Are You the Driver or the Hitchhiker?

The tiny off-grid community where I live in Hawaii is accessible only by steep, bumpy, unmarked dirt roads which require four-wheel drive and courage to navigate.

The valley walls feel like the moat around a castle, protecting us from an outside world that can feel noisy, harsh, and unforgiving. One of the things I love best about my hut in the rainforest is that I rarely hear a car, and even then, it’s usually far in the distance.

I’m much more likely to see neighbors walking past on foot or hear the clopping of horse hooves on the trail.

Of course, all this peace and quiet comes at a cost.

Going to town means a long, slow, dangerous drive. And if your car breaks down or gets stuck, you can’t just call a tow truck or summon a mobile mechanic. Hiking through the forest, you often stumble across the rusting remains of abandoned trucks dating back to the 1980s, with vines growing through their windows and fallen guavas rotting on their hoods.

It’s all too easy to imagine that yours will be next.

As long as I’ve lived in the valley, car trouble has been my number one source of anxiety, a recurring stressor in an otherwise delightful life.

Once, my car died on the steepest, narrowest section of the hill, and had to be backed all the way down. Another time, a rat got in through the glove box and chewed up the seat cushions and wiring. I’ve lost track of the number of hours I’ve spent messing with socket wrenches, jumper cables, and duct tape to frustratingly little avail.

Sometimes, I envy my neighbors who have eschewed car ownership altogether and simply hitchhike to town with a big backpack of laundry and an empty propane tank in tow.

They have it so easy—no repair bills, no headaches! —but of course, it takes them all day to get anywhere, and walking for miles with a propane tank takes time and effort that could be spent reading, writing, and working in the garden.

Although I’ve considered giving up my truck and joining them, it seems like there’s always one more load of lumber to pick up before I do.

A few weeks ago, some friends of mine came to visit for the weekend. I picked them up where the paved road ends and brought them down to my homestead, and we had a wonderful time collecting fruit and visiting on the lanai, but when the time came to drive them out again, my car wouldn’t start. After tinkering with it for a couple of hours, I went back to the hut and told my friends they would have to hitchhike back.

“Don’t worry,” I told them. “There’s a big rock at the bottom of the hill where everyone waits for rides. It’s a sunny weekend; you probably won’t have to wait long.”

Once I’d walked them to the gate and sent them on their way, I went back to my car, determined to try one more trick for starting it before declaring defeat. I scrounged around in the forest and found a long stick. I was poking at the starter when all of a sudden, a bright red Toyota truck came roaring up the stream.

The woman driving leaned over her passenger and waved at me.

“Do you know where Kulia’s place is?” she asked.

“Oh man,” I said. “That’s on the other side of the valley. You have to cross the river, then two or three more streams, then a sharp right by the breadfruit tree by the broken-down pickup truck…”

“Can you jump in and take us?” the woman asked. “We’re already late, and we’ll never find it without help.”

I glanced at the stick in my hand. Who was I kidding?

I wasn’t going to get my truck running like this. Might as well let the day take an unexpected direction. I squeezed into the truck and got acquainted with my new companions, native Hawaiians who had come down to the valley for a ceremony at an ancient village site.

We crossed the river, wound our way up the dirt roads, found the hairpin turn, and parked behind several other vehicles that had also made the journey down. Up ahead, in a clearing in the monkeypod trees, I could see people gathered solemnly in a circle, many of them wearing leis, and I heard oli, or sacred chanting.

“I should get home,” I said. Clearly, this gathering was not intended for outsiders.

“Oh no, you have to come with us,” said Auntie Ola, the woman who had first called to me from the truck. “You’re our guest now.” I wavered for a moment, not wanting to intrude on a sacred occasion, but then I realized that she was now offering me a gift.

“Well, that’s very kind of you, I’ll be happy to join” I said.

Although my day had started out with the stress and responsibility of a driver, I felt the joyful serendipity of a hitchhiker blossoming inside me as I followed them up the path.

Is it better to be a driver or a hitchhiker?

To me, this is one of the central questions of life. A driver can provide for others—coming through in an emergency, giving rides, moving heavy objects that a person on foot cannot.

A hitchhiker can receive what others have to give, while bringing a little novelty and magic into the driver’s day.

A driver is lucky to have security, comfort, and predictability; a hitchhiker is lucky to have freedom, even if it means getting rained on now and then. A driver can feel weighed down by responsibilities; a hitchhiker, stymied by dependence on others or worn out from the demands of the road.

Throughout my life, I’ve been both: a giver and a receiver, a guest and a host, a person catching a ride and a person offering one.

I’ve found meaning in both modes. And I’ve realized that both parties can fall prey to the same delusion. Drivers forget that they, too, can leave their cars at home and set off on an adventure, open to receiving whatever the world gives. Hitchhikers forget they can trade in their rootlessness for something that endures.

When one mode wears us down, we can and should switch places, even if it’s just for an afternoon.

Of course, the very best days are the ones when we somehow manage to embody both positions: giving and receiving, carrying and being carried, providing for others and finding ourselves unexpectedly provided for.

I wasn’t expecting my truck to break down, but I also wasn’t expecting to be gifted with the experience that was now unfolding as a result of that seeming misfortune.

A light rain began to fall as I stood on the edge of the circle. As I listened to the chanting, and watched the tall, thin waterfall tumbling down the cliff beyond where the singers stood, the beauty of it all gave me chills.

Afterward, there was a feast of taro, haupia, and other delights, and a slack key guitarist took the stage. I realized I recognized a few people from a land restoration event I’d volunteered at months before; as I chatted with them in the shelter of a monkeypod tree, my sense of being an intruder quickly waned.

Sensing that the rain was about to fall in earnest, I said goodbye to Auntie Ola and the others and started the long walk home.

It was a pleasure to stroll down the dirt roads that I normally only saw from my car.

On foot, I could see the avocados ripening in the treetops, and stop to pick hibiscus flowers for tea. When I crossed the streams, the cool water felt delicious on my bare feet. I was reminded of how much beauty I used to see as a hitchhiker, before car ownership boxed me up in a cage of metal and glass.

When I got back to the clearing where my neighbors and I park our cars, nothing had changed. I would still need to research my truck’s symptoms, order parts, and wrangle a mechanically knowledgeable neighbor to install them.

Doing all those things would take time and money. All the responsibilities of a driver were still on my shoulders; and yet I felt a new lightness around them.

Being whisked away by Auntie Ola had reminded me that there was a world out there that was bigger than my problems—beauty, grace, and joy unfolding all around me, even as the vexing tasks of life still needed to be solved.

Perhaps more importantly, it reminded me that the drivers of this world are carried along by the same breeze as the hitchhikers, even if it’s harder to see.

As we move into the height of spring, may you all enjoy the gifts of giving and receiving, and may adventure find you when you most need it.

Sincerely,

Hilary T. Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

A Strong Community Can Accommodate a Thief

The tiny off-grid community where I live has a lot in common with a fairy tale. Tucked away in the rainforest, connected by walking paths bordered with rambunctious fruit trees and flowers, you might stumble across the hand-made house where the weaver lives, cross paths with the carpenter on your way to gather water from the spring, or listen to the old fisherman tell tales of catching ono in the bay. In such an enchanting setting, it’s easy to feel that time has stopped: the ordinary rules of the world don’t apply here, and things will go on as they are forever.

In the six years I’ve called this Hawaiian valley home, I’ve become attached to the way things are: the sunset gatherings under the monkeypod tree, the evenings playing card games at my neighbor’s house, the familiar people who can almost always be found at one of a handful of familiar places. I’ve found deep comfort in the predictable rhythms of the day: the roosters crowing before sunrise, the sound of my neighbor cracking a coconut with a machete and pouring dry food into the dogs’ bowls, looking out my kitchen window to see another neighbor pushing her wheelbarrow across a big, open field, cutting through yet another neighbor’s yard to reach the place where we all park our cars.

Like an unsuspecting character in a children’s story who stumbles into a dream world, I’ve been lulled into the sense that this is just the way things are. I will always wake up to these sounds, and always see these sights. One neighbor will always be sitting on his porch doing the crossword puzzle in the daily paper while his little black and white dog comes out to bark at me; another will always be making his way down the trail with a pair of five-gallon buckets, harvesting windfall fruit to feed his pigs. In this version of reality, nobody ages, nobody argues, and nobody leaves; the roosters keep crowing and the flowers keep blooming until the end of time.

A few months ago, one of my favorite neighbors left the valley after making the painful decision to part ways with his longtime partner. Just like that, the Monday night badminton games which had been the social highlight of the week disappeared. We tried to carry on without him, but we barely had enough players to begin with, and the games just weren’t the same without his entertaining commentary and trick shots. To cement the tradition’s demise, the more elderly neighbors who used to come over simply to watch the game decided they no longer wanted to walk home after dark. With no spectators, and only two or three players, there wasn’t enough glue to hold things together. Just like that, a beloved tradition came to an end.

Well, I told myself, it wasn’t that bad. At least we still got together to play cards in the evenings once or twice a week. People were getting old; it was only a matter of time until more neighbors moved away from this extremely remote and demanding life. At least we could enjoy each other’s company for now.

But then one night, while we were playing a rollicking game of cards, two of my favorite neighbors each drank one more beer than they were accustomed to having. One of them made an ambiguous comment, the other one interpreted it in the worst possible way, and before you know it, they had escalated into a full-blown shouting match—an unprecedented event in the time I’ve known them. After gently attempting to help them de-escalate, the rest of us sat there in stunned silence as a thirty-year friendship imploded before our eyes.

Just like that, the card games which had formed the other social backbone of life in our community ceased to be, as both parties concluded that they were better off without the other’s friendship. I continued to visit both neighbors separately, but it wasn’t the same as the group dynamic we used to enjoy. When I realized that things might never go back to the way they were in what had been for me some truly golden years, I felt a quiet sense of grief. I had long accepted that the neighbors I love and depend upon would someday get old and die—I just didn’t expect that the community would die before them.

What do we do when things happen that are out of our control? How do we deal with change, especially when we experience that change as negative? As the senior editor at a self-help and spirituality publisher, I spend all day pondering these questions alongside the authors I work with—and yet, when it comes to living the answers in my own life, I struggle just as much as anyone else. I ask myself what advice the authors I’ve worked with would give, and the answers float into my head: words like acceptance, compassion, ritual, and imagination.

I tell myself that this time of seeming destruction is an essential part of my journey with this place, just as much as those precious evenings under the monkeypod tree. If we only lived through the easy moments, we would never learn wisdom. If we only saw people at their best moments, we would never learn true compassion. If we didn’t trust that things will unfold in the fullness of time, we would never receive the gift of perspective.

Years ago, when I was studying North Indian classical music, my teacher explained why a certain raga contained a bitter-sounding note. “That note is the thief,” he explained. “But this raga teaches that a strong queen can accommodate a thief in her queendom.” I’ve pondered that story ever since. A strong community can accommodate some discord; a strong heart can accommodate disappointment and grief; a strong life can flow with change. Without its bitter note, the raga would have less depth. Indeed, it is the presence of the thief which allows the monarch to practice true nobility.

While I don’t think it’s necessarily true that all negative events are blessings in disguise, it has been my experience that great upheavals often do give rise to unexpected possibilities—new chapters revealing themselves that never would have been written if the old fairy tale hadn’t fallen away. I remember other moments in my life when things felt uncertain, or when the structures and rhythms I’d depended on suddenly changed. Usually, it meant learning new skills or otherwise expanding; rarely are we called to contract in response to change.

Even when my neighbors inevitably make amends, it won’t alter the fact that our small community is dwindling, with fewer people moving to this remote area, and more and more residents growing old, dying, or moving away. As much as I exult in the life of this place—the green leaves, singing birds, and abundant fruit—it stubbornly, insistently teaches me about death. From the rotting tangerines on the forest floor, to the tumbledown shacks whose owners have gone away, to the old stone graves just steps from the walking path, this place has never pretended that nothing ends. It was only me who imagined otherwise.

To be noble in the face of change is to remain in harmony with your innermost values. What remains constant in your heart even as external circumstances change? What do you continue to do, say, and believe even when things aren’t going your way? I ask myself these questions as I gaze at the grassy spot where we used to play badminton, or sit on my neighbor’s porch in the evening, just the two of us, with the card games and dominoes gathering dust on the shelf.

In North Indian classical music, ragas are sung over the constant droning of a perfectly tuned tanpura, which provides the fundamental notes against which all other notes are measured. It is by listening to the tanpura that raga singers remain perfectly in tune, even as they travel far from the fundamental, moving from note to note at incredible speed. In this manner, the change inherent in melodic improvisation is anchored to something dependable and eternal.

In life, that dependable, eternal thing can only be love. The truth is, as much as I’ve felt challenged by the upheavals in my community, I also feel that in giving up my fantasies and projections of an idyllic world, I’m learning to love that world more deeply—indeed, to truly love it for the first time. Without stubbornness and contradictions, life would lose its poignancy. And without the knowledge that things can suddenly change, we might never learn to appreciate the fleeting nature of what we are given to experience while we are on this earth.

This spring, I hope you all find that dependable, eternal thing in your own lives—and when a bitter note appears in your raga, may you sing it with grace.

Sincerely,

Hilary T. Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

Understanding Human Design (Revised and Updated Edition)

The New Science of Astrology: Discover Who You Really Are

Treasures Past and Present

I've never been a particularly sentimental person when it comes to material things. Living in a small cabin in a warm and rainy tropical climate means being ruthlessly practical about possessions, as anything that doesn’t get used on a regular basis will quickly succumb to mold, rust, or other forces of decay. Yet among the utilitarian tools that furnish my home, one object stands out: a tarnished silver candlestick that belonged to my great-great-grandmother in Saskatchewan. I remember rolling my eyes when my mother gave it to me to me shortly after I graduated from college. What was I supposed to do with a candlestick? Who even used candles anymore?

At the time, I was living in San Francisco, and my life in the city felt lightyears away from my ancestors’ existence on the prairie. In my brightly lit apartment, there was no need for candles, and with all the taquerias nearby my roommates and I rarely ate at home. Indeed, we didn’t even have a dining table. Yet somehow, I held on to the candlestick through frequent moves, reluctantly packing it up even as I felt vaguely foolish for doing so. So what if it belonged to my great-great-grandmother? The candlestick was a nuisance, a random knick-knack I didn’t really need. Still, something in me couldn’t quite let it go.

Somehow, the candlestick stayed with me for the next eighteen years, outlasting books, instruments, and items of clothing I would have told you I cherished far more. It survived friendships, relationships, and versions of myself that were all destined to fade. And when I made the biggest move of my life, leaving city streets behind to live off-grid in the forest, the candlestick came with me. It sat on a milkcrate during the years I lived in a tent, and eventually graduated to a simple shelf I built out of scrap wood.

So many things in my life had not endured, and yet my great-great-grandmother’s candlestick had stayed with me all that time. After years of seeing it as “useless,” I now appreciated the unexpected dignity it lent to its humble surroundings. I realized that in my grandmother’s hut on the prairie, it had probably done the same thing. Like me, she lacked many of the luxuries and conveniences that people in the city take for granted; and yet she could still light a candle and eat a meal in its glow.

After a lifetime of feeling little connection to or appreciation for my ancestors, I began to wonder what else I had in common with them—what other shared threads ran through our lives? Which of their skills and talents had I inherited, and which of their wounds did I still carry? In which ways were their choices still shaping my life, just as the candlestick exerted a subtle but powerful presence in my cabin?

Last year, I had the opportunity to edit Dr. Steven Farmer's book, Healing Ancestral Family Patterns: A Practical Guide to Ending the Cycle of Intergenerational Trauma. Dr. Farmer writes that we inherit four types of traits from our ancestors: physical traits such as tallness or a proneness to insomnia, emotional traits such as a melancholy streak or a reputation for being irrepressibly cheerful, behavioral traits such a love of long-distance running or a tendency to flirt, and mental traits such as a facility with numbers or a way with words.

He points out that when these traits repeat themselves over many generations, family patterns emerge. These can be positive patterns, like loving and enduring relationships, or more challenging patterns, like a tendency to burn bridges and sever ties. In some cases, children can seem to be reruns of a particular ancestor’s life: the older brother who amasses a fortune at a young age and squanders it all by the time he’s thirty, just like his grandfather, the younger brother who seems cursed with misfortunes, just like his great-uncle, the daughter who’s the spitting image of her great-grandmother and has the same sharp sense of humor.

As I edited Dr. Farmer’s book, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own ancestry. Unlike my Hawaiian neighbors who can recite not only their own family lineage but the lineages of friends in their community, I know relatively little about my parents’ families, having grown up far from their hometowns. Yet this in itself constituted the first of several family patterns I ultimately came to recognize: like me, many of my ancestors moved far away from the places where they were born, and expressed few regrets about doing so.

Although my living relatives are scientists, teachers, and writers who live in cities, it warmed my heart to remember that most of my grandparents and great-grandparents had grown up in settings far more rural and isolated than my tropical homestead. They would surely relate to ordinary tasks such as carrying water from the spring, preserving a big harvest of fruit, and coming together with neighbors for seasonal celebrations.

I realized that many of the values I thought I'd discovered independently, such as resourcefulness, thrift, and community building, were actually family traditions—I just hadn’t recognized them as such. At the same time, I realized that some of the things I struggle with mirror the struggles of the generations who came before me. My family tree contains several sets of siblings who are estranged from one another, just as my sister and I have been estranged throughout most of our lives. Maybe this wasn’t “my” problem, but just one manifestation of a bigger wound that had its origins deep in the past—and by studying the histories of my aunts’ and grandmothers’ relationships with their siblings, I could better understand my own.

Throughout Dr. Farmer’s book, he emphasizes that you do not need to be a genealogy expert to heal ancestral family patterns. In some cases, it isn’t even necessary to know who your ancestors were at all. Simply opening yourself to the fact that you represent one link of a chain of being can be enough to change your mindset, empowering you to question which energies are really “yours” and which have simply been passed down, available for you to transform through your own wisdom and benevolence for the benefit of future generations.

When my solar batteries run low, I light a candle in my great-great-grandmother’s candlestick, and the flame illuminates my small space just as it once lit her prairie home. In those moments, the physical and temporal distance between us seems to collapse.

In the soft light of that candle, I sometimes wonder what she would make of me—a woman living alone in a hut in the rainforest, typing on a laptop which is powered by a handful of solar panels. Would she recognize in me the same deeply practical nature that allowed her to survive in Saskatchewan? Would she understand my choice to live in this unusual and inconvenient way? I'll never know for certain, but I like to think there would be a spark of recognition between us that transcended our physical traits.

As Dr. Farmer points out, our ancestors were far from perfect—they made mistakes, often held beliefs we would consider offensive today, and sometimes caused damage that reverberated through generations. Yet by engaging thoughtfully with our inheritance, neither rejecting it out of hand nor accepting it uncritically, we can weave something new and healing from these ancestral threads.

Toward the end of Healing Ancestral Family Patterns, Dr. Farmer describes the thrill of diving into your ancestry, which can be akin to a treasure hunt or mystery novel: “Just when you think you understand your story, some new piece of information comes to light, revealing insights that may have eluded you before.”

As I was drafting this essay, I picked up my great-grandmother’s candlestick and inspected it closely for the first time in years. I noticed nicks and scratches on its stem, and some kind of patch or repair just under the depression where the candle goes. Picking up a cloth to polish it, I was startled when the candlestick came apart into three pieces; I had never noticed they were held together by a long screw. For a moment, I had the wild thought that there might be a secret note hidden inside one of the sections. How incredible it would be to find an old love letter in faded, spidery handwriting, or a yellowed photograph slipped in there for safekeeping.

Of course, the candlestick was empty—yet it still felt like some imaginary threshold between the deep past and present had been unexpectedly breached. In the instant it came apart, I saw it for the first time—not as “my” candlestick, but as its own being, a thing which might well outlive me, just as it had outlived my great-great-grandmother. For a moment, I felt my own mortality. Then I screwed it back together, and pushed a brand-new candle in.

Sincerely,

Hilary T. Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

The patterns of the past don’t have to define your future.

Drawing on decades of experience in psychology, family systems therapy, and shamanic practice, Dr. Steven Farmer reveals how the physical, emotional, behavioral, and mental traits passed down through your family tree influence your relationships, decisions, and overall well-being. This compassionate and practical guide will help you:

Identify the traits and patterns you’ve inherited from your ancestors.

Heal emotional wounds that have been carried across generations.

Break free from cycles of addiction, trauma, and dysfunction.

Enhance your connection with your ancestors to draw on their wisdom and strength.

Create a legacy of healing that benefits both you and your descendants.

With a blend of modern therapeutic techniques and ancient shamanic practices, Healing Ancestral Family Patterns offers a clear path to ancestral healing. Whether you’re seeking to address deep-seated trauma, understand your family’s history, or simply connect more deeply with your roots, the practices within will empower you to transform your ancestral patterns into sources of strength and resilience.

Was Shakespeare a Self-Help Master?

When I first moved onto the small piece of land in the Hawaiian rainforest I call home, my focus was on my own survival. For the first several years, I was completely preoccupied with clearing brush, planting a garden, and getting some kind of roof over my head. When friends came to visit, they had to sleep in the same big tent where I stored my garden tools; once, a friend of mine tried to chase an enormous cane spider out of her bed, only to have it drop its egg sack, releasing hundreds of baby spiders scurrying across the sheets. Another friend of mine was distressed to realize I had no electricity and therefore no refrigerator in which to store the fancy cheese and yogurt she’d brought down, and that taking a shower meant heating up a kettle of rainwater on the propane stove, then standing in the muddy yard and pouring it over your head.

I’m proud of my friends for continuing to visit me during those rugged but memorable initial years. I remember the way they stepped up to the plate, gamely washing dishes in a five-gallon bucket, hauling drinking water from the spring, and helping me carry the lumber I would someday use to build the first real structures on the land. But while I knew that they loved swimming in the waterfall, hiking to the beach, and playing card games with my neighbors, they were always a tiny bit relieved to go home—after all, you can only put up with spiders in your bed for so many nights.

Even though I enjoyed showing my friends around the valley, I was also a little relieved when they left: it was stressful to worry about their mosquito bites and muddy shoes, and to try to make them comfortable in a space and a life that had only really been designed to accommodate one person. The truth is, I wasn’t a great host. Carving out my homestead had toughened me, and I could feel impatient with people who wrung their hands over the discomforts I’d learned to take in stride.

I realized that in my scramble to gain a toehold in a challenging new life, I had built a hermit’s hideout, not a community space. My kitchen was only big enough for one person to cook in; two people could squeeze onto the tiny wicker couch on the lanai if they were skinny, but a third person would have to stand awkwardly on the grass nearby. It was hard for guests to do anything for themselves, because everything was so rickety and patched together; I was the only person who knew where to find the scissors or hang a wet towel.

It was clear that if I wanted other people to be truly comfortable at my place, I would have to make some changes—build a bigger kitchen, maybe, and replace the rotting pallets that always threatened to send a rusty nail through someone’s foot. It was also clear that I would have to make some changes on the inside, opening my heart to guests instead of feeling overwhelmed by their needs. But how could I do those things while preserving the simplicity I cherished? I didn’t want to turn my land into a five-star hotel; even getting solar power meant giving up candle-lit evenings and a deep silence I adored. How could I let others in to the life I had built without losing myself?

Hierophant author Kim Bradley, whose book Shakespeare’s Guide to Living the Good Life: Life Lessons for Comedy, Tragedy, and Everything in Between arrives in bookstores soon, lives in a hand-built tiny house in northeastern Florida. When she and her partner moved in during a cold snap in January, they had no furniture, blankets, dishes, or cutlery, and the only source of heat was a wood-burning stove for which they had to beg wood from a neighbor. Still, their closest family members insisted on coming to see the new place. Bradley recounts that they showed up with sleeping bags, pizza, and a bottle of wine which they drank out of mugs, reminding her of Balthasar’s line from A Comedy of Errors: “Small cheer and great welcome make a merry feast.”

In Shakespeare’s Guide to Living the Good Life, Bradley draws out ten timeless lessons from the Bard, on subjects ranging from persistence to friendship to thinking for yourself. Just like us, the people in Shakespeare’s time dealt with plagues and pandemics, political upheavals and family dramas, wealth inequality and conflicts over identity. Shakespeare’s take on all these subjects remains prescient today, and Bradley shows how we can use the playwright’s wisdom to find more happiness and meaning in our day-to-day lives.

When I first read Bradley’s chapter on hospitality, in which she discusses Shakespeare’s beloved play The Comedy of Errors, I found myself feeling some wistfulness about my hermit lifestyle. In Balthasar’s quote, the word “cheer” refers to the material elements of a feast—the food, the candles, the decorations—while “welcome” refers to the warmth and generosity of the hosts. I realized that although I’d done my best to give my guests both cheer and welcome, my ability to be hospitable had long been hampered by excessively rough living conditions, as well as by my own curmudgeonliness as a host.

It felt hopeless to make anything but the most intrepid guest feel comfortable in my space, so I’d discouraged all but my closest friends from visiting at all. Now, it occurred to me that maybe I ought to follow Bradley’s example and let more of my friends and family visit even though nothing was, or ever would be, completely clean and comfortable. Maybe I could meet friends halfway, sharing the joys of off-grid living without so many of the perils, and we’d all be richer for it.

A few months after I read the first draft of Bradley’s book, my neighbor helped me build an eight-by-twelve shed for storing solar equipment and carpentry tools. However, as soon as the shed was built and painted, I realized the protected indoor space was much too valuable to waste on storage. Instead, I bought the smallest futon I could find and turned the shed into a guest room. I put out the call to friends far and wide, announcing that I could now host them in the luxury to which they were accustomed—by that point, I even had satellite internet and a hot shower.

This winter, for the first time since I moved onto the land, I found myself hosting a steady stream of visitors. They came in groups of two and three, meaning that some people still had to sleep in tents. However, this time I made sure that even the people sleeping outdoors had lanterns, clean towels, and all the dark chocolate they could eat. When my usual water system ran dry, I guided nightly excursions to the waterfall to swim by starlight and rinse off the day’s sweat, turning a minor calamity into a beautiful adventure. I felt that I was getting the hang of this “welcome” thing, even if the “cheer” was improvised, ramshackle, and covered in muddy paw prints from the neighborhood cats.

Intrigued by all the visitors, my neighbors often came over to join in the socializing. When it became apparent that we needed a central place for all these people to hang out, I dragged an old, defunct solar panel out of the bushes and propped it up on a pair of sawhorses to make a table. A friend of mine helped me gather flowers which we stuck in Mason jars, cut up papayas and other fruit to serve everyone, and brew big pots of tea from the herbs in my garden. In the evenings, we lit candles and sat around the table talking and gazing at the blanket of stars peeking out from between the branches of the monkeypod trees.

Over the course of a few weeks, my hermitage was transformed into a gathering place. After the last of the off-island guests flew home, I kept the solar panel table in the middle of my yard. Almost every day now, one or more neighbors will drop by to sit at the table chat, and to check their e-mail and make phone calls on my internet connection. Often, I’ll come home to find a rack of bananas or a container of steamed kalo sitting on the table, a sign that one of several people I know and love has dropped by.

Even though my homestead still consists of little more than a tiny outdoor kitchen, a guest shack, and the hut where I sleep, it is nevertheless starting to become a community resource—a place whose existence benefits people other than me. The self-centeredness that characterized my early days on the land is slowly transforming; more and more, my thoughts have turned towards how I can best shelter others, providing comfort to both neighbors and guests. I have to confess I feel richer for it; my heart filled with welcome, and my table laden with cheer.

This spring, I hope you all find the wisdom you need to navigate your own comedies and tragedies—and that your table is always filled with friends.

Sincerely,

Hilary T. Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

“Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.”

So says Shakespeare, whose plays and poems remain as beloved in the twenty-first century as they were in the sixteenth. For all the years between us, the world he inhabited was much like our own—afflicted by political turmoil, divisiveness, extreme weather, the fouling of natural resources upon which everyone relied, and discrimination against people who were different. The bard’s remedy for these troubles was to offer respite and inspiration to his audience through his writing.

In this book, author Kim Bradley reveals the inspirational messages in Shakespeare’s works. Every chapter is a journey through one of his most notable plays, each with actionable life lessons to be learned from his writing.

“Yes, there is sickness, death, conflict, and division in today’s world,” Bradley writes. “But there are also sunrises, starry skies, families, friendships, laughter, and love. Shakespeare invites us to enjoy the latter while acknowledging the former, and shows how balancing an appreciation for both is key to living the good life.”

Click here to read two free chapters from the book!

Healing Ancestral Family Patterns

A Practical Guide to Ending the Cycle of Intergenerational Trauma

Soul Growth Astrology

Acts of Love and Service

Dear readers,

Here in Hawaii, each island has a “wet” or windward side, and a “dry” or leeward side. The valley where I live is on the “wet” side. The forest here is graced with frequent rains and warm, damp winds. Mushrooms spring from rotting logs; ferns and flowers thrive; streams meander down the cliffside on their way to join the river that leads to the sea. I love the lush and misty mornings, and the rain that fills my catchment barrels and waters my garden. As for my possessions, and especially my books, they don’t fare as well in the relentless damp, which is forever making objects rust, mildew, or otherwise deteriorate in a variety of ways.

As an author and editor, I’ve spent most of my adult life lugging around a large collection of books: Chinese poetry, novels I keep meaning to reread, hefty tomes on technology, nature, and language. Since moving to the valley, however, I’ve realized that books aren’t meant to be collected—at least, not by me. They’re meant to be read before the warm, wet air speckles their pages with mildew or furs their jackets with a fine white coating of mold. My book collection, once substantial, now occupies one trim shelf—a strange state of affairs for a writer. The upside, however, is that when somebody gives me a book, I read it right away, before the local microorganisms have their way with it. A book feels like a flower, which will wilt, then rot—so I appreciate its fleeting presence all the more.

The last book I read was Loaves and Fishes: The Inspiring Story of the Catholic Worker Movement, by Dorothy Day—a gift from an acquaintance of mine. As the Senior Editor at Hierophant, I read a great variety of self-help and spirituality books, from a wide range of traditions. Although I could easily list all the Buddhist, shamanic, and New Age books I’ve read in the past year, I have to admit that was the first time in many years I’d read a Catholic one. In fact, the book had sat on my shelf for several months, in violation of my “read it right away” rule. I was afraid I wouldn’t like it, or that it would feel like church—a type of resistance I don’t usually bring to, say, the Zen books that come my way. But as Hierophant author and Toltec Shaman don Jose Ruiz would say, “We’re all working for the same boss.” Once I recognized my resistance, I took the book down and began to read.

Dorothy Day was a journalist who converted to Catholicism at the age of thirty, and co-founded a newspaper called The Catholic Worker, along with a social justice movement of the same name. With the help of a growing number of friends, she opened “houses of hospitality”—literal houses, apartments, and eventually, farms run by volunteers, where people impoverished by the Great Depression could get hot food, dry clothes, and a bed. In Loaves and Fishes, she talks in frank, no-nonsense language about the challenges of running these houses. She describes the difficult or unpleasant characters who moved in for months or years at a time—belligerent alcoholics, people suffering from severe mental illness, people who were selfish, grandiose, or downright mean.

It was against Day’s principles to turn anyone away, no matter how disruptive or destructive they were. She believed that humans were called to love one another, and she was determined to put this belief into practice, no matter how much it cost her at a personal level.

Far from making the path of radical love sound easy and attractive, she is unflinching in her account of how difficult it was. There were unpaid bills, evictions, theft and vandalism, and sleepless nights. Guests at the hospitality houses weren’t necessarily transformed by Day’s kindness; often, they wandered away just as cranky and irascible as they were when they showed up.

The path of love, in Day’s telling, isn’t only about working on oneself—it’s active service to the people who need our kindness and care the most, who often happen to be the people we find difficult or overwhelming. It’s doing things we don’t like to do, or which we even find unpleasant, giving up time, sleep, privacy, wealth, or comfort so that others may suffer less. Put another way, it’s a radical realization that there is no separation—that there is only one body of humanity which needs to be clothed, sheltered, and fed.

The day I finished reading Loaves and Fishes, I went to visit my neighbors, as I do several evenings a week. We sat around under the monkeypod trees, chatting about trucks and dogs and other features of rural life. Then one of my neighbors brought up the subject of the little old man who lives down the trail with a menagerie of dogs, cats, and pigs. As long as I’ve lived in the valley, he has been rickety, with a skinniness verging on the ethereal. We all have stories about finding him toppled over on the trail, pulled over by the weight of his enormous backpack, or sprawled in the river after his ankle turned on a rock. But in the past few months, he’s grown even more frail, and the question now arises of what to do about him. How can we help him? What do we owe him? Where do our responsibilities begin and end?

Six months ago, after he had a bad fall, a few neighbors found him housing closer to town, where he would no longer have to walk for miles to get basic supplies. But after just a few nights away, he made his way back to his hut in the forest, unwilling to leave the life and the home to which he was accustomed. We all confessed to leaving groceries at his gate; some neighbors brought him propane, and others cooked him hot meals. One neighbor raised the idea of repairing the old man’s hut, or moving him into an empty building where we could keep a closer eye on him—and wasn’t there an empty cabin on another neighbor’s land?

The neighbor in question protested. “You want him as your roommate, you take him!”

I couldn’t blame him. The truth is, we all had space to take in the old man, if we really wanted to. But the thought of having him there every day, with his dogs and pigs, his messiness and his needs, was daunting. Besides, the old man had already made it clear that he didn’t want to leave his hut, refusing the housing that had already been found for him.

“Do you guys even remember all the things he did?” my neighbor went on. “We’re not talking about some sweet old man, here.”

Indeed, the old man has caused a lot of harm over his lifetime. Although his age and frailty give him an aura of innocence, the truth is that he ruined many lives during his healthier years. How should that factor into how we treat him now? Should we bend over backwards to help him, or should we let him lie in the bed he’s made?

By the end of the evening, we hadn’t arrived at satisfying answers to these questions. But the next morning, and every morning after that, we all kept dropping groceries at his gate, just like before.

How can we practice love? Not just think about it, or write about it, but practice it in our everyday lives? How can we love others when it’s hard or inconvenient, or when they don’t deserve it as much as we think they should? How can we practice love when it’s unfair, outrageous, and uncomfortable?

I feel lucky to live in a community which challenges me to face these questions head-on, and to have a job which invites me to explore them in every book I read or edit. Whether you’re a shaman, a Buddhist, a Catholic like Dorothy Day, or something entirely different, the work of love is never-ending. Like a beautiful mountain we set out to climb, it has difficult terrain we couldn’t anticipate when we were only gazing at it from a distance: rocky slopes and perilous crossings that put our hearts and bodies to the test. We do the best we can with the knowledge and resources at our disposal, and seek support and inspiration from the fellow climbers we encounter along the way. Most of the time, the answers are simpler than we make them out to be. Put one foot in front of the other. Bring the groceries. Feed the dogs. The outcomes of these actions aren’t ours to decide.

This spring, I hope you all find wildflowers on your mountain of love, even as you make your way through the tricky parts—and that the love you share comes back to you many times over, whenever you need it the most.

Sincerely,

Hilary T. Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

The Importance of First Drafts

Dear readers,

This December marked my five-year anniversary of living off-grid on three acres of tropical rainforest in rural Hawaii. It’s the longest relationship I’ve had with a place since leaving my parents' house at seventeen, and the first time I’ve been solely responsible not only for maintaining a home, but for building one from the ground up—painting every board, laying every stone, and slowly coaxing the magic of running water and electricity out of previously-inscrutable piles of wire, fuses, and PVC pipes.

A few months ago, I decided to build a solid roof over my bed to replace the tent I had been sleeping in ever since I moved onto the land. I hauled in the lumber and hardware, and my next-door neighbor framed in a simple shoebox of a structure with a sturdy metal roof and half-walls on two sides to let in light and air. Over the holidays, I caulked and painted, stapled mosquito screens across the openings in the half-walls, and finally retrieved my grandmother’s painting from a friend’s house and hung it on the wall.

For most of the five years I’ve lived on my land, the infrastructure has been provisional and haphazard—temporary placeholders propping up yet more temporary placeholders. The kitchen sink is held up by two sawhorses, its faucet hooked up to a garden hose. A handful of nails banged into a two-by-four passes for a tool rack; a length of PVC pipe suspended between two hooks serves as a closet; a couple of old wooden boxes stacked one on top of the other functions as a staircase, provided you have good balance.

At the time that I put these things in place, they felt like amazing improvements: no more washing dishes in a five-gallon bucket, or storing clothes in garbage bags. Now, I am slowly replacing these resourceful but flimsy solutions with sturdier successors—overwriting my exuberant but sloppy first draft with something a little more elegant, sure-footed, and pleasant to behold.

Creativity takes many forms, but I’ve found it to be an essential practice to a happy and fulfilling life. And whether you’re building a homestead, choreographing a dance piece, establishing a spiritual practice, or writing a book, chances are you’re going to go through one or several first drafts before arriving at the final expression of your vision. Our early attempts are sometimes exuberant and bursting with beginner’s luck; other times, they’re halting and uncertain, bits and pieces coming together as we feel our way through the dark. We know there’s something juicy in there, and we have a feeling if we just try a little bit of this and a little bit of that, we can slowly summon it into existence. As a writer and editor, I am well-acquainted with first drafts with their endless placeholders and notes-to-self. Need better anecdote to illustrate this point, I’ll write. Or, End-of-chapter exercise will go here.

A first draft often looks like one long to-do list: Fix this! Replace that! See if this works better over there! You call your creative vision into being by sketching out what will be there someday, erecting a crude version of it as you go, while promising to eventually replace those preliminary gestures with the real thing. You dream, ruminate, and gather inspiration from others who have trodden a similar path—and you make endless lists of what you’ll do to make your creation even better.

Every now and then, a little piece of the final version will make itself known to you: a few paragraphs that just happened to come out right the first time, a chord progression you feel confident about, an aspect of your project that just makes sense. These moments of clarity offer a sneak preview of the polished gem to come, and often give us just enough encouragement to keep going through the more difficult aspects of the work. Starting at one of those solid points, you can slowly claim more and more territory, coaxing the rest of your creation into being.

Although the decisions involved in undertaking a creative project seem endless, an infinite fractal of possibilities that can easily overwhelm even a seasoned artist or creative, each new point of clarity helps to narrow those options down. Huge structural decisions give way to modest organizational ones, which in turn yield to subtler aesthetic ones. What was once an unwieldly and impossible jumble of ideas mysteriously transforms into a generous, coherent, and meaningful work of art; a contribution that might help, inspire, or even shelter someone, someday.

The platform on which my tent used to sit, and on which my shoebox now stands, was the first point of clarity in the process of drafting my homestead. When I first arrived on my land, I had no idea how long I would stay here, or what kind of shelter I’d need. All I knew was that I had to get above the thick brown mud that swallowed my boots to the ankle every time I took a step.

My need to be dry was so urgent that I couldn’t afford to spend weeks carefully evaluating where the platform should go. Instead, I picked a spot, cleared a few spindly guava trees that were standing in the way, and banged the thing together. As it so happens, I was lucky: the spot I chose has worked well over the years, the surrounding trees providing both privacy and shade.

Having just one permanent element of my homestead in place gave me an anchor point from which to build the rest. The overwhelming fractal of possibilities resolved itself into a somewhat smaller subset of options; I set about plotting other chapters, and sketching out where other elements of my homestead would go. Any visitor to the land could see that my vision was far from realized, the tarps and sawhorses dragged to more promising locations every month or so; yet every now and then, a new point of clarity would emerge, and like a constellation revealing itself amid the stars, the final shape of my home began to come through.

Now that the tent is gone, I am slowly replacing many of the other original features of my home: that ridiculous sink, those dangerous stairs. As I erase the exuberant, ramshackle, sometimes-bewildering traces of my first draft, I feel grateful for the way these things held space for the better versions to come. These structures didn’t come out perfectly the first time, and they didn’t need to—like the placeholders in a manuscript, their job was to say, Do this thing, but better; and by their mere existence, to give me the confidence that I could.

Few artists know exactly what they’re going to say when they pick up a paintbrush, tune their guitars, or sit down to write a book, but the process of creation teaches them. Following our creative passions challenges us to go beyond what we already know and become more capable than we already are. In our first drafts, we throw our intelligence into a kind of sandbox, saying, Go play, go try things! I trust that you’ll figure it out. Eventually, a handful of words becomes a song; a hazy vision becomes a clearly defined path, and a determined amateur becomes a knowledgeable practitioner.

When I decided to build the shoebox, I wondered if I would feel nostalgic for the tent which so defined my first five years on the land. But now that I’m sleeping under a solid roof, I’ve discovered that I feel no more nostalgic for the tent than for one of the many haphazard and provisional first drafts which have passed across my desk as a writer and editor. The books that emerged out of those drafts were far superior to the drafts themselves; and the shoebox is indisputably superior to the tent.

First drafts aren’t meant to be clung to. Like seedpods, they are meant to break down and fade away when the true flower emerges. We might look back fondly on planting those seeds, but we would never trade the flower to get the seed back again. Once they’ve served their purpose, first drafts disappear; it’s our job to let them go, even as we honor their role in bringing the final version to life.

In this new year, I look forward to keeping authors company as they transform their own first drafts into sturdy, beautiful, and worthy books. May your own seeds of inspiration receive the water they need to bloom—in whatever form your creativity takes—and may you perceive the potential in those first, uncertain gestures towards your vision, no matter how approximate they are.

Sincerely,

Hilary Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing