23 March

Does Being Unhappy Mean You’ve Failed?

by Jon Katz
Does Being Unhappy Mean You've Failed?
Does Being Unhappy Mean You’ve Failed?

My friend Eve Marko asks an important question on her  blog: “Are You A Failure Because You’re Unhappy?” I hope not, because I have been unhappy for much of my life, sometimes deeply and painfully, and I have often felt like a failure because of it.

Eve is writing beautifully about her mother’s somewhat critical insistence that she was unhappy as a child. “As  a Zen student,” she writes, “I felt perfectly free to share my ups and downs with my peers. Most of us had gotten  into meditation because we needed it, because things had gone South, career and relationships soured, and Zen practice compelled us to finally sit down and look for the answers inside rather than running around looking for them out(side). As I usually say when I talk to others about my own meditation practice, I sat down in 1985 and never got up.”

I imagine almost everyone reading this is unhappy at times, and has perhaps felt like a failure because of it. The culture worships happiness, it is supposed to be the goal and the purpose of life, happiness and security. The Buddhists believe that life is suffering, we never quite get what we want, at least not all of the time, something is always troubling or disappointing or threatening. Almost every form of spiritual practice preaches acceptance: let things be as they are.

You find love, but you lose all your money. You have a great morning, but your computer crashes or your dog dies or you have a fight with someone you thought was your friend. Life moves and stumbles in lurches, almost never in straight lines. You take your morning walk, and end up in the hospital having your heart re-constructed.

I can’t speak for Buddha, but in my life I have come to see happiness in perspective. It is painful, but it has nothing to do with success or failure. Success in life does not come from never being unhappy, it comes from learning how to deal with the inevitable suffering and confusion life brings.

It is the unhappy who seek answers, who so often turn to creativity to understand their struggles. It is the unhappy who turn to meditation, to therapy, to true friends, to change to ease their suffering and work to improve and understand the world and  themselves. It is a strange thing to say, but the people I know who always seem to be “happy” also seem to me to be hollow, I rarely connect with them or seek to know them better.

The world is a difficult place, and it is the people who are unhappy with suffering who set out to ease suffering.

It is the unhappy people who are my soulmates, my tribe. And to be unhappy does not mean to be grim. Most successful comedians are neurotic and often miserable, their humor is often born out of suffering, as is so much of my work and my writing.

If I were not unhappy, I would never have known Maria. I would never had moved to a farm. I would never have become a writer. I would never have had a life with dogs and animals. I would never have started my blog. I would never have taken a photograph. I would never left my unhappy life, or had the strength to change. Was I a failure to be unhappy there?

If Maria had not been unhappy she would never have loved me, never fulfilled her dream to be an artist, never stopped going to those family dinners.

At this point in my life, I feel I am the happiest I have ever been or hope to me. I waited a long time for it, as I get older, I see how every good thing in my life, ever bit of love, wisdom, insight and accomplishment, has been born out of my unhappiness, was forged and shaped by it.

Unhappiness unchecked is a sad thing. Unhappiness acknowledged and understood is something else, a window and a door. If we think about it, we learn every day not to let the conventional wisdom of others shape our self-esteem None of us can ever be as happy and secure as we are told every day we ought to be. That is a dark road to travel.

I understand what the Buddhists mean, suffering is an integral part of life, as is loss and death, and it is important to accept it, but it is not the whole story, it is not for me, the point. For me, suffering is a mid-wife. If I accept it and understand it’s place in the world, it so often helps me to give birth to the purest happiness I have ever imagined. It is not failure to be unhappy, it is a door that opens wide.

23 March

Sharing The First Draft Book Cover: “Talking To Animals”

by Jon Katz
Talking To Animals
Talking To Animals

I was excited to get the first draft of my next book cover “Talking To Animals.” Although the sub-title is certain to change, I love the cover design, I think it perfectly captures the spirit and intention of the book. The subtitle will hopefully read something like “A New And Wiser Understanding Of Animals.”

This is the first book cover in awhile that isn’t one of my photographs, and I think it’s a good decision on the publisher’s part. The dog’s face is striking and the bold design captures the eye, more directly, I think, that a photograph of mine. I know little of what makes books covers work, but I am excited about this one. It works.

I’ve often had my photos in my books, but as my new publisher pointed out, photos don’t really affect sales. I will put up a special photo page so readers of the books can see the characters they are reading about, as I did with Frieda in “Second Chance Dog.”

As always, I share the process of putting together a book, Simon and Schuster controls the cover, and they may choose to change it, and if so, I’ll post that as well. The book is scheduled for publication in April of 2017, about a year from now. It’s a long time to wait, and this is the longest space between books I’ve had in my book career. I’ve always published a book a year.

That, also, is good to change. People never had the chance to miss my books, and it is good sometimes to build up expectations. Publishing has changed quite a bit in recent years, and this is my first book with Simon and Schuster, my new publisher.

It was my decision to leave Random House, but I will be honest about it, I was nearly pushed overboard. It happens to mid-list writers, I was lucky to be offered a new contract by Simon and Schuster right away. I am one of the lucky ones, and I could not have survived the process as a writer without the blog and you very good people who read it.

Maria is extraordinarily supportive of my work, as I am of hers, and that makes such a difference. She has pulled me out of a lot of black holes and dog days. It’s a bit early for congratulatory messages to myself, but I love this book, it is the culmination of 15 years of living with animals and learning how to communicate with them. It is a personal book, the story of one man’s very spiritual experience with a number of different animals.

I am happy writing on my blog, that is my creative home now, my living memoir. But it will be good to have a book out again as well. I do miss the book tour, and my previous publisher has abandoned them, my new one believes in them. So you might be seeing my ugly face as I move around the country next Spring. It is always good to get out there and meet readers. A year is a long way, but it takes about that long for a publisher to really market a book. Not like the Internet.

Anyway, I was eager to share the cover with you. I am a lot more open than some authors, and I’ll stick to that. You have the right to see the process as it unfolds. I am working day and night this week to finish the book, just a couple of days away.

23 March

“Surprise!” – The Daily Ambush

by Jon Katz
"Surprise" - The Daily Ambush
“Surprise” – The Daily Ambush

Every day, Fate springs her ambush on the always unsuspecting and business like Red, he is the perfect straight man for her. Today, she got him good, she popped out from behind the pole barn and got right in front of him, she then raced alongside of him for the entire length of the pasture. Red was visibly startled, but he didn’t veer off course or interrupt his mission.

23 March

Talking To Animals: The Writer Reborn In The Night

by Jon Katz
Writing In The Night
Writing In The Night

My book “Talking To Animals” has been scheduled for publication next April. I am very happy about it. For most of my life, my books were published by Random House, then my editor left, and I seemed to get lost in the corporate shuffle. My new editor did not seem to care much for my books, and I rarely, if ever, spoke with her. Last year she left as well and it was apparent I had to go too.

There was just no one to talk to, nobody who cared much about my work. I love writing on this blog, it is my writing and creative life now, but I have been a book writer for most of my life, and I felt a piece of my soul had been cut out and discarded. I have no complaints to make about my former publisher, I had a wonderful time with them, and in our world, nothing is permanent, this is simply the way the corporate world works.

You can love it or hate it, but complaining accomplishes nothing and drains the spirit. I took a gamble and left them, and was very lucky to get picked up right away by another powerhouse publisher, Simon and Schuster. They loved my book idea and yesterday I had a long phone conversation with the two people who will be editing and shepherding my book.

I was quite dazzled by their enthusiasm for my book and my work, their very thoughtful and insightful ideas about the final revisions for it, and their plans for publishing it. I felt whole again, I texted Maria that I was “very happy,” and she came running to kiss me and congratulate me, she is the sweetest thing on the earth.

She said she had not heard me say that about my publishing life or any book in some time. It’s true, my last few books were hard, a struggle everyone, there was just no one to talk to who knew me at all. Those of you who know what it is like to be patronized will know how uncomfortable I was.

I didn’t feel that at all, I felt heard and appreciated, we are on the same page. My blog is my creative soul now, but it is wonderful to love being a book writer again, I have been getting up at 3 a.m. all week to plow through the manuscript and get it into shape. Just one or two new chapters to go.

I also want to be sure and thank those of you who supported my Kickstarter fund two years ago to help me purchase a new camera, my wonderful Canon 1D. You have seen the photos and what it has meant to me to have it, and my editors were excited about my plan to put a link in the book so people can see the photos I took with it, I’ll set up a special page for them.

My camera has made an enormous difference in my creative and I will always offer my photos for free to anyone who wants to use them. I never bookmark them, they are my little angels, they go out into the world to spread the message of color and light.

This week, I am getting up at 3 a.m., and Red and I come down to go into the cluttered study and edit and write. In the late mornings, I put posts up on the blog. I love working on a book that I love, it means the world to me. And I am feeling reborn as a writer of books as well. I am nothing but lucky.

23 March

Red In The Woods. “Until Your Soul Reveals Itself.”

by Jon Katz
Red In The Woods
Red In The Woods

Red is a beautiful dog and an extraordinary companion for me. I have never had a dog loved so much by other people, I sometimes think my work should be driving him around to people who need to be uplifted. He loves going with me into the deep woods, and sometimes it is just him and me, Maria and Fate are working her studio or buys. He will sometimes walk a few steps ahead of me, and then turn and wait for me. He never lets me out of his sight, or fails to know where I am. Today, there was something spiritual about our walk together, the way the light hit him, the way the sun backlit the forest, and created a canvas behind him.

Two men getting up there, I told him this morning, he seemed to smile and shake it off.

Red is one of those dogs that are spirit dogs, animals who mark the passages of our life, who come with a purpose, and leave when their work is done. Red is graying a bit, he is slowing down a bit, I can tell his legs hurt him sometimes after a long run. One day in the not too distant future, hopefully years away, he will join the other spirit dogs in my life, dogs that have supported me, given me so much strength and life,shaped so much of my writing.

I will never despoil their memory by lamenting their loss, they brought nothing but joy and love to me.

In the meantime, we walk through life together. The good in Red is divine, limitless. This morning, before walking in the woods I read from the writings of a brilliant and forgotten mystic, and thought of the woods and the trees.

“The greater you are,” he said, “the more you need to search for yourself. Your deep soul hides itself from consciousness. So you need to increase aloneness, elevation of thinking, penetration of thought, liberation of mind – until finally your soul reveals itself to  you, spangling a few sparkles of her lights.”

I love that the soul is seen as a part of the feminine divine. Red and I love women.

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