The other morning I sat in the pre-dawn darkness on my porch, wrapped up against the cold, staring at the stars with their piercing, distant magnificence. I listened to invisible raccoons running through the trees, saw the inky outline of the branches bending under their weight. I heard the soft clopping of deer hooves, and then the owl’s resonant, echoing call in the middle distance.

Sitting inside the Full Moon Woo tarot tent, I stared at the cards representing the state of affairs in my little world. In the center of the spread was the Hanged Man — my current situation. I read up on the Hanged Man, and the sum and substance of it is this: perspective. As in, get a new one.

Everyone I know is going through some serious suffering. I’m not talking about the suffering one feels watching a Tom Cruise movie, or hearing the phrase, “I know, right?” I’m talking about suffering chronic illness, staring mortality in the face, losing a loved one, being in dire financial straits: in other words, Hell.

I’ve collected some very sage advice over the years,  far more than a 500-word limit would allow.  As Mark Twain famously observed, it takes a helluva lot more time to write a short piece than a long one; it requires that one be succinct, a thing that no self-respecting, egomaniacal writer likes to be.

You’ve heard someone say it. Heck, maybe you say it. “I’m spiritual but not religious.” But what the heck does that really mean?

Imagine yourself on a beach on a lovely summer’s day. You have spent the past few hours lovingly and painstakingly constructing a fantastic sandcastle, complete with moat and protective walls. You stand back admiring your work when you notice that the tide is coming in.

I’ve been exhausted for years. I’ve been low energy for so long that I began to think that it was just my “normal.” In fact, an acupuncturist I saw for my fatigue stated as much. “You were just born this way,” he said, like that was that.

You don’t have to be introspective or make any changes in order to feel better; there is an alternative. In my twenty-some years of practice and study, I have learned some valuable techniques for handling difficulties without delving into the depths.

I heard a small-time country singer on the radio the other day talking about the difficulty of hitting it big in the music business. He shared how one day, feeling tired and discouraged, he’d heard his phone ring and decided not to answer it. Later, when he listened to his messages, he discovered that it was his agent who had called. “Too bad you’re not there,” the agent’s voice said. “I have Garth Brooks on the other line and he wanted to talk to you.”

Every new author has two fantasies when they publish their first book. The first fantasy is that it will be a runaway best-seller. I imagined being interviewed by Oprah, or Scott Simon on NPR. “So tell me, Ms. Ingram, how does it feel to have such surprising success with your first book?” You really believe this might happen … for a while.

Reading through my collegiate musings reminded me of some interesting things from my past that I’d forgotten, like the fact that I sure did have a lot of boyfriends, and I sure was into Jesus, and I sure was a damned good daughter for writing all these newsy letters. But the big OMG moment was seeing how really very little has changed.

I hate snakes. Hate is a strong word, but there it is. So imagine my excitement this time last year when we entered the year of the Black Water Snake. I knew it was going to be a wild ride, and not just because I hate snakes: I knew it because a year whose symbolic energy is turmoil and transformation ain’t going to be easy.

My eggs have all hatched. This is what I thought last week as I sat on the porch in the morning, my children back in school. I thought about them being gone, and about my book being finished, and my mother entering the last chapter of her life. I sat and I thought about a lot of things that have to do with the period of seemingly empty time between the end of one thing and the beginning of another.

Four years ago, I began writing a book.* I had something close to a first draft when I took it to a writer’s group. That first day, one of the members arrived late; she looked as if she had just been spit out of a terrible tornado and plopped, disheveled and wide-eyed, into a corn field. The cause of her distress? She had just published her first book.

Trust is tricky. It’s all very easy to have trust when everything is going swimmingly; it’s another thing altogether to maintain total trust when you’re hanging on by your fingernails. Or fins. Whatever.

I learned, early this morning, that I am a success. A piece on NPR was relating how some wingless mosquitos in Antarctica survive under the most miserable of conditions, only to “awaken” out of semi-dormancy to live for ten days or so, mate, and die. In the animal world, the reporter noted, this is considered a successful life. You have reproduced. You have won.

I am late to the party at Downton Abbey; I only just began watching it two weeks ago on DVD and I just … can’t … stop. It’s distressingly absorbing. Yes, the acting is superb, the writing spot-on, the sets too much to be believed. The peek into turn-of-the-century Edwardian life—a life so radically different from our current age—is mesmerizing. I could stop there and say that I am ensorcelled by all of the above, but it’s more than that, I fear.

I find it no coincidence, seeing as I do not believe in such things, that I’ve recently been studying Deepak Chopra’s “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success,” Law #2 of which is about giving. This March fortnight of fun provided ample opportunity to put this law into practice.

One of the more interesting phenomena of middle age is the recognition of just how very stupid and arrogant you have been up to wherever you find yourself near the halfway point.

Yesterday I grabbed The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, deciding that it was time for a refresher. I also thought that, energetically, it would behoove me to read his book, since I’ve asked him to endorse mine; it may generate some sort of karmic reciprocity.