My New Book - A Body Of Water

Sign up for the release!

Hello!

I have some awesome news today—the proof of my first book, A Body Of Water, was delivered Wednesday. Anna & I went through it and found that everything was ready to go. I made a few design tweaks, added a back cover, then uploaded the final design.

I want to gauge interest since paying to print books is pretty expensive. So, if you are interested, sign up here:

I would also appreciate if you shared this signup link with anyone who might be interested in ordering the book. You can just copy-paste it anywhere. I am planning to use the proceeds from this book to fund my backpacking trip this summer, so it means a lot to me.

I am trying to sell at least one hundred books. You can even forward this email to interested parties. Please share this in any way you can, as I really can’t do much trying to promote this alone.

Thank you so much!

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Why I Wrote This Book

Writing, or any creative impulse, requires a lot of inner motivation—especially when the work is made with the intention of offering it to others. It is hard to predict what people want, or what will hold their attention.

Since I care about such things, I tend to try and form my work to what I believe will help people. I want to create things that have value—not necessarily useful things, but things worth cherishing.

Why not just leave that up to the Earth? Well, the fact is, there needs to be a massive cultural shift here on Earth. People aren’t being exposed to truthful work, work that places us in the flow, rather than at the top of a hierarchy. This book is my attempt to express some of that flow. And maybe to inspire others to give themselves permission—to follow their own intuition, to live how they want, to take care of themselves; to go against the grain.

The Work Itself

It’s funny to offer something for money that comes from my own blood and bone. The writing process has taken a tremendous amount of work and living. I started at 250 pages of writing, and over several years of rewriting and removal whittled it down to just 70 or so. The work is so dear to me, I remember crying in Taos back in 2018 when I first came up with the name—maybe like naming a child. A Body Of Water.

I was staring at a photo of the Rio Grande in the bathroom of a little restaurant. I was thinking about my place in the world, and how it seems to be ever changing. Thinking about the flow of things: of water, wind, and the way things move through the world. I felt at the moment that I am a body, and that all water on earth is a body, and we are both constantly flowing through each other—like blood through organs. This idea… every time I write about it, even now, I seem to find something new.

This interdependent relationship is so deep, so multifaceted, that I feel like I will be exploring this one idea for as long as I live—that we are bodies, that there are other bodies, yet how we are at the same time all connected. Interdependent.

As I heard Thich Nhat Hanh say once: people, plants, and animals, even rocks and trees are not themselves. They inter-are. If you look closely enough at a drop of dew, or one person, or one tree, if you look closely enough, you can see the whole world reflected there. A Body Of Water.

Thank you for all your support: over the years, and hills, and through the valleys of life.

— Hudson Gardner, rivrwind