April 25, 2026

I hope you won’t think I wasted my time, and I hope you won’t think you wasted your money (It only will cost you $2.50. That’s less that a cup of coffee at Starbucks).

I enjoyed this re-write more than any of them, and there have been many, and I expect that I will allow this one to be it for a while. It takes a lot of focused attention even to do a re-write, probably more than a new book does, and I am older than when I started (I think my first ebook was published in 2015, but I published a couple of paperbacks in the 2005 area (Remember “The Evolution of the Idea of God”?) and there was another, maybe “A Guide Book for the Spiritual Journey). And the joy at the heart of all the writing and re-writing (I have no idea how many books that actually amounts to, but probably into the 20’s, maybe 30,s, is that I haven’t had anything at stake in, or riding on, any of them. I do it with the Attitude of, “Here’s this,” on my way to the next one. This is in the spirit of Bill Hamilton’s friend Alan Stacell, who taught architecture at Texas A&M, but he was an artist at heart, and told Bill, as he (Stacell) was throwing canvasses he had painted into the dump at A&M, “I paint like a dog wags its tail.” Well, that is the way I write. The writing is the reward. If you read it fine, if you don’t fine. If you like it fine, if you don’t, fine. I’m already thinking about the next book (Probably another re-write, “The Way of the Buddha”).

And I think we all would be better off if we forgot about success, and making a name for ourselves, and just did what we love to do, what we are here to do–not to achieve anything more than doing it, and doing it well, according to our own standards of “well.” Doing what we love to do and doing it well is all the epitaph we need to leave behind.