Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Karma

Okay, I'm going to take a leap and say something that no one will like or agree with.

Oh, wait - I do that all the time.

Anyhoo...

I don't think book pirates are such a big deal.

Yes, pirates offer Petals & Thorns for free download - I've seen the links from Google Alerts. No, I don't go look at them. I don't send take down letters. I don't mention it on Twitter or really give it much thought at all.

This is why:

I think I've said before here, that if I were asked to put a name to my religious/spiritual affiliation, I'd say I am a Taoist. I believe in individual responsibility, that we reap what we sow, that what goes around comes around. Everything is about the exchange of energy, the natural balance of the universe.

Money is only a symbol, really. Our paper and electronic dollars in the US are based on gold. (Yeah, I know - not so much anymore. We won't go there.) Gold is pretty; it makes for nice jewelry, but really it has no intrinsic value. Gold won't keep you alive in a blizzard. However, because we all agreed at some point in time that gold is nifty stuff, you could trade some of your gold to live in a warm hut someone else built and cook some meat from a rabbit someone else killed over a fire burning wood someone else cut.

Of course you could go out and do all these things yourself: you could cut wood, build a hut and stack firewood next to it. You could kill and clean your rabbit and cook it over the fire (or your carrots, whatever). If you don't have time to do all that, or if you really suck at snaring bunnies or digging up carrots, you can trade with someone else. Over time, we substituted tokens in lieu of direct trade: I'll give you this piece of gold (or vial of salt or packet of saffron) which you can give to someone else for whatever they have that you want.

So, for a storyteller, someone gives us tokens so we can keep fed and housed while we sit at home and make up stories.

Yes, I hear you now. If people steal your stories, then you can't keep fed and housed. It's much easier, I freely admit, for someone like me who's getting a pile of gold tokens for other work I do. I don't depend on those stories to keep me alive yet.

The way I think of it is, money is just a stand-in for the exchange of energy. A balance of their efforts and mine. If someone downloads my story, reads it and loves it, then I believe that they do pay me. They send little happy feelings of gratitude out into the universe for me. Can I quantify this? Of course not. Is it still valuable to me? Yes yes yes.

I believe that we all know, on some visceral or spiritual level, what we owe to other people. And I believe we're driven to repay it, on whatever level we can. Sometimes it's a pay-it-forward thing. The good feelings I generate in one person gets passed on to someone else, who then passes it along. I get paid in thousands of ways in all the tiny blessings of life.

Are there jerks out there who just take? Of course there are.

But, I've learned in life, as I'm sure most of you have, that people will do nasty stuff to us that we may never see justice for. I've had my share of people undermining me, stabbing me in the back, what have you. I've been involved in court cases where I paid money to people who didn't deserve it, simply to extricate myself from the situation. We all have.

And we all have to find a way to let that stuff go, or it poisons us.

I believe in Karma. I trust that the universe will take care of it. One of the people who's wished me the most ill in this world is a miserably unhappy person. It's sad, but I also think that's what happens.

We all get back what we put out into the world. I truly believe that. The best part is, the universe tracks this for me, so I don't have to.

I just sit in my little hut and write the stories.