Mo' Money, Mo' Problems

Monkee land is expanding, it seems. We are growing fast. My inbox is a little scary.

I realize that for most bloggers, growing is the point. But growing fast makes me nervous. Partly because I haven’t grown since 1982, so it’s unfamiliar territory.

My inbox is full of beautiful new Monkee emails, which I savor and save, but I have also started receiving three totally different types of emails.

The first type goes like this:

Glennon, we love your blog and we think that you and your readers would love our products! We’d love to send you a free (book, trip, ticket, halter top, baby genius tape, pan) for you to try and review for your readers!

The second type goes like this:

Glennon, we think your readers would be a perfect match for our (Zit cream, jewelry line, Cooking for Dummies Line, etc) We’d love to advertise on your blog!

The third goes like this:

Glennon, I write for such and such blog. I have one million bazillion followers. Would you like to swap links so we can access each other’s readers?

So far I’ve just been quietly ignoring these emails, but since they are coming fast and furious now, it’s time to respond once and for all. And I think maybe we should review a few basic tenants of Momastery. Just in an effort to stay true to our roots, to keep it real.

Kay. We Monkees and our Momastery are not for sale.

I have never, and will never make a penny off of this blog. I will never accept a freebie. On the rare case that I offer a giveaway, it’s because A MONKEE has something MONKEE LIKE she’d like to share out of love. And if I love the Monkee thing, I BUY the Monkee thing. So that there is never any confusion about what it is that I am doing here. And I will never, ever, reference a link I’m not in love with just to gain a few readers. Goodness gracious.

Listen, I honestly don’t know where this blog is going. But I do know how we’re gonna get there and how we’re not gonna get there.

One of the purposes of this blog is to prove that things exist that are not for sale. That money and efficiency and publicity and popularity might not be the answers, the end games, the highest goals, the keys to happiness.

Everybody keeps suggesting to everybody else that these things ARE the answer. But I’m suspicious. Isn’t the fact that Dr. Drew makes a good living proof that 15 minutes of fame and fast cash do not necessarily a peaceful life make?

Our goal is to go deep here, not wide. We are collecting hearts, not exposure, and certainly not cash.

Our goals are to be careful, to be slow and pay attention and look closely at each other and to re-think and pray and feel and wake-up and care and connect. So we can become braver and live bigger and realer on this Earth.

My favorite book is Walden, by Thoreau. Thoreau was this thoughtful man who became suspicious that the world’s hoopla was making him forget what life was really about. So he decided to perform a love experiment. He never called it a love experiment because, well - because he’s a boy, but it was. He went into the woods for two years and lived on the land by a beautiful pond named Walden. And he thought and he wrote and he read and he tried to remember what he was born knowing. It was easier to remember because it was so quiet, and so he ended up writing this beautiful book in which every sentence makes my heart leap and forces me to scream to no one: LISTEN TO THIS, LISTEN TO THIS! And so Craig hates when he sees me walking around with Walden because he knows he’s going to have to do a lot of LISTENING TO THIS!

The two hours I spend writing to you each morning are my Walden. Momastery is my way of starting each day remembering what I know in the quiet.

I’d prefer to go live in the woods for two years, trust me. But I know they’d find me. Also I really, really hate the woods. Spiders.

The point of all of this is that part of Thoreau’s experiment was to live in utter simplicity. And so he had almost no furniture in his little cabin that he built himself. And one time a lady felt sorry for him and offered him a doormat, but he refused it. He said, “It’s better to avoid the beginnings of evil.”

Now listen, I don’t think that Thoreau thought doormats were evil, and I certainly don’t think blog advertising or giveaways or link swapping are evil. I just think he meant that he needed to keep his love experiment pure.

And that’s what we need to do here at Momastery. We need to never become starry eyed and dazzled and forget what we are doing here.

People are always saying the following to me: “Can’t wait for Oprah, We’re gonna be on Oprah someday!” But listen. Oprah is not the answer! As a matter of fact, being on Oprah might ruin everything. Those things are shiny and bright and WOW but we are not a shiny, WOW Revolution. We are a quiet, slow revolution. We are a one at a time revolution.

We are not for show and we are not for sale. And we are not successful if we make it to Oprah or the Today show or start creating serious revenue or what HAVE YOU.

We are successful because chances are that tonight some tired and lonely mom will click on a friend’s link and get lost in our essays and our comments and our love for each other. And she will ignore her husband for hours and she will cry a little and laugh a lot and she will read on and on and on. And it may take her months to rally the courage to comment, but she will meet us here every day because she has finally found her people! She has finally found a group of women whose only motive is to love and laugh together and who are NOT FOR SALE. And this will help her believe and be peaceful and feel a little less suspicious and more comfortable and safe and brave on this Earth. And so she will be full of joy. DONE. REVOLUTION WON. Without Oprah!

Please listen to me. The revolution is not in the future, the revolution is not on the Today Show. The revolution is in one quiet kitchen at a time. One Monkee at a time. Slow and steady. Tiny as a mustard seed. The Revolution, the kingdom of God, is INSIDE each of us. It is won or lost THERE, in each heart. Not on Prime Time.

Listen. If Lou and Oprah both called me tonight, and they both asked me to meet them for coffee. .. I would meet Lou.

It is possible that when I arrived, I might ask Lou if she felt like going to meet Oprah with me.

But if Lou was tired and kind of comfortable and said NAH, I’d say, Okay Lou, you’re right. Latte, please.

If the Monkees need money, we’ll raise it. If we need a particular word spread, we’ll spread it.

But we are not for sale. We deal in a different currency here.

And that currency is this:

Are you more joyful when you leave this place? Are you more inclined to believe that you are good and brave and true, and that others are doing the best that they can? Are you more willing to consider that there might be hope for all of us?

THEN THE REVOLUTION IS WON!

Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is inside you.” Luke 17: 20,21