I know that, for me, reading the work of a valued author can be a source of encouragement, reinforcement, and even stability. Rereading a bo0k can help with this, but having a new work, with new thoughts, in hand is even better. With that perspective, I decided to collect together the daily emails I’ve sent to my subscribers over the past couple of years.

Many of these are excerpts from Tears and Healing. They center around the text of a section of that book. But each of my mailings also includes an introduction. In these I elaborate on or emphasize the message in that excerpt. Other mailings are completely new writing, and I’ve included those here as well. Many of these are among my most poignant writings, and this is their first appearance in print. In some cases those original essays either led to or followed from another work like Meaning from Madness.

While Tears and Healing and Meaning from Madness are essentially teaching works, this collection is intended to serve more as a refresher. As such, I’ve chosen not to order this collection into like subjects, but instead to allow the subject to vary from one essay to the next.

If you’ve received my mailings, you know they serve more than one purpose - they both educate and sell. Sometimes I’ll refer to the selling side of these as "shameless promotion." My father was a salesman, and subsequently a manager who taught and guided others for whom selling was their livelihood. And while selling may have come more easily to him than to me, at least I learned that, indeed, there is no shame in it. In most cases I’ve edited out the more explicit encouragements to buy, but in some cases the messages mingle. There, I’ve chosen to include it, and let you sort it out. Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I don’t want you to buy some more books. It’s just that I don’t mean to drive you batty asking you do it 5000 times in a row.

Richard Skerritt, aka Richard, 21CP, and author of Tears and Healing