conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled Nothing Left Over about Bell, Tower, Nothing with the genre: Biographies & Memoirs, Specific Groups?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author, a prestigious book publisher and founder of Bell Tower publishing house, shares her life wisdom in Nothing Left Over. Her memoir speaks to living with full-tilt generosity and joy while not clinging to material clutter, resentments, and unfulfilled passions. "In truth, it is not the number of and diversity of our possessions that is the problem but our attachment to them.... The freedom we are all seeking is the freedom from the fear of losing what we believe we own." We've heard these sentiments before, but somehow coming from the author, who has her share of foibles, the words feel palatable and the wisdom feels earned. Like the gentle, intelligent voice in <a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679732411/${0}">Gift from the Sea</a> , the author contemplates the stories of her life as she passes on humble advice and observations. Whether she is writing of her existential crisis at 17 years old, her arrival in New York City as a 25-year-old virgin, the amazing conception of her son, or insider stories at Random House, the author offers a spiritual framework. In other words, she is an excellent storyteller--able to make meaning from her life so that readers can glean the rewards of her thorough contemplation. --Gail Hudson
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: --Gail Hudson. In other words, she is an excellent storyteller--able to make meaning from her life so that readers can glean the rewards of her thorough contemplation. Whether she is writing of her existential crisis at 17 years old, her arrival in New York City as a 25-year-old virgin, the amazing conception of her son, or insider stories at Random House, the author offers a spiritual framework. Like the gentle, intelligent voice in <a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679732411/${0}">Gift from the Sea</a> , the author contemplates the stories of her life as she passes on humble advice and observations." We've heard these sentiments before, but somehow coming from the author, who has her share of foibles, the words feel palatable and the wisdom feels earned. The freedom we are all seeking is the freedom from the fear of losing what we believe we own.... "In truth, it is not the number of and diversity of our possessions that is the problem but our attachment to them. Her memoir speaks to living with full-tilt generosity and joy while not clinging to material clutter, resentments, and unfulfilled passions.the author, a prestigious book publisher and founder of Bell Tower publishing house, shares her life wisdom in Nothing Left Over
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first four paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Nothing Left Over
  But this did not happen. Each day I was busy from seven in the morning until Adam returned at the end of the day. It rained a great deal, so I did not go out much. There was always more Bell Tower work to do; it was right there in front of me, and there never seemed to be a natural break when I could turn to what I saw as my own work. After four days of this, I realized that I had trained myself for forty-three years to put my employer's interests before my own, and this was going to be a tough habit to break. The first lesson in my new life was perhaps how to establish boundaries.
  I thought back to the days when I had begun to meditate and remembered how at first it was so difficult to fit two half-hours into an already crowded day. Then it became clear that if you waited for a space to appear in your schedule, it never did. But if you meditated before the day began and again at the beginning of the evening, there was never any problem fitting everything else in. So I determined that in the weeks ahead I simply had to sit down at the computer early in the day and not peek at my e-mail until the time for writing was over—not that I needed to set a specific time to start and finish but that I had to take care of this one thing, my writing, before all the demands of the day claimed my attention.
  That was August, and I was full of good intentions. Now it is February. It has been just over six months since I abandoned a full-time job for the freedom of a life of my own, and it is hard. For all these months I have been coasting along on the energy accumulated over a lifetime of push, push, push. I had had a full (too full), active, and successful professional life, and now that I have broken loose from the old mold, I am in limbo. I am no longer being driven by outside circumstances, and inertia has set in to some extent. This is truly a bleak, dry, and uneasy time. In my previous life I was, of course, usually on automatic, reacting to outside stimuli.
  Whoever I talk to or whatever I read points out that the way to get going again is to make myself a schedule and stick to it. As the months trickled by I noticed that, although I planned to start writing at 8 a.m. and round off the day by practicing tai chi chuan at 5 p.m., neither of these things ever happened. Yes, it is possible to schedule every moment of the day and not allow yourself any wiggle room. That way I would certainly get things done, but would I be any more present while I was doing them than I had been in my old job? I do not want to exchange one kind of servitude for another. Not that you can't choose to be present at any moment, but being present does tend not to happen if you get pulled or pushed into the next activity through sheer force of habit. I know only too well that I can have a bath, get dressed, do my mini-stint of yoga, eat breakfast, and listen to the news on National Public Radio, without really knowing what I am doing.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: We were the happy owners of a five-story brownstone that had been turned into ten apartments, although much of the renovation still remained to be done. So the next thing we did was start renovating. I learned a great deal about sanding, painting, electricity, and plumbing—all on-the-job training. Our spare time was given over to working on the house, and when I left to get married four years later, the renovation was still in progress.
  Those of us who lived in the building all had different responsibilities. One person was in charge of the finances, another the boiler, a third the garbage, a fourth the garden, and so on. My responsibility was to care for everyone who lived in the house in a general way—someone had to be nominally in charge—and to keep the peace. This led to some interesting situations, including the following one.
  Two of the people who moved in were a high-school teacher and her sixteen-year-old ward, Lorraine. As it turned out, there was some friction between them, and shortly after their arrival the guardianship came up for renewal, and it was decided not to continue it. I offered to become responsible for Lorraine, and we went to family court to make this official. This was a very long-drawn-out procedure requiring several appearances and much investigation. Lorraine had been assigned a guardian by the Bureau of Child Welfare when her mother had taken her to court three years earlier on a PINS petition (Person in Need of Supervision). The bureau suspected that we were running a commune and tried to block the transfer of guardianship. I pointed out to our legal aid lawyer that if it were a commune, we would be sharing expenses, which we were not—unfortunately for me. Then they said that the building was unsuitable because there were single men living in it. I countered by saying that each of the two single men occupied his own apartment on the garden floor while Lorraine was living on the fifth floor but that also, if there were an apartment building in the city in which young men did not live, there was probably something peculiar about it. In the end we got the bureau disallowed in the courtroom because of its prejudice. When I eventually came before the black woman judge, she asked me only one question: "What do you see as your responsibility toward this child?"
  I took a deep breath and replied, "To know where she is at all times—physically, emotionally, spiritually..." I was about to continue, but the judge cut in:
  The proceedings were over almost before they had begun. We all filed out, and I asked the psychiatric social worker what the ruling meant. She explained that because the Bureau of Child Welfare had not been allowed in the courtroom, Lorraine had been reassigned from the bureau to the Probation Office. Unfortunately, the Probation Office had no funds and so, although we had achieved our aim, there was not going to be money from any of the agencies to support Lorraine. She offered to take me to the Welfare Department and work with me to obtain some funding. She was as good as her word. She went with me over and over again, but I had to wait until a new mayor was elected before I got any money. I was grateful to John Lindsay when he overhauled the system and we began to get an allowance and food stamps. In the interim, various friends helped us out.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last four paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: After reading biologist David George Haskell's marvelous The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature, I went to hear him give a talk and came away with this gem: "Wonder increases as speed decreases." Let us all take this to heart as we rush into the future.
  In Tricycle magazine I found meditation teacher Ken McLeod's account of a three-week retreat where he was instructed to do nothing. In "Something from Nothing," he asks, "What is it like to do nothing? I mean, really do nothing, nothing at all—no recalling what has happened, no imagining what might happen, no reflecting on what is happening, no analyzing or explaining or controlling what you experience. Nothing! I had to receive whatever arose, experience it, and not do anything with it. Be willing to receive, not control, whatever arises—that is, not only allow but embrace every sensation, feeling, and thought, everything we experience." This is what I have been endeavoring to practice for many years now, but have not seen it described so succinctly anywhere else.
  This describes my life too. I am no longer looking for one person to love. I love so many people now—and so much else besides. What I love is my life and the abundance the universe delivers to my door time and time again. Everything unfolds and I love life itself.
  After fifty years in publishing Toinette abandoned editorial work and devotes herself to East Asian brush painting, which she taught at the Educational Alliance for four years and now teaches on the Upper West Side of New York City. You can view and purchase her paintings and cards at www.toinettelippe.com.