Now Playing: The Winter 2006-7 Issue May Be Our Last Hurrah!
Since the inception of Spirit of the Valley in 2003, we have received nothing but positive feedback, and calls from around the state to distribute and make available our amazing newspaper. While readership and circulation has literally gone through the roof, our advertising revenues – though substantial - have not kept pace with the increasing costs of production, as well as the reality of serving a larger and larger community base. As a free publication, our ad dollars are what keep us going.
DECISIONS, DECISIONS
Through the years we’ve upgraded the size, paper quality, and availability of color – as ways to both expand our readership and to better serve our advertisers. Our distribution has gone from 400 to over 10,000, and we’re running out every issue! In order to print more, distribute more, and keep this amazing consciousness raising, positive, and high quality publication growing and expanding, we need an influx of energy from the communities we serve. We’ve given our hearts and souls to this project, and want to be able to operate with integrity and wholeness.
For advertisers, Spirit has allowed people who are doing amazing work to let thousands of readers know what resources are available, and do it in an affordable way reaching a targeted audience. One of our goals when we started Spirit was to create just this kind of atmosphere for the practitioners, healers, and conscious business-people in the West. If we raised our rates, we would be raising them over the budgets of many of these people.
For many readers, particularly those in more remote and rural locations, I have often heard that Spirit is their window into a more expansive world, and has allowed them to connect with people and events they otherwise would never have known existed.
So, what does the future have in store for Spirit? We’re open to all possibilities. Its path may lead to someone new taking over the reigns who has the resources, infrastructure, and the vision to take it to the next level. Or, it may simply be time to move on to other challenges and opportunities.
Whatever lays ahead, it has been our honor and our pleasure to serve, and an amazing adventure.
When we started this publication, we wanted to see if the public would be receptive and open to new ideas, and the answer has been a resounding yes! What will the answer be this time?
THE VIEW FROM THE FRONTLINES
While being in the center of a lot of information over the last few years, many of us have had a lot of time to reflect on the state of consciousness, wellness, and spirituality in this part of the country. While on the one hand there are an amazing amount of events and practitioners, turn out is often sometimes low for things that are truly amazing. When Lori Joyce of Idanha Productions and Midge Woods of Spirit at Work Books & Beyond put on Goddess Night in July, and about 2 dozen people came to see some of the most amazing dancers, speakers, and musicians, it truly broke my heart. The gift they were offering was so amazing, and the underlying message of self-acceptance and esteem was exactly what we say we all want.
It’s so easy to take all of our opportunities for granted, such as the festivals in this part of the country, workshops, classes, and publications like Spirit. How often have we said to ourselves, that’s wonderful, I hope people show up. The entire New Age paradigm seems to operate under a process in which we look to others to tell us the answers, mantras, or steps to achieve what we want. The lack of support for many of the wellness events in many parts of the state suffer from this – we are so used to sitting back and taking, in being receivers, when in reality, every one of us needs support, and if we fail to balance our learning with action, our taking with giving, we simply fail to grow. How often we talk about manifesting this or that, when the reality is that we don’t exist in a bubble, but as part of a neural, conscious web of action and being. We are so much more powerful than we have been led to believe. When the event centers around how to manifest parking spaces – droves show up. When it centers around embracing who you are, and evolving to and experiencing a new level of being, actively, right now, it’s always a small group. I sometimes think that attendance at such events is low because our self-esteem is also.
The central question remains the same however, what is it that we really want? As in most cases, we vote not with our mouths, but with our feet.
No matter what happens, I know I’ll be dancing.
If there is anything that I have learned as the founder of Spirit it’s that what you know, or better yet – what you think you know – is often largely irrelevant at worst, and way way off at best. I honestly can tell you, when I look at the success and reception of Spirit, that I don’t know how it happened, it happened in spite of me many times, and most important of all – that it exceeded my wildest expectations. I also know that I don’t have all, or any, of the answers about the future, but I know it will exceed what I am capable of seeing now.
“What do you really want? If you’ve got the kids and the house and the cars and the career, or any sort of life you’re fond of, and you’re looking at the subjects discussed here as a way to spiritually enhance yourself, really ask yourself, why you’re reading…about setting your world on fire.”
- Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, page 164
