, just $20.70, including signature, gift wrap and Media Mail shipping (cover price: $25.99). You can order here. (And please, remember to write me a “note to seller” right below the shipping address in the shopping cart, so that I know who to inscribe your book to.)

What Readers Say About ‘Peace’

AND I SHALL HAVE SOME PEACE THERE is a book about finally making time for things I always said I “had no time for,” though they were things I wanted more than anything: to live in the country, to write fulltime, to be in my garden year round, not just on weekends. It’s a book about setting new priorities; about life transitions; about how Nature can help on the road to the next stop. It’s a book for anyone seeking a little more peace in their lives, and wondering how to get there. Here’s what just a few readers have emailed me to say:

“Reading your book has inspired me! I have begun tunneling my way out of my corporate prison, just wish I had a bigger spoon to dig with.”

“I was especially moved by all the different ways you have come to realize that “there is nowhere to be but here”–such a valuable concept to finally learn for all of us!”

“I randomly picked up your book off the shelf in our local library–the title seemed to speak to me. i wholeheartedly believe that you are one of my messengers, helping me to find my way and my own peaceful place.”

“I was so inspired that I decided I would chase my dream of leaving suburbia and moving to the ocean!”

“Your insights are giving me the touchstones I need to get clear. Thank you, thank you for your courage and for sharing your metaphoric life.”

HAVING DECIDED TO WRITE MEMOIR FOR A LIVING has its perils. For me, it has some extra-prickly ones, since my only sibling has been teaching memoir-writing for 13 years, and has a disarming thing or 20 to say on the topic—plus she shares a lifetime of my memories. Now Marion Roach Smith has tucked her tactics (along with a number of our childhood anecdotes) into “The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life.” With our memoirist friend Katrina Kenison, we’re celebrating the new book and the very medium of memoir—offering six chances to win Marion’s irreverent little guide to writing what you know, whether in a whole book, a blog post, or even a letter to a loved one. Do you dare try?

Holding Marion’s latest book in my hands, I’m reminded how much writing my memoir, “And I Shall Have Some Peace There,” meant to me—which of course the tagline to her book’s title more than hints at with the “…& Life” part. I don’t think I’m unusual when I say that writing stuff down helps me sort it out; the act of writing has enriched and clarified over and again. Without a pen or a keyboard, I sometimes wonder if I could really think at all, or puzzle my way forward.

A couple of years ago, while I was sitting writing about dropping out of my longtime publishing career for a rural life and renewed personal creativity, Marion was an hour away, parenting, writing and taping a daily radio column, blogging, serving on boards—and teaching the art of memoir to wait-listed classes. Somehow in that juggling routine she was always ready with just the right memoir-writing trick on her blog each time I needed one to keep my own book on the tracks, and “coincidentally” helped me push onward.

If you’re looking for warmup exercises or a cheerleader who never says anything but “rah-rah,” wrong girl. Marion (above) is a do-er, and will expect you to be one, too—again, even if you simply wish to give your spouse an anniversary gift of some written facet of the years, or your adopted child the story of the day you met her. Don’t get my sister started on subjects like writer’s block (no such thing, she says—and believe me, I tried that excuse). Don’t tell her you’re doing your writing “exercises” when she asks if you’re at the desk working. Doesn’t count.

She prodded me to remember that “just because something happened doesn’t make it interesting,” and to never forget what the story is about: to ever-vigilantly keep the theme in a place of prominence. With an offbeat humor (maybe it’s genetic?), Marion takes you through the steps to success. Just look at her Table of Contents for a hint of how she thinks:

To write good memoir, Marion says, You Must Be Present to Win (Chapter 1), paying attention and telling the truth. You should channel Galileo in Walmart (Chapter 2) by not letting all the “stuff” in those crowded aisles distract you; focus that lens of your telescope. Lest you find yourself Having Sex With Roger (Chapter 3), keep your eyes open, the lights on, and a notebook by the bed, all in the name of creating The Barbie-Bodied Book (Chapter 4), whose whistle-stopping figure won’t let readers peel their eyes off your argument.

She dares us all—not just those pursuing the writer’s path professionally—to write it all down, and for that prodding I have usually thanked her (except when it exasperated me, in the way siblings cannot help but do from time to time; I get in my turns, I promise).

If I sound proud of Marion’s latest book—her fourth—in a more-than-sisterly way, a postscript: I am, because “The Memoir Project” got its start as a dare from me, the big sister. Year before last I challenged Marion to write what she knew—her class curriculum—so we could self-publish it and maybe, just maybe, get a major publisher to buy it someday. I guess I spoiled the suspense of that story by revealing in the first paragraph here what came to pass. Congratulations, Marion!

How to Win 1 of 6 Copies of ‘The Memoir Project’

MARION, KATRINA AND I are each giving away two copies of Marion’s new book “The Memoir Project,” and all you have to do to win is comment, answering the question:

What memoir that you have read mattered to you, and why?

Copy and paste your comment onto all three of our blogs to triple your chances of winning—again, each of us has two copies to share, and we’ll all draw winners at random (using the tool at random dot org) after entries close at midnight Saturday, June 18.

• Here.
• On Marion’s site, on her latest post.
• And on Katrina Kenison’s, author of “The Gift of an Ordinary Day,” whose message has been heard not just in print but by nearly 1.6 million YouTube viewers so far.

Now we are pretty flexible, we three, so even if you don’t want to name a book, or have a title but not a reason why, that’s OK. Simply say, “I want to win,” or “Count me in” or some such, and your entry will be official. But remember: copy and paste it on all three blogs, using the bulleted links above. Good luck! (And we can’t wait to see the booklist you help generate with your replies.)