Michelle Huneven - The Tao Gals Guide to Real Estate: Six Modern Women Discover the Ancient Art of Finding, Owning, and Making a Home

THE TAO GALS' GUIDE TO REAL ESTATE

ALSO BY BERNADETTE MURPHY

The Knitter's Gift (editor)

Zen and the Art of Knitting

ALSO BY MICHELLE HUNEVEN

Jamesland

Round Rock

The Tao Gals'

Guide to Real Estate

Six Modern Women Discover the Ancient Art

of Finding, Owning, and Making a Home

Bernadette Murphy and Michelle Huneven

BLOOMSBURY

Copyright 2006 by Bernadette Murphy and Michelle Huneven

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Murphy, Bernadette M. (Bernadette Mary), 1963

The Tao gals' guide to real estate : six modern women discover the ancient art of finding, owning, and making a home / by Bernadette Murphy and Michelle Huneven.1st U.S. ed.

p. cm

eISBN: 978-1-58234-561-1

1. House buyingUnited States. 2. Residential real estatePurchasingUnited States. 3. Mortgage loans United States. 4. Spiritual lifeTaoism. I. Huneven, Michelle, 1953- II. Title.

HD259.M87 2005

643'.12'0973dc22

2005016177

First U.S. Edition 2006

13579108642

Typeset by Westchester Book Group

Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World

Fairfield

CONTENTS

T HE TAO GALS are a group of six women who meet on Tuesday nights to reflect on spiritual principles and how to implement them in our lives. We "fell into" the Tao when we agreed to anchor each meeting with a period of reading and writing. The Tao Te Ching (a spiritual text of eighty-one short verses written twenty-five centuries ago in China by the wise man Lao-tzu) was suggested as a text. We used the translation by Stephen Mitchell, published by HarperPerennial. Each of us, it turned out, had previously encountered at least excerpts from this slim, intriguing document, and all were equally drawn to explore it more systematically. Practically, its format of short poem-shaped chapters perfectly suited our purposes.

We Gals hail from varied religious backgrounds (Catholic, Jewish, Baptist, Unitarian Universalist), yet, to a woman, we found in the Tao Te Ching concrete, practical help in steeringor better yet, not steeringour personal and professional lives. We've learned to weaken our ambition and strengthen our resolveonly to find long-standing goals quietly attained. We've learned to do our work and move on without waiting for approbationand are amazed at how much more we accomplish. We've learned to temper our expectationsand find our disappointments sizably reduced. We Ve learned to relate to and trust the powerful, invisible, endlessly replenished, unknowable source "older than god"and find we navigate our lives with more facility and brio.

Meeting, reading, writing, then discussing the problems and issues of our lives as seen through the lens of the Tao has carried us through many a thresholdliterally. For, over the six years we've been gathering, one common thread has arisen over and over: our individual struggles with homefinding one, making one, and owning one. Or not owning one, as the case may be.

Living in Los Angeles during a peaking real estate market has been especially challenging. Together, we have learned firsthand what it's like to be women buying real estate in cutthroat circumstances. Through each other's examples, we now know that it's possible to keep your sanity and equanimity when the market has lost its head. We've seen that real inner security is not something that can be purchasedand also that it's equally possible to lose the real estate game and still come out ahead in life, with a deep sense of contentment and a true sense of being home.

Buying a house, we've also discovered, isn't simply buying a house, but a statement about where we think we belong in the world, how we see ourselves, and how we imagine others will see us. So much more is involved than simply finding suitable living quarters and signing the contract. Indeed, to be fully alive and conscious as a first-time home buyer, a certain amount of emotional prep work is required; there must be a willingness to look at old assumptions, unexamined beliefs, and entrenched prejudices about who gets to own a home, and where, and what kind of a home it will be. As with all growth, first-time home buying can be a painfulif revelatory-process, and how we handle it tells us a lot about how we handle life in general.

On a typical Tuesday night, we'll read aloud a chapter of the Tao Te Ching, then silently reflect and write for about twenty minutes on how some part of that section applies to our lives. In the writing, we make a point of telling storiesstories full of specific detail based on our own experience. When everyone's pen has come to rest, we'll take turns reading aloud what we've written. Sometimes, we sit in silence listening to each other, nodding in agreement; other times, we might add a word of encouragement or toss out comments. We laugh a lotmaybe even as much as we weep. Again and again, we see the old text come to life through the mirror of our own experiences. The Tao's wisdom, we've found, is inexhaustible. It doesn't compete with other theologies, doesn't insist on being preeminent; anyone, we've discovered, can enter its calm waters and gain a new perspective on life.

By participating in this group, we've found strengths we had no idea we possessed. We've often divided up a burden one of us is carrying, each woman taking a piece of the loada task, a bit of research, a series of daily, hand-holding phone calls. We've shared our struggles and triumphs, looking to the Tao for clues not only on how to handle the lows and the highs, but also the vast, often-dull middle ground of life. In this group, we've come to see how spiritual principles, like those in the Tao, can guide a life and make even the most roller coaster times navigable.

As for us, we are six quite disparate women, each intelligent, educated, and possessing extensive expertise in our own fields. Yet when it came to dealing with real estate, we all felt on shaky groundand discovered that many of our insecurities had to do with being women in the home marketplace. In all of our families of origin, our fathers had exclusively handled the real estate transactions, so the arena of home buying seemed well outside our realm of expertise and experience.

Two of usthe coauthors of the bookwill tell our stories directly.

MICHELLE

I'm the novelist of the group and a freelance journalist. As a single woman, I had never thought seriously about buying my own home until the eviction notice arrived. My experiencethe ups and downswill be explored here.

BERNADETTE

I'm a writer, creative writing teacher at the UCLA Extension Writers Program, and literary critic for the Los Angeles Times. I'm a married mother of three whose previous foray into real estate ended badlyvery badly. Can you spell foreclosure?

THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, we'll share our stories as well as those of the other Tao Gals, who offered practical advice and emotional support during our moments of real estateinspired panic and who shared their experience, strength, and hope with us as we walked our own paths. To protect the privacy of these women and to allow their stories to be told honestly and without fear of reprisal, we've changed their names.