One Global Tweet, One Earth

The smallest thing happened today, and yet it altered my life. The tiny thing was that a friend was signing books at a book fair. Without giving it much thought, I tweeted a message, "If you're in Abu Dhabi, visit my friend Seumas Gallacher's book signing at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair."

It didn't hit me until a couple of hours later, when Seumas and I were chatting about the book fair on Twitter. We might has well have been chatting over coffee at a local cafe. Our conversation felt that casual and comfortable. We signed off with hugs and sleep well's that felt like the real thing.

Earlier in the afternoon I'd been chatting with my friend Molly Wishlade. We joked about eating peanuts for dinner, peanut butter for me and peanut satay chicken for her. She was savoring a piece of cheesecake that I wanted a bite of. Thing is, Molly lives in Wales, and I live in Mexico. We were chatting on Twitter.

What struck me, and I know it isn't news, but my heart's community, the people I interact with on a real, daily, and personal level, is now global.

I'm used to the idea of a long-distance family. My children live thousands of miles away, and we talk on the phone and Skype several times a week. Same with my sisters and some cousins. About a year ago I started following Melody Fletcher's blog, Deliberate Receiving, where I learned about the Law of Attraction. We email and Skype often, and she's become a third daughter. Melody lives in Barcelona. Close connection with family at a distance isn't a rarity for me.

It's not that I'm isolated. I live on an ordinary family street in Mexico, and have conversations daily in Spanish with neighbors ranging from young children to great-grandparents. Friends invite me to dinner and we go to the movies. Volunteering in animal rescue is a social as well as a spiritual activity. I love salsa dancing! In person community isn't lacking from my life.

Today felt like something different. What struck me today is that my life has been enriched a thousandfold by my global friendships. I'm deliberately avoiding the adjective 'virtual,' because the friendships aren't virtual, they're real.

Nathalie Thompson in Ottawa is as real, alive, and vibrant a friend as my amiga Sara here in Colima. Melody in Spain, Seumas in Abu Dhabi, Molly in Wales, Lori Gosselin in New Brunswick, and many other lovely people ALL OVER THE WORLD are now an integral part of my life.

Readers come to this blog from across the globe as well, and though I don't know all your names, I feel your presence. Welcome to, at last count, 9071 readers from China, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Russia, Singapore, Romania, Brazil, Greece, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, Austria, Canada, Maldives, France, and many other countries!

Shamans say that global energy is rising. That our vibration as humanity is lifting us into a new level of consciousness. Today, I felt it. With one little tweet, I realized that my heart has expanded and a whole new One-Earth has flooded in!

I wish for every one of you the same joy that I feel. I wish for you more hugs than you could have imagined for a lifetime. I wish for you sunshine and rain and green and volcanoes puffing in the background.

Thank you every single person on the planet, thank you every animal and plant, thank you every rock and every molecule of water, thank you for existing! And thank you, dear and lovely readers, for sharing the journey!

Please share your thoughts, your musings, your questions, and your hugs. I look forward to a wonderful conversation!

And if you're in Abu Dhabi, drop by and visit Seumas. He'll be at the book fair all week.

This doesn't feel like a regular post, so I'm skipping, at least for now, the usual add-ons of other posts to visit and blogs to follow. Do click the links in the post and meet some fantastic new friends!

Blogging, the Law of Attraction, a Union, and Bats! What??? #TBSU #BAT

Last night I finished Seumas Gallacher's The Blogger's Guide to Absolutely Nothing. This isn't exactly a book review, though I do urge you to buy the book and enjoy a few hours of fun with an upbeat message. The Blogger's Guide is a humorously presented appeal to be our better selves, and all in a Scottish accent that I love and won't even try to duplicate.

Click to buy the book! Now!

Whether you go to Amazon and buy the book or not, do yourself a favor and subscribe to Seumas's entertaining blog. It's joined my very short list of daily reads.

click to visit Seumas Gallacher's blog

What I want to write about though today, is something a little different. Seumas' philosophy of life and blogging got me thinking. I had been moving in the same direction, but reading his words pulled it all together for me. And it all ties in with the Law of Attraction, wouldn't you know.

The Money Bugbear

A few days ago, Nathalie Thompson at Vibe Shifting generously published a guest post I wrote. You can read all about my slightly twisted relationship with money, and how I recently got clarity on a little piece of the bigger issue. Letting go of the need to be the rich American who funds the Mexican dog rescue is a huge step for me. Huge! My ears are popping all the time, which is my own little personal sign from the Universe that energy is shifting. Pop, pop. There it goes.

Now, I am not, have never been, and probably will never be a rich American. I live in Mexico because I love it, with the giant added benefit that I live nicely on a relatively small pension. The urge to fund a rescue shelter had led me to release my novels on the Kindle market in the first place, to hit the jackpot of sales for a good cause.

The first day I 'met' Seumas, and I can't even remember who introduced us, I was in the middle of a partial meltdown. If I wasn't promoting my books because I needed lots of money for the dogs, why was I putting in twelve hour days tweeting, blogging, and Facebooking, not to mention trying to figure out Goodreads and now Google+? Arggg!

Here's the Law of Attraction part.

When I was ready to realize that the pressure to fund dog rescue was a purely self-imposed strain, the Universe put the lovely Nathalie in my path, to invite me to write a guest post, which gave me the opportunity to wrestle through to a happier emotion.

That's how the LoA works. Even when you're not ready, the opportunities are all there. You just can't see them. When you finally drop the blinders, the resolution is so clear and simple it makes you weep, or jump around doing a happy dance!

And here comes the Law of Attraction again. Just when I'm struggling with the next layer of the onion, I meet someone who can articulate a clear vision of where I'm going and why I'm going there. Thank you, Universe! Thank you, Seumas! I didn't even wallow for very long—just a day or two. When you open yourself to change, it comes roaring through.

The Evolution of a Blogger/Human Being

By now I hope you're really curious about what this message is that I've learned, or reaffirmed, from reading The Blogger's Guide. It's simple really, and it's more like a booster shot for things I was already doing. We can blog from a spirit of generosity, nothing more, pure generosity. Seumas does, and I can too. Just share. Joy, bounty, encouragement, kind words. Just share it all.

Tweet this, okay? I have no idea how to set it up as a link. Maybe you can figure it out.

Just share. Joy, bounty, encouragement, kind words. 

Just share it all.

What Seumas communicates effortlessly, and what he reminded me of in The Blogger's Guide, is the sheer joy of touching lives and being touched. He writes about how he stumbled into the fun of blogging after starting his blog as a purely promotional tool. Me too! I realized about a month ago that what I really enjoy about blogging is not the promoting, but the writing about all the amazing things in my life. If you happen to see a book cover and want to buy a book, Woohoo! But it's kind of secondary to the other fun.

Right now, last night, today, I needed that reminder and I was ready to listen. And there were Seumas and The Blogger's Guide, ready to nudge me in the right direction!

#TBSU

Seumas has a group called #TBSU, the (arrg, I can never remember what the letters stand for!), okay, The Blog Scratcher's Union. It's a hashtag for bloggers who support each other's writing: You scratch my back, I scratch yours. As of today, please consider me a member.

If you are a blogger and reading this, consider putting #TBSU on your posts and Tweets. It's like a secret (but it's not a secret) handshake to other bloggers. You help me. I'll help you. Go to Seumas blog for a complete explanation of how it all works, or read the book! (Woohoo! A plug!)

My minor addition takes the idea a baby step further.

#BAT (We could have a bat signal, or something!)

When I meet a blogger that I like, I want to read their posts. Not just the new ones, but all of them or at least most. Sifting through a whole blog full of archives is way too much. So what I propose is that the #TBSU adopt the additional hashtag of #BAT to identify a Blog Archive Tweet! There are some bloggers out there who are brilliant at tweeting me into reading their archives, and I really appreciate it! Check out

@CassandraPage01

@Kevin_Hanrahan2

@MindfulHealth

@VibeShifting

to name just a very few master archive tweeters. What makes this tactic work is that every single one of the archives they tweet is well worth reading! I search the Twitterverse for posts from them to read and RT.

Tweet Your Best Archives with the Hashtag #BAT

How about if we make it a little easier, folks? Tweet your best archives, the ones that don't lose their timeliness, with the hashtag #BAT, Blog Archive Tweet. You'll make my Twitter searching easier, and maybe the idea will catch on through the #TBSU world! We can tweet and share and spread the joy not only across space but across time! 

I don't want to imply that I have any kind of endorsement from Seumas for #BAT. He has never heard of it before reading this post. And I hope I'm not shamelessly hanging my hat onto an already hugely successful hashtag. It just seems to me that maybe we could all have a little more fun, and make our blogs just a little more alive.

So what do you think? Are you already using #TBSU? If not, why not start? When you discover a wonderful blog, do you like to read archived posts, like me? Would you look for the hashtag #BAT? Will you start using it? As always, I'm eager to read your comments! How about a lively discussion of the joys of blogging? Thank you again for starting the conversation, Seumas. And y'all—buy his book!

Oh yeah, oh yeah. And buy my books too, okay? The links are on the right side of the page. Whew! Marketing done. Check.

Check out these related posts:

• Publish or Perish vs the Law of Attraction

• Can I Use the Law of Attraction to Boost Book Sales?

• Banish the Anxiety — Focus on the Fun!

Banish the Anxiety — Focus on the Fun!

How do we stay in the flow when we’re in the middle of advertising, promoting, and otherwise selling our creative darlings? How can we banish anxiety over the barrage of numbers: views, sales, tweets, friends, follows, et al!?

The solution applies a lot further than publishing. In fact it can help all of us keep having fun, no matter the circumstances.

This comment to my latest post, Starting 2013 Off Right - January of Abundance!, on Melody Fletcher’s Law of Attraction blog, Deliberate Receiving, started me thinking.

A slightly paraphrased version of the original comment

I know we have discussed that it is all about the journey. Yet, it’s imagining and expecting the destination with utmost faith that keeps us going on our journey, right? At least that is what I find. When I get stuck somewhere, it’s usually because I allow the stuff happening around me to depress me, when I shouldn’t. Makes total sense, but it takes practice to get there.

Besides the wonderful creatures you rescue, what else do you do to feel good, to set you up for staying in the flow? I have found that only by feeling good and excited, everything comes into alignment. Then I lose the flow, and have to get back to that frequency. How do you personally get back to having fun?

Paying too Much Attention to the Numbers

I've bumped up against exactly this problem in the last few days, and it took me awhile to feel my way through. What happened was that I started focusing on how many people retweeted my tweets, how many people visited my blog, etc. I wanted tangible results in exactly the form I wanted them to come in. Arggg! Even though the numbers were generally good, I started to get anxious.

Join their Facebook page.

Before, it had felt wonderful visualizing opening a shelter for puppies and old dogs, the main reason I’d like to sell a bunch of books. I imagined the yard, and the cute doggie beds, and all the volunteers. All of it felt fantastic, and in my heart I know it's all just around the corner. Lately, with too much focus on HOW to get there, ie the numbers, the dream started to feel more anxious too.

Getting Back to Having Fun

What brought me out was when I realized that it's names that matter, and not numbers. Each retweet was the action of a person, someone real and alive that was connecting with me! How amazing is that! The whole purpose of all of everything, for me, is connection, connecting with people and connecting with dogs. Whether I help them, or they help me, or we just share space, it's all good!

Savoring the Human Connections

As soon as I felt again the human connection behind all these hours at the computer, everything felt good again. The dream of the shelter is back, clear and strong. The difference is that now I just KNOW it's going to happen, and I don't think about the picky details, like money and land and legalities. When they become relevant, they'll resolve, maybe through my diligent inspired action, maybe through a different agency.

Since working all this through, my energy has stayed consistently high. I can look at the numbers now, laugh a little, get excited when they're really good, and laugh some more when they go down. I've remembered that the numbers don't matter, that every connection is precious, and that makes everything fun again.

How to Recognize Inspired Action

It can be hard to know whether something you want to do is truly inspired action, or whether perhaps you want it because of prior conditioning. I’ve followed a lot of ‘dreams’ that turned out to be me living out someone else’s (generally my Mother’s) dreams. Even here in Mexico, the vision of a dog shelter is evolving by fits and starts.

One way to recognize inspired action may be by looking at how hard you are willing to work for the dream, and by whether that work feels like a chore toward an end, or whether the work itself is truly joyous. Promoting my books is so fun and absorbing, I’d do it even if there were never a penny to be made.

A non-publishing example, brought up by the same reader, is a decision whether to incur university debt. The student wants to keep going. The parents are saying, 'No!' The friends are saying, 'You're crazy!' We all know university debt can become crushing, and I certainly understand parental fears. I have one daughter who loves studying – loves it! She’s finishing a masters degree and moving on to a PhD. Who knows if she’ll ever recoup the money, but she’s doing what she loves most in life. Every course excites her. And she works her butt off!

To me, the deciding factor is the joy. If the dream that gives you greatest joy is to buy your own home, maybe you need to give some thought to working and avoiding debt. If what gives you greatest joy is learning, and you could care less about your accommodations, keep studying!

That's not to say you can't have both the house and the degrees. Of course, you can. But if one is a passion and one is a should, you need to be clear in your heart about which is which. When you know and follow your true joy, emphasis on Your. True. Joy., the Universe will align with you. And, rather than an elusive target, staying in the flow will be a given.

How Do You Keep Having Fun?

How about you? How do you keep from focusing so much on the details, you forget the fun? How do you keep yourself floating when you’re in a sea of scaly, demanding alligators? How do you know when your action is inspired? Please share your thoughts. I look forward to our conversation.

Huge hugs,

Carole