How rapidly life becomes complicated!

I started out with a very simple desire to share my love for the forest in stories that would touch peoples' hearts and encourage them to experience the world in a more beautiful and more connected way. But, in order to achieve that goal, I had to make sure that my book was accessible and that people knew about it. And so, this past week, I found myself tumbling ever deeper down the rabbit hole of the online publishing world.

It's been a wonderful learning curve, but I must admit that I wished on several occasions that I could simply deposit my book in some great Akashic record somewhere where it would immediately be available to all who would enjoy it and benefit from reading it! During the process of listing my e-book on several online retail sites, I have become increasingly astounded by the remarkable strangeness of things that we simply take for granted:

The forests here in my home in the Garden Route of South Africa evoke within me deep and profound feelings of love and connection. I express those feelings into thoughts that I "code" into the metaphor of language in my own mind. Then I use a device (a laptop) that converts that language into a binary, machine code. My feelings are now a stream of noughts and ones stored as magnetic fluctuations on a disk inside the hard-drive of my laptop. Then I send this coded stream via fibre optic cable under the ocean or via a satellite that's circling the Earth in space to several host computers all over the world. Now my double-encoded feelings can be downloaded by anyone who has access to a machine that can decode the binary code and present it in a series of letters and words on a screen. As a result of light hitting the screen and bouncing back to hit the retina of the person reading my words, this language code is decoded, via the optic nerve, in the language centre of their brain into words and concepts that, in turn, evoke feelings. Now you, dear reader, can experience a simulacrum of my feelings of love and connection to the forests on the other side of the planet. How deeply strange to connect and share such profound feelings with someone you have never met via this tortuous coding-decoding process!

But it gets even stranger when I consider that the eye reading the words, the computer, the fibre optic cable, the satellite, you and I and, yes, even the forests, don't really exist at all. When we consider the smallest particles of matter, we realise that most of matter consists of space and that the smallest units of matter, the subatomic particles, are merely probabilities, popping in-and-out of existence. And, at an even deeper level, we reach the zero-point energy field and we realise that all is truly One and just an infinite field of potential energy.

And when this current, temporary, illusory reality dissolves, I believe I will find myself where there is no distance, where there is no code and no metaphors separating you and me and we can simply share... all of ourselves. And I look forward to that time.

But, until then, while I still find myself here in this crazy, confusing and magnificent reality, I will have to hop through all the hoops required to make sure that my feelings can be shared. So, back to the practical aspects of this reality then!

My e-book, The Green Lady, is now available for sale on Amazon. This is a crucial step for any author, as Amazon remains the most important online book retailer, selling more than 60% of all e-books and paper books worldwide.

I've had to put a price to my e-book on Amazon, as the site doesn't list free e-books. However my e-book will continue to be offered free-of-charge here on my website and also on several e-book retail and free e-book hosting websites.

If you have read my book, The Green Lady, won't you please consider posting a review on your favourite e-book retailer? I'd really appreciate it.

I've started the process of having paperback copies of my book printed for the South African market, and this week I begin the process of making print copies available for all international markets. I will keep you updated on the progress every week in this blog.

And so the journey continues...