Why publish CopyLeft?
CopyLeft isn’t an invitation to a free-for-all, it’s a call from a wild soul seeking freedom from the biting shackles of capitalism. My novels are free of charge, not because they’re cheap, but because they’re priceless.
Why create? Why spend an interminable amount of time devising narratives expansive enough to convey the philosophical, poetic, & social insights I unearth in the collective psyche, only to give it all away to any grabby handed shill while demanding nothing in return, not even a reference to my name? What’s in a name? These understandings, these creative leaps in cognition are a gift, and therefore must be gifted onwards. Anything less than freely given doesn’t align with my higher Self, or the universal spirit of Love.
Nothing grows in a vacuum, and in that same manner neither does inspiration. The imagination needs an ecosystem within which to develop. Some writers are exotic plants demanding a very specific amount of sunlight & water; they cannot survive without constant care & attention or else their ideas wilt like petals in the glare of the critic’s laser focus. I am no such writer. I am a weed thriving on barren earth, writings rooted in salt-rock & rarefied air; I create when showered with attention; I create when roundly ignored. However a person creates, dreams manifest through co-creation, so to claim sole ownership of that, and then attempt to dictate how such inspiration is to be interpreted by others, is sacrilege.
CopyLeft is the abundance of apple trees in autumn, the wild-berry hedgerows; the blackbird’s song. CopyLeft is Tim Berners-Lee’s fight for the free democratisation of the internet; it is Danish writer Janne Teller arguing that if AI can scrape the data from books written by humans in order to democratise knowledge, then all AI platforms should be nationalised for a fair & balanced exchange.
‘All ownership is theft’, the old anarchist adage goes, and that includes ideas. Perhaps I'm a fool who gives her ideas away too easily to vampire souls who devour & regurgitate without any care for the original creators they dare not admit inspire them. But I have faith in the universal law of every action having an equal & opposite reaction. I know karmic energy sent out into the world returns, and so I don’t need to fight for my rights, I just need to create, share the work, & have faith that the people who resonate with my words will find me.
There is one caveat, and it is that absolute freedom to help oneself doesn’t mean that a person should do so without offering something of equal value back to the universe. That’s the catch. That’s the twist in every fairytale plot – you can take whatever you want, but beware because everything you do exacts a price and if you won't pay onwards exactly what you soul knows it should now, then a cost not of your choosing will likely be exacted at a most inopportune time & place. But still, like the apple trees, it’s not for me to dictate who can & cannot eat the apples, or how they’re devoured; the apple trees’ role in the ecosystem is to produce beautiful apples avec grâce et grandeur. It is for the forager to learn how to care for the trees so that an abundance of apples continues for many years to come.
Now I ask, could anything sent out into the world with such trust & Love fail? How is failure measured? I don’t seek fame or fortune, CopyLeft by its very nature negates those facsimiles of success while offering the freedom to focus solely on the heart’s imaginings. And what freedom! All that is asked in return is that I write the truth as it is revealed, no more, no less. Still, the path is long & arduous because this seemingly simple request actually demands nothing less than the stripping away of ego while embracing the psyche’s shadows in order to step into an authentic iteration of self I’m not sure I’ve previously felt brave enough to reveal.
This most authentic inspiration is a fickle, mercurial animal who vanishes at the slightest attempt at tying her to financial reward or egoistic gain, and so leaning into CopyLeft forces me away from those capitalist benchmarks towards measuring success through each insight translated with subtle artistry into compelling narrative.
CopyLeft takes the creative’s demand for sovereignty right to the feet of the capitalist behemoth, and yes perhaps this challenge has no greater effect than if I were to throw snowflakes at the beast’s flaming eyes, but if there were hundreds of millions of us, couldn’t enough snow dampen even the hottest furnace?
No matter. I no longer shoulder the responsibility of wanting to create enough of a snowball to start an anarchist avalanche because CopyLeft! Ah! CopyLeft will not disappoint, nor will she desert me, for she is the ideal I hold to when others’ obsession with capitalist success threatens to dissolve my faith in our capacity for Love. CopyLeft is Love. It says ‘I Love my creations more than money’, ‘my time is more valuable than cash’, &, ‘I have faith that the truth will find her way in the world’.
I cannot dictate where & when my ideas might reach minds that appreciate them, instead I remain wedded to the notion that these creations are, as I said at the beginning, a priceless gift to the universe in praise of all the inspiration she bestows, and as such I can only create with a Love-rich, cash-poor heart, trusting in diving timing: the universe aligns when the he[art] is true.
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