Creating Empty Spaces, Toinette Lippe on the Mindful Art of Being

"Each day is valuable...Do not compare it with a dragon's bright pearl. A dragon's pearl may be found. But this one day out of a hundred years cannot be retrieved once it is lost." - Zen Master Dogen

This quote easily tripped off the lips of author, editor, illustrator and brush painter Toinette Lippe. An artist of many pursuits, Lippe had a distinguished publishing career at Simon and Schuster (under Robert Gottlieb, who later became editor of The New Yorker), Knopf and then as the editorial director of Bell Tower where she published 72 books from such luminaries as Ram Dass, Frederick Franck, Thomas Berry, Mirabai Starr, Stephen Levine, Rabbi Rami Shapiro and many others. Lippe has authored two of her own books, Nothing Left Over: A Plain and Simple Life (2002) and Caught in the Act: Reflections on Being, Knowing and Doing (reissued 2016) and an illustrator of the upcoming book On the Wing: Lyrical Moments (to be published December 2016). In this conversation, Toinette and I dive into the themes of harmonizing work and play (and if it is actually possible), ease of being a teacher and difficulty of being a student, lessons learned along the twists of life, and most beautifully, Toinette's life philosophy that came to her unexpectedly and under book deadline.