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Posts in Creativity
Are You a Follower, a Bender, or a Breaker?

Rules are meant to be [FILL IN THE BLANK]

BEACH CLOSED, said the sign. HAZARDOUS.

And yet the people walked toward the sea.

When my boys were in elementary school, their principal sent out a weekly email containing parenting tips and anecdotes. In one such message, she told the story of a mother and child she’d seen at the natural grocery. The child reached for something marked off-limits. The principal overheard the mother say, We’re not supposed to touch those, but let’s do it anyway.

I hope that child doesn’t go to my school, our principal wrote. I’m a rule follower.

The rules keep us all safe, she went on to explain. They keep our community running smoothly.

Of all the emails I received from her during our years at that school, this is the only one I remember.

I was raised to be a rule challenger, bender, and, in some cases, breaker. I was a young child when Timothy Leary popularized the phrase Question authority, but its guiding principle was baked into my DNA. My parents were anti-war and civil rights activists. I marched against the Vietnam War when I was three years old. My dad was a leader in a movement to integrate the swimming pool in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, a movement that eventually led to the creation of a public pool that all could enjoy. My mom, though reserved and soft-spoken, wore jeans in college as part of a coordinated effort to overturn the college’s dress code for women. She marched on civil rights picket lines. Much later, as a faculty member in the statistics department at UC Berkeley, she mentored women in math and science and pushed back against attempts to favor American PhD candidates over more qualified international students.

Of course these are very different kinds of rules from the ones my boys’ school principal was talking about. These were matters of principle, not safety or courtesy.

Even so, when I read the words, I’m a rule follower, my gut registered it as if she’d written, I’m a sheep.

Yet though I would never say, I’m a rule follower, I would also never say, The rules don’t apply to me.

The former calls to my mind the sickening phrase just following orders—also known as the Nuremberg defense—while the latter evokes a certain orange braggart who deems himself above the law.

So what’s the difference between a rule breaker and one who thinks the rules don’t apply to them?

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All That I Hope To Say

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.” - E.B. White.

My dear friend M recently told me she needs an unselfish reason to write her story. Without it, telling the story feels yucky to her, like some big ego trip. A voice comes into her head saying, “You’re just trying to get attention,” and that stops her words from flowing.

I get it. I’ve got those voices myself, the ones that say things like, Who the hell are you to think you’ve got something valuable to say? Everything worth saying has been said a million times over.

There’s no arguing with that choir. Those internal carpers will out-reason me every time. Which is why I try to put aside reason when it comes to making stuff. The reasons for our actions that our brains come up with are rarely the real ones anyway. Mostly, we follow our mysterious longings and invent rationales afterwards.

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The Song You Came to Sing

There was a sign on the wall at the Lawrence School of Ballet, in Lawrence, Kansas, where I grew up, that read, Make sure the song you came to sing does not remain unsung. Throughout junior high and high school, coming and going from dance class, I saw that sign almost daily.

That sign frightened me—What if I don’t find my song?—but it also filled me with determination. I would find my song. Nothing and no one would keep me from it. I would find it, and I would sing.

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The Human Experience: “The Fourth Messenger” and Me

My journey with The Fourth Messenger began in the year 2000, on a nine-day silent meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California.

It was my first retreat, and to me it felt hardcore. Meditating all day, alternating fifty-minute periods of sitting and walking, stopping only for food, kitchen duties, sleep, and to listen to a dharma talk each afternoon. Every couple of days we had a one-on-one meeting with a teacher. We weren’t supposed to bring reading or writing materials, but I secretly bucked that rule, feeling both sheepish and defiant. In the evenings I sometimes hiked instead of sitting. Once an owl swooped close to my head, beneath a half-moon so clear I could see every contour. Oh, it was beautiful. Oh, how the silence entered me.

 

But oh, how hard it was for me to sit so long. One of the hardest things I’d ever done. I was perpetually restless. When the retreat ended, a woman told me she’d made working with the frustration she felt about my fidgeting part of her practice.

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Get Out Into It

February in Michigan is thirteen months long. - Bob Hicok.

That’s why I don’t want dogs! said a friend. You have to take them out every day, no matter how crappy the weather.

It’s a gray Monday afternoon, and the temperature outside is a bone-chilling 14 degrees Fahrenheit. I have fetched my offspring from school and walked the 29 steps from my heated car to my heated home. As I sit by the fire, clutching a cup of Bengal Spice tea in my hands, inhaling its cinnamon steam, the last thing I want to do is to go back outside. But within the hour, that’s exactly what I’ll do.

Being the mama of three energetic canines means that every day of the year, whether there’s rain, snow, icy sidewalks, gusting gales or, for that matter, scorching sun and humidity to rival the rainforest, I walk.

I do this because, although we have a fenced yard where they can chase squirrels and deposit their bodies’ waste, I know that this ritual of the daily walk, when they get to go beyond that chain-link fence and bask in the wider world’s infinitely varied smells for an hour or so, is the highlight of their day. I know this because the closer I get to the spot where their leashes hang, the more wildly they dash back and forth, wagging their tails and prancing with glee. I figure it’s the least I can do for them in exchange for all the unconditional love they shower on me and my family with their exuberant greetings, licks, snuggles, empathetic gazes and rollicking joy.

But here’s the other thing : As much as I long to stay hunkered by my cozy fire, as soon as I suit up in boots and coat and balaclava and gloves and step out the door (after four and a half years in Michigan I can tell you with absolute conviction that your well-being in winter is all about the clothes), something unexpected happens: I fall in love with the world.

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Not Buying It: My Date With Marketer Bob

A lot of artists I know hate marketing. They know it’s necessary, but they’d give anything for a fairy publicist to appear in a glittering puff of smoke and promote the hell out of their latest project with a wave of a wand, so they could forget about websites and email programs and social media and keep right on making stuff.

Personally, I’ve long had a more positive relationship with this aspect of the business than many of my peers. When I started my career as a solo performer fresh out of college, I was filled with energy and enthusiasm for every aspect of the job, including promotion. I finagled friends into taking photos of me in costume. I wrote my own booking brochures, blurbs and press releases. I printed the text for my flyers on my printer, cut and pasted the images (literally, with scissors and glue — we’re talking 1988) and went to the copy shop to duplicate them. I walked every commercial neighborhood in San Francisco and the East Bay armed with flyers, tape and a staple gun, posting my image in spots both legal and il. Anyone I chatted with about my show for even a moment walked away with flyers in hand. I, on the other hand, usually managed to walk away with their address scribbled on a piece of paper to add to my embryonic mailing list. When I mailed out postcards for my upcoming shows, I added personalized notes in ballpoint pen. I felt like my audience members were my friends, and indeed, many of them were and still are.

Fast-forward thirty-plus years. My mailing list is now an email list. I have a website and the requisite trinity of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts, though I definitely prefer a discursive warble to a succinct tweet. My creative pursuits have evolved too over the years. In addition to writing plays and prose and hosting a podcast and taking photos and even still acting and singing once in a while, I’ve been leading Off-Leash Writing Workshops for the past three and a half years.

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Does Ego Get A Seat At The Table?

Twenty-odd years ago, I raised my hand in the large hall at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, and asked the renowned Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield a question.

 

“Is there a role for ambition in the Buddhist cosmology?” 

 

“That’s a good question,” said Jack, and silly as it sounds, the memory of that compliment warms me to this day. Jack said I asked a good question!

 

He had been talking, as Buddhist teachers do, about the fact that according to the Buddha’s teachings, desire—alternately translated as grasping or clinging—causes suffering. This concept, one of the Four Noble Truths at the core of Buddhist philosophy, had resonated with me ever since I picked up Sharon Salzberg’s book Lovingkindness: the Revolutionary Art of Happiness in my early thirties and plunged headlong into Buddhist teachings. Desire or grasping as the root cause of suffering spoke directly to my experience. 

At the time, I was working as a regional theatre actor in the San Francisco Bay Area and other parts of the West Coast. I related intimately to the pain of desiring to snag a particular role or work with a particular company. The desire itself was painful—I could feel it in my body as a visceral ache. Often the waiting period following an audition—the days, weeks, or even months when I didn’t know if I’d gotten the job—was worse than the disappointment on the occasions when I didn’t.  And the feeling never stopped. Even when I had an acting job that I loved going to every day, I would hear about roles others were playing and feel a stab of envious longing. I felt it even when the shows they were in conflicted with my own. I wanted to be every place at the same time, and because I couldn’t, I was never satisfied. 

 

When I discovered the Buddha’s teachings, I immediately recognized myself in the image of the Hungry Ghost, a voracious apparition with an enormous belly and a tiny pinhole mouth, who eats and eats but is never full.

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Give It All, Give It Now: A Manifesto of the Creative Life

Confession: I still doubt myself. A lot. Even though I’ve lived more than half a century, even though I’ve been putting pen to paper on an almost daily basis since I was nine years old, even though I’ve made the arts my profession throughout my entire adult life, as actor/writer/solo performer/producer at various times, I still ask myself why I do these things and what makes them worth doing.

 

There’s an ebb and flow to this inner questioning—there are periods in which I’m so utterly absorbed by the work itself that the existential dilemmas blessedly recede and I’m carried along by the current of pure doing. Love those times. But when the Muse takes a call on her cell, leaving me with the ditherings of my own mind and the eternal struggle for a more disciplined daily existence, the doubting voices return. The most persistent of these is the one that says Why bother in the face of…fill in the blank: mortality, climate change, humans’ abhorrent treatment of each other, violence, racism, poverty, greed…

 

A year ago, I added regular teaching to the list of creative endeavors that comprise my professional life. Leading others in the act of writing has been an incredible gift, but it’s also ignited a blazing new round of self-doubt. Who am I to take the lead? Am I capable of holding a room? What do I have to give? And accompanying all of that, the old underlying refrain: why why why why why…

 

Since this inner Why has been with me for so long, I’ve developed a litany of responses, drawn primarily from the work of other artists: songs, poems, passages from favorite books. So when the questions arise within me, these alternate voices rise up to answer them. Together they form a kind of Manifesto of the Creative Life, a buttress against despair. This is why. And this. And this. I share them with you today, dear Reader, in the hope that they may help you through your own moments of darkness. And if these things don’t resonate with you as they do with me, I hope the examination they sprung from may inspire you to develop a Manifesto of your own.

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