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Ordering Information for
The 12 Basic Principles of Being Organized:
60 Tips Toward a Serene Life
If you would prefer a downloadable e-book version, please visit our store at www.wintersdaughterpress.com/dl_paycart/index.php, then click on E-Books (under Products, on the left).
- Number of copies
- 1 to 4 books: $4.95 each
- 5 to 9 books: $4.50 each
- 10 or more books: $4.00 each
(All prices and payments are in U.S. dollars)
- For information on trade discounts and bulk orders, please contact
Claire Josefine at organized@humboldt1.com
- Sales tax: 7.25% for books shipped to California addresses
- Shipping and handling:
US: $1.00 for the first book and 50 cents for each additional book
International: $2.00 for the first book and $1.00
for each additional book
- To order by mail, please send a check or money order, payable to:
Winter's Daughter Press
7512-A Elk River Road
Eureka, CA 95503
phone: 707-268-8585 or 800-505-3881
Be sure to state how many books you are ordering and include your shipping address! Your order will be sent as soon as the check clears.
- All
orders shipped via U.S. Postal Service
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A wonderful contribution to the growing literature on the art and pleasure of simple living. - Vicki Robin, author of Your Money or Your Life
Claire Josefine is the Zen master of organizers, a black belt in helping you create a space that works for you and makes life sing! - China Galland, author of Longing for Darkness, The Bond Between Women, and the forthcoming Marking the Ground
Claire Josefine advocates a simpler and lighter life. Her book, The Spiritual Art of Being Organized, is filled with imagination and joy, and engages disorganization not as a moral issue, but as a spiritual one. - Judith Kohlberg, founder of NSGCD
Claire's book is the perfect antidote to the currently popular "whirlwind makeover" approach to organizing. The Spiritual Art of Being Organized is a serene environment in which to find peace-enhancing solutions to organizational dilemmas. - Debbie Stanley, Red Letter Day Professional Organizers
A delightful, easy-to-read book with the best advice ever: '"organization is
actually about being lazy and making our lives easier." Any system that allows for more ease and laziness is OK by me! - Janet Luhrs, author of The Simple Living Guide, Simple Loving, and editor
of the newsletter, Simple Living
This book is a meditation on serenity. More than a how-to book, it's a how-to-be book. Having The Spiritual Art of Being Organized on your bookshelf is a little like having a wise bubbe as your household CEO. - Ava Hayes, editor
This book helps answer the question of how to start living a more balanced, productive and joyful life. - Dr. Maridee Winter, author of Mind Your Own Business, Be Your Own Boss
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but I could see this book in Costco. It appeals to many people, and has the potential to help a broad spectrum of people. - Pam Robertson, Central Area Leader, Christian Home Educators
I truly enjoyed reading this book. It affirms what I know, honors what I forget to honor, and has lots of great insight into human nature and ways to triumph over tendencies that aren't quite self-fulfilling. - Amelia Raymond, poet
I enjoyed your book very much. You have a warm, conversational writing style--much the way you come across in person. - Louisa Rogers, Communications Consultant
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Claire,
Having not long ago been diagnosed with breast cancer, I was faced with the deep-seated desire not to shuffle off to Buffalo leaving my family to deal with my three story 3,600-square-foot Victorian full of 25 years of "collecting," obsessive "stuff" accumulation, and chronic disorder. However, already on emotional overload and not feeling any too red hot, the prospect was, to say the least, overwhelming.
Cruising by Wild Berries to check out their orchids, I happened upon your book, and read the opening quote by Shoma Morita. I knew this was a book I needed to read.
You accomplished the impossible. You see, I have always detested neat, highly organized people. They are not like me. They made me feel faulty, inadequate, guilty, and so I pronounced them without creativity, spontaneity, or passion.
But, from what I could learn about you from your writing, I began to like you, a person who alphabetizes spice bottles! This amazed me. When, about half-way through, I found you quoting Wendell Berry, I was totally won over.
After several readings of your book, I realized that, while the totality of what I had to do remained overwhelming, I could handle beginning, and that in the process of incrementally imposing order on the chaos of my house, I would also be dusting out and re-ordering places in my own being that needed an equal amount of attention.
I had always envisioned starting my "clean-up" process in my "abandon hope all ye who enter here" attic, but decided instead to start on my spice cupboard. Here I found six half-used boxes of tapioca dating back over several years, each purchased after a search did not produce that box of tapioca I knew I had, but couldn't find. I began to laugh at myself.
Now then, I do have a "junk drawer," or at least I did. I had a monumental junk drawer, wide and deep, and full. I have lived in my home 25 years, and when I got to the bottom of that drawer, I found things I hadn't seen in 25 years, and also 11 pairs of scissors!
Your book is underlined, and written in, and special pages are marked with bent-over corners. It shows the effects of being read in the bathtub and taken with me to bed. I may be a messy disorganized person, but I am a very discerning and particular reader, and you write very well indeed.
In more ways than I could begin to tell you, you wrote this book for me. I would not have been reached by a simple list of handy hints for organizing. What you had to reach was my deepest being, and you had to convince me to like you and trust you before I listened to you. That there was something in neat, organized, "spice-jar-alphabetizing you" that connected on a deep spiritual level with messy, chaotic "can't find that box of tapioca" me, opened my mind.
"Little by little", the acorn said.
Thanks to your extraordinary book, the best imperfect person I can be has begun.
Regards,
S. W.
March 23, 2005
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While traveling from Prince Rupert down the Yellowhead Highway to the Canadian Rockies, I stopped in a public library in Prince George. A kind librarian there turned me on to Yahoo! email accounts, set me up with one, and explained that I could access my email from most public libraries. (This was almost a decade ago, remember. It was still exciting stuff back then.) The following is an email I sent about a third of the way into the journey. It is excerpted from my new book, Following Raven, Finding Ground: A Road Trip in Search of Home.
JULY 11, 1998
Thunder & Lightning & Downpours, Oh My!
Greetings, all, with a quick update from Nelson, B. C. They boot you off in 30 minutes at this branch, and the librarian is very strict -- the first and only truly uptight librarian I've ever met. I suppose I should have compassion for her, but I feel more like challenging her, especially since she got so upset when I truthfully answered "none" as my address on the form they make me fill out, promising to be a good girl on the net. "It sounds..." and she cuts herself off. Sounds what, lady? Homeless? Uncouth? What are your assumptions? But I'm a nice girl, eh? Only felt like challenging her, didn't push it. Changed the address from "none" to that of Kokanee Creek campground.
What a glorious, loud storm there was last night! Thunder rumbling and roaring and shaking the ground, lightning four to seven counts away, shocking the whole sky awake. I could feel the electricity vibrate up from the ground and through me. Couldn't help but think of Zeus roaring in anger -- but why do we think of these storms as angry? Yes, they feel angry, but maybe there's another way to understand them. Ecstatic? Undeniably, raw and powerful. So alive.
Took an impulsive detour last night -- 16 kilometers up a gravel, pitted, bouldery sort of road -- just to see what was at the end. At the end was a lake and a trailhead, and a sign with a funny, cartoon drawing of a porcupine that warned us that critters will eat your tires, brake linings, etc., and to protect your vehicle with chicken wire. "We are not joking," concluded the sign. And they weren't. The cars parked there were indeed surrounded by chicken wire. The things I learn... .
I love Canada, especially the road signs. One, warning of wildlife (animaux sauvages) in the vicinity, is a large, white cutout of an antlered wapiti (elk), with a neon-orange round eye. The picture for falling rock took me a moment to decipher -- it looked like a bear's paw at first. And the one for trucks entering the roadway looks like the truck is going to run smack into the road: Kaboom!
On the way here from Fernie, via Cranbrook and Creston, is a kitschy place called The Glass House. A guy in the funeral trade (trading corpses for what?) decided to build a whimsical home for himself and the missus out of empty, sealed embalming-fluid bottles. It's actually quite livable and sweet: round rooms. He had so much fun, he kept building, mostly little round watchtowers, an arched bridge, what-have-you. Then came the landscaping. (Mind, all this is built on bedrock along the shores of Kootenay Lake -- an idyllic setting). The waterwheel isn't bad, but all the dwarves, Snow White, deer, etc. get a bit too cute. Still, it's quite charming and worth the five bucks for a tour (given by his sweet, early-20s granddaughter). Beat the heck out of the wildlife museum that I stopped in (seduced by the roadway signs), which was a morose collection of stuffed mammals and live pheasants (gorgeous plumes on those caged birds).
Some moments, being on the road is fabulous: driving along two-lane, line-less highways, blasting the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Other times, I long for a stable roof over my head, particularly when it comes to fixing myself a meal. God, I'd love to have access to an oven just to bake myself a spanakopita, or maybe a cobbler, or... . Cooking in the rain sucks when you don't have adequate shelter, and I don't even try. I'm spending far more than budgeted on eating out. (What else is new?) On the other hand, I prefer bathing in the eddy of a fast-flowing creek to a bathtub any day, and my hair is so much softer when rinsed regularly with creek water. True, hot running water is one of our finer inventions, but those creeks sure are fine, too.
Time's up. I'll keep y'all posted as I can. My love to everyone.
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last updated on March 15, 2008
The Spiritual Art of Being Organized
