Teresa R. Funke's Blog: Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life, page 7

The Gift of Receiving

My birthday is coming up soon, and since I’m too happily busy this year to plan anything, I’ve instead enjoyed looking back on past memorable birthdays and what they meant to me. This morning, this memory came to mind:

It was my 12th birthday, I think. My mom always hosted a joint birthday party for me and my brother with our extended family, and a small party for each of us with a few friends. Since no one in my family or my friends’ families had much money to spare, my gifts were usually modest and few. But that year, for some reason, I got lots of great gifts. My mom had saved her best present for last; a teddy bear I’d been pining for. Because she knew I really wanted it, she let me think I hadn’t received it until that evening when she announced, “Oh wait, I almost forgot . . . I have one more gift for you.” I was so excited.

But an hour later, I went to her room with my teddy bear and said, “Here, you should return this.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Well,” I said. “I feel bad. I got so many great gifts this year. This feels like too much.”

To my surprise, my mother became angry with me. “It’s not your place to return a gift that someone wants to give you,” she said. “I was happy to give you this gift because I knew you really wanted it. You’re ruining it.”

I was shocked. I was the kid who always tried to do the “right” thing, and I thought that’s what I was doing. I’m not sure why my mom reacted so strongly. Maybe something else was upsetting her, maybe she was tired, maybe she was picking up a hint of false humility on my part. Though I never forgot her admonishment, it didn’t stop me from loving that bear.

The other day, we received an invitation to a party for an important occasion with the instruction, “No gifts.” I was a little disappointed to see that, because the occasion is a big deal and I thought it called for something special. I’ll respect their request, of course. It’s a pretty common one, especially as we get older. There are few things at this stage in life any of us really need, and many of us, myself included, are trying to declutter, so I get it.

I word my invitations a little differently though. I always say, “No gifts necessary.” Because they’re not. I will never, ever ask for gifts, nor do I need them, but if there’s a new chocolate bar you’ve been dying for me to try, or a small bouquet at the grocery store that is calling to you, or a funny, big-ass balloon that makes you feel like a little kid when you walk it to the car, I’ll take it.

It feels a little risky to write this post for fear it will be misinterpreted. All I’m really saying is, if my birthday, or any other occasion, provides you an excuse to do something that makes you happy, that makes me happy. Just like my mom with that bear. And if giving you a present or doing you a favor makes me happy, can that be okay with you?

While we can all agree it’s often better to give than to receive, could it also be true that sometimes it’s better to receive than to give? And I’m not just talking about birthdays here . . .

Think about it.

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Are You Really in the Pursuit of Happiness?

This post originally ran on July 1, 2017

This Fourth of July weekend, I’m musing on the Declaration of Independence. What exactly did our Founders mean by including “the pursuit of Happiness” as one of our unalienable rights?

Some say they were influenced by Francis Hutcheson, an Irish reverend and philosopher, and others who believed happiness was best achieved when people engaged in civic actions to ensure the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers. In other words, our admittedly privileged Founders knew that true happiness came from contributing to society, not just seeking personal wealth, satisfaction, fame, or glory.

Our interpretation of this “right” has changed in modern times. Most people today view it in a more self-gratifying manner. Our right to pursue happiness seems to mean the ability to seek personal fulfillment, material goods, time for our hobbies, etc. We have truly become a “me-centered” nation.

But what would happen if we all looked at the things that make us happy in our personal lives and sought to make those same things more readily available to others? And what if we pushed our lawmakers to do the same?

So, if getting a college education helped you achieve happiness in your career, could you demand our politicians make college more accessible and affordable to all? If you were lucky enough to benefit from a grant in your arts career, might you lean on your Members of Congress to make more such grants available for others. If you take pride in your heritage, might you encourage new candidates entering political races to embrace and support diversity in all areas?

And when your pleas fall on deaf ears, can you legally take matters into your own hands? When our lawmakers fail to care for those in need, can we be the ones to start scholarships, set up grants, raise awareness, take action?

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend wrote that the Founders knew, “People were happy when they controlled their destiny, when their voice was heard, when they participated in public events, when the government did not do things to them, or even for them, but with them.”

This country was founded on the belief that happiness is hollow when it’s not shared. And our Founders recognized that when only a portion of our citizens are happy and others are not, unrest will follow. It isn’t just our duty to care for others, it’s our right. We are privileged to live in a country where we can fight not only for our happiness, but for the happiness of others.

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Are You Boredom Averse or Stress Averse?

Whew, what a crazy week! I feel like I say that a lot. Wait, I do say that a lot. My friends and family have come to expect crazy weeks from me, which is why the many months I took off last year to address health and personal issues was so unsettling for them and for me.

I vowed I wouldn’t jump back into the “yes mess,” as I call it, once the pandemic and my sabbatical ended, and yet I have. I’m not complaining. My work is endlessly fascinating, and often exciting, and just as often hours upon hours of hard work and focused concentration.

This past week, I had just enough time on my walk to listen to Adam Grant’s podcast ReThinking. He was interviewing Agnes Callard, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago. She shared her thoughts on a theory that some people are “stress avoidant” and some are “boredom avoidant.” While most of us would prefer to steer clear of both of them, she said people who really want to avoid stress are willing to have some boredom, and people who really want to avoid boredom are willing to have some stress. She added, “I’m often told ‘you seem exhausting,’ and I think that it’s because they are stress avoidant, and I’m boredom avoidant. I’m willing to deal with a lot of stress as long as I’m not bored.”

It’s always a bit disconcerting when the universe holds up a mirror to you without warning. I instantly recognized myself in her comments. I am, and always have been, boredom avoidant. And it’s true that because of that, I operate at a certain level of stress at all times.

I was a very bored teenager growing up in a working-class family in Boise, Idaho. There wasn’t much money to do a lot of “fun” things, and my daily after-school job kept me out of extracurricular activities. But it’s not like Boise was teeming with new opportunities anyway, not to mention most of my friends were bigtime introverts and preferred to stay home on the weekends to recharge. I wiled away countless hours reading, watching old movies on TV, making up stories in my head, and vowing whatever career I had, it would never, ever be boring!

And it’s not. I love my job, and the many challenges it brings. I adore spending time with my friends and family and being involved in several creative communities. The pandemic and my sabbatical did reassure me I wouldn’t go crazy if faced with a bit of boredom, but also reaffirmed it’s not a state in which I thrive.

So is the “answer” that those of us who are stress averse should try moving out of our comfort zones now and then, and those who are boredom averse should set aside time to be bored? If so, the problem is, I don’t remember how to be bored. I think I sometimes assume it’s as easy as setting aside time for what you might call “intentional boredom” (also known as relaxation). You know, wiling away a summer afternoon on the patio reading a book or chatting with a partner about nothing or dozing in one’s chair. But that’s enjoyable, and boredom is not. So that can’t be it. Deciding to be bored by, say, watching a boring movie would just lead to frustration. So, what is the answer?

Maybe there isn’t supposed to be an “answer.” Maybe sometimes a theory is just a theory, and not something designed to prompt us toward action or change. Maybe that’s just me choosing to stress about being a boredom-averse person. Maybe the universe just wanted me to notice this about myself. Not change it, necessarily, simply accept it. Acknowledge I’m never going to be someone who leans into boredom, but that doesn’t mean I can’t also be someone who dials down the stress now and then in order to reground, recharge, and relax.

My task list is a mile long for the next few weeks and contains some things I simply need to do but also several things I’m excited to do. Still . . . the weather is looking good this weekend, so maybe, just maybe, I’ll see you for a bit on the patio. That is, if you’re not out there stretching your own boundaries.

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Where Imagination Meets Conscious Choice

My friend Bruce Adolphe is a world-renowned composer. In reading through his new book, Visions and Decisions: Imagination and Technique in Music Composition, I wondered how many of his insights I’d be able to apply to my own art. I’m not a musician, after all. While I did enjoy playing the piano well into my college years, I never got good at it. The same can be said of my singing. I can carry a tune but even after singing lessons, I mostly confine my vocals to the shower.

But the book is really about the creative experience of, as Bruce puts it, “thinking in the music and thinking about the music.” That journey all artists take when we get a vision and move on to decide how that vision will be realized on the page or on the stage. There’s a section where Bruce tells how Leonard Bernstein used to lie down to work in order to more easily access the “twilight area . . . wherein fantasies occur.”  Bernstein goes on to explain that if you are conscious enough to observe yourself fantasizing you can start to form that fantasy into something tangible. “You may not know what the first note is going to be,” he says, “but you have a vision of a totality.”

Of course, this is a truncated piece of a more developed point that both Bruce and Bernstein are making, but what struck me about this quote was my continuing fascination with this very blog, and to a larger extent, the writing process. I approach this blog every week from a waking “twilight space.” I’m never sure what I’m going to write about, and then a line comes to me from something I recently read, or overheard, or thought up myself. Sometimes I start out with that line and the blog builds from there. Sometimes, though, that original line (which you would think was sacred) gets cut in the editing. More often, the blog post moves in a direction I didn’t anticipate, and when I type the last words, I hear myself say aloud, “Oh! So that’s what this post is about. How cool.”

The general public loves to ask the question, “Where did the idea for this play or song or novel come from?” They want to hear that producing art is as easy as getting the answer in a dream or a divine download. Or that art always springs directly from a particular experience or emotion, because if that is our truth, it can be their truth too. “All” they have to do is go deep inside. Or maybe they want to hear stories about how we reworked that piece one hundred times before it arrived at its finished place, because that lets them off the hook. They can convince themselves they don’t have the time, the discipline, or the “talent” to revise something one hundred times, therefore it’s not the path for them. Instead, they can sit back and revel in our “genius.”

The only thing, though, that truly makes disciplined artists special is that we accept and thrill first to the vision of what something could be. We can’t see it in its entirety when we start out. That’s not even possible. But we can envision its existence in the world and that excites us. A writer friend of mine says when she starts a new book, she pauses to picture her finished book in published form floating before her. And then she gets to work. Long, hard, arduous, painstaking, enlivening, joyous, mindful work.

Really, though, don’t we all get visions every day? We “see” a new recipe we want to create, or the perfect outfit we want to assemble, or the answer to a complex problem at our workplace and our energy rises. Sometimes, though, the recipe tastes like crap, sometimes we can’t find the exact items we need for that outfit, sometimes our ideas get shot down at work. But if we hold on to the vision, we find the courage to try different spices until the recipe is good, or to tweak our original idea until the outfit comes together, or to propose a different suggestion at work that does get accepted.

In other words, a vision itself is not perfect, no matter how true it feels at first. A vision is the initial acceptance of the finished product in its totality. A totality that includes all the mistakes, and sharp turns, and right and wrong decisions along the way. Art, I think Bruce is saying, is the perfect marriage between imagination and choice. What do you envision today and how will you choose to begin?

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You Can Make It There and Anywhere

On a recent trip to New York City, I spotted a young man studying a musical score on the subway, deep in concentration. I’ve traveled to New York nearly a dozen times, so I know it’s not uncommon to board the train and see musicians setting their instruments beside them on a seat, or to overhear two young actors quizzing each other about their current roles, or to listen to a couple of young writers chatting excitedly about the bookstore reading they just attended.

Some of them were born in the city, some have come to New York from far-flung places because, as the song promises, if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere. Some were raised by parents who nurtured their artistic dreams, some by parents who scorned them. Some have arrived in the city to get art degrees from prestigious colleges, some have come knowing only they will sleep on a friend’s couch and busk on the streets for their share of the rent. Some have come fully intending to make it big, some have come just to give it a shot.

Their excitement and ambition are infectious. Their frustration and despair are palpable. They are the kids we told to follow their dreams no matter what. They are soul wanderers, and I feel such affection for each and every one of them.

But a part of me also wants to remind them we are in charge of our goals; they are not in charge of us. Success doesn’t lie in New York or Nashville or Chicago, success lies within us. Our journeys will take us down many paths, but the yellow brick road always leads back to the home we find within ourselves.

Not every young artist will be “discovered” in those great cities, and many who move there will “give up” and go home, but it’s only giving up if you stop doing what you love! Just because things didn’t turn out the way you hoped they would in the Big Apple, doesn’t mean your art has left you. Maybe you only got one gig per year in New York while you also waited tables and worked in retail stores and delivered pizzas, but in that smaller town where you later choose to live, you are cast in nearly every local show. You’re acting six times a year, doing what you love. The big fish in the little pond. The actor or singer or writer or artist who helps build a community, and who is truly appreciated for what they offer, sometimes even outside their area.

And for those who get their big break in the big city, rejoice! Revel in it! But remember those accolades, those hits, and the fame that might accompany them do not define you, and your fame does not own you. Your goals belong only to you. You are allowed to change them any time you choose. Ambition is not just tied to work. We aspire to be many things in our lives. Your achievements are not your measure. You’ve proven you can follow your dreams, so always, always follow your heart.

And to those of you ambitious artists who knew all along chasing that big-city dream of success was not for you, congratulations. I trust and hope you’ll never have regrets. After all, you started local theater companies that have run for 50 years, you taught middle-school students how to find their voices, your downtown murals are the first thing your neighbors show their visitors when they come to town, your regular gig at the wine bar is the thing people look forward to all week. You are the reason people like me found our way into the arts.

And for those of you who’ve chosen to set your art aside for a while to pursue other dreams, you inspire us, too, because you value what matters to you right now. You are still and always following your dreams. In all your news roles, your artist soul is guiding you.

Ambition, at its core, is a desire to achieve something coupled with hard work and determination. Only you know where your ambition can and will take you, if you keep your heart open. There’s no straight path for any of us. We’re all zigzagging in the direction of our dreams, setting new goals one moment, shedding old ones the next. Working hard, resting, searching, and growing. Embracing the art of living.

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Long Before There Was Music, There Were Notes

The other night, I attended an “evening of creation” designed to help us access our “practical spirituality.” One of the presenters, Jonathan, played music for us on a handpan drum. I wasn’t familiar with the instrument, and the sound was ethereal and relaxing. Jonathan was one of those splendid individuals who manage to come across as calm, insightful, and full of mirth all at the same time.

In talking about his “technique” for playing and composing, Jonathan said he just “feels the music and allows it to come through.” He reminded us, “the things that go into the creation of all music – 12 established notes, recognized chords, etc. – all existed before anyone ever ‘thought’ of them or played them or wrote them down.”

It’s not the first time I’ve been introduced to that concept, but it grabs my heart every time I hear it. For centuries, artists of all kinds have tried to explain the process of creation. Many of us have spent hours marveling at or longing for the experience of “flow.” Most of us have had an idea or image come to us in a dream, or received a “sign” offering us creative direction. We’ve been continuously delighted when two of us get the same idea at the same time, or when a collaboration transcends to a uniting of souls, and we start moving or singing or writing in unison.

We like to call it “magic” when we experience something divine in the arts. When we, the audience or the artist, start to cry and we’re not sure why. When the art moves our bodies to dance or makes us jump up and down with excitement. When the art “speaks” to us and suddenly we know what it is we’re supposed to do about that problem we’ve been struggling with, or that thing we can’t let go of, or that person we just realized we love after all.

If art existed long before we did, then it exists for us, but not just for us. As Jonathan and some of the other people pointed out that evening, art can be seen and heard in nature, in wildlife, in light and darkness, in the rush of air. Art is nature’s breath.

It’s no wonder artists throughout time have offered up their work to whatever gods or spirits or muses they believed in. How else could they explain something that is in you and outside of you and before and after you all at once? Yes, we make the art – the artist and the recipient. But it comes through us and moves out into the world where it inspires someone else to create their own art. And in that way, it continues on, never ending, always a mystery, always divine, always of us and beyond us, defying understanding at the same time it makes perfect sense. Magic.

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What Is Your Soul Telling You?

“I paint to let my soul know I am listening.” That’s a comment a friend posted on one of my social media pages in response to one of my blog posts. I’ve seen her work, and its beautiful and unique. It brings me joy just looking at it, probably because my soul can feel the joy she felt when she was creating it.

We’ve all had the experience of going to a concert by one of our favorite singers and feeling surprisingly unmoved. When our friends ask about the concert, we express our disappointment by saying, “You could tell their heart wasn’t in it.”

You might have had the experience, too, of visiting an art gallery when your heart wasn’t in it, rushing through so you could get to the café, and being stopped in your tracks by a piece of art that reached out and grabbed you by the soul. Conversely, you might have gone to an exhibit by a famous artist with high expectations and left feeling unaffected. No meeting of the souls there, at least not for you. But what about the person standing next to you?

The fact is, every living artist has created a work half-heartedly. Maybe they were struggling to meet a deadline, maybe they took the job just for the money, maybe they’ve grown tired of a certain style but their audience or promoters won’t let them move on. And most of the time, we, their fans, can tell.

Putting your soul into your work doesn’t always mean your art should elicit joy. If your soul is hurting, your colors may be dark, your lines harsh. Your soul tells us your pain is real, and we feel it. We recognize it, because we’ve felt it too.

There are so many reasons we don’t produce art from our souls; we’re afraid of hurting someone, of being judged, of being labeled, of “getting lost” in our own emotions, or of deluding ourselves. We’re afraid we won’t be understood, or that our soul’s art will never make us money or bring us fame.

But you can only say no to your soul for so long without compromising your art. All art is about growth. A love song, a play about abuse, a humorous memoir about parenting, a photograph of mourners at a funeral, they’re all about growth.

The desire to create art is our soul’s call to stop and notice what’s causing us to grow; a person, an experience, a triumph, a heartache, a lesson, a love. The pursuit of art is our answer to that call. The question today is, are you listening?

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Should I Change the World Or Take A Nap? – Revisited

This Post Was First Published on January 16, 2016

I have a tendency to work too much. My friends tell me to slow down, take more naps, spend more time outdoors, and so on. So, I do. I drop some projects, step back from some roles, say no to some opportunities. And for the first few weeks, it feels great. I have time to read books again, watch TV with my husband, and have coffee with friends. I feel like maybe I’ve returned to my true self . . .  until I don’t feel that way.

I’ll start to feel antsy and as if my productivity has suffered. Apparently, I need a certain amount of chaos and loads of deadlines in order to accomplish more.  What’s that old adage? If you want something done, ask a busy person.

But I think a bigger question is at play here. Now that I’m entering a new phase (the empty nest era), I’m wondering if the time has come to kick back and enjoy life, or do the opposite: shift things into high gear and do something big.

When I was a child and people asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I’d say, “I’m not sure, but I know I want to help people. I want to make a difference.”  I had this abiding certainty I was put on this earth to do something great. People would say, “That’s cute, kid, but not everyone can be president.” They told me just being a good person was enough, and I think that’s mostly true.

But what if those feelings I had as a child were not passing fancy?  What if that quiet voice of my intuition was speaking my truth? What if I was put here to do something important and I knew it the way kids know so many things we dismiss? Is it arrogant to think it? And if I give myself permission to believe it, does that mean I’ll have to go back to being crazy busy all the time?  Can I change the world without changing the life I love?

I have a friend who says, do what you want to do right now, always. If you want to sit outside and gaze at the clouds, do it. If you want to change the world, do that. In other words, throw all the rules out the window, throw out all the judgments and self-criticism and analysis, and just do what your heart is calling you to do in that moment, without question.

Maybe I do know why I’m here, I’ve just forgotten. Maybe if I stop trying so hard to figure it out, it will come to me, kind of like that song that is on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t remember it until you give up trying. And it might come to me on a relaxing walk or in a focused meeting with a colleague. I’m not going to worry about that anymore. I’ve realized I don’t need to look for my path. I’m already on it. I just need to trust where it leads.

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What Is Love Without Risk?

Artist Dario Robleto once said, “With nothing to risk, love can’t exist.” Maybe that quote is resonating with me because my husband and I are approaching our 32nd anniversary. Though we’d been together for two and a half years by the time he asked me to marry him, and while we’d talked around the subject a few times and the proposal came as no real surprise, and while I’d already decided I could spend my life with this person, when he proposed, I hesitated. Big time. I paced around the living room for a full twenty minutes and only said yes when he threatened to leave. Poor guy.

In my defense, I’d seen plenty of bad marriages, many of which ended in divorce, in the circles that surrounded me while growing up. All four of my grandparents had been divorced at least once in a time when divorce was uncommon. In fact, just dating someone in any sort of serious manner had seemed scary enough. But part of me knew if I wasn’t able to take a risk, I’d never be able to love.

I took another risk shortly after our marriage and left my job to pursue my love of writing, knowing it would never be an easy path. And I took a risk and had children, knowing there would certainly be times I’d get my heart broken by worry for them. And I took a risk moving to a new city, practically sight-unseen, believing I could find a loving home there. More recently, I took the risk of allowing myself a sabbatical to address personal and health issues, trusting that the work, friends, and family I love would still be there when I re-emerged.

I heard a folk singer tell a story the other night about a time when he wrote songs for a publishing company. Of the 400 songs he wrote, only one went on to achieve real success but that was okay with him. It paid for his house. You can’t write 400 songs without giving a piece of your heart to each one, and you can’t submit them for publication without a leap of faith. What amazing risks we artists take.

This is my 440th blog post. I’ve put my heart into every single one, publishing each in a leap of faith. Many posts reach exactly the right person. I know because they write to me, or share the post, or comment on my social pages. A few of my posts have been picked up elsewhere, some I’ve repurposed in other ways, none have “gone viral.” And still I write. Nearly every week. Taking all kinds of risks. And loving every minute.

I’m getting ready to launch a major new work project. It felt at first like a risky venture. Now, whether it’s perfect or not-quite so, it just feels like something else to love. Lucky, lucky me.

(Happy anniversary to my amazing husband. You were right, the risk was worth it!)

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Books Are Not Sacred

I gifted a nonfiction book to a friend I knew she’d like. She texted me to say she was loving it, so much so she’d actually dog-eared a couple of pages so she could come back to them later.

I texted back: “Books are not sacred. Dog-ear it, underline it, write in the margins, put stars next to sentences you like. A book is an agreement and a connection between reader and writer.”

I’ve come to understand a book is not complete when it’s published, it’s only complete when it’s read. It only comes fully to life when the reader brings their own experiences and opinions to the story or information. A book is a dialogue between reader and writer, so go ahead and “talk” with your dog-ears and scribbles.

I didn’t always feel this way. I was raised to revere books. They were precious items to be treated with respect, stored carefully, and saved forever in your personal library. I still believe that books, like any piece of art, deserve respect but I no longer view them as sacred.

In offering up my house as a repository for good literature, I overtaxed every bookcase I own. Shelves were sagging under the weight of so many volumes, some books were stacked two-deep so you couldn’t even see the ones behind, others were piled up in falling-over stacks. As much as I adored my book collection, I came to realize not only was so much clutter not allowing me space in my thinking, feeling, manifesting sides of life, it was weighing me down, making me feel “overbooked” (as my feng shui friend said of her own vast collection) and torturing me with a sense of obligation to read the unread volumes or revisit old favorites.

Over the past year and a half, while working to feng shui my home, I’ve given away or donated more than 650 books. There was a time when you would never have convinced me to part with that many titles. So, I had to take it slow.

I started with nonfiction books with outdated information or information I no longer needed for my career. Then I moved on to those tumbling-down piles of unread books, some of which had been sitting in my house for 20 years. If I hadn’t read them by now, I probably never would. Then came the hard part, the hundreds of novels I had read and carefully organized. I pared it down to only my favorite books (which is still quite a few). Part of my criteria was that I had to be able to recall the story very well. It was shocking how many books I’d read that I remembered thinking were good, and yet somehow their stories had not stayed with me.

Then came my vast collection of World War II nonfiction books, which had supported the 27 years I’d spent writing about that time period. In that case, my friend convinced me to “lighten up” by parting with any books whose titles evoked conflict or a sense of harm. Out went good books like The Art of War or They Were Expendable or Bloody Sunday.

And suddenly, I could breathe. There was space now to make way for new things to come. New passions, new joys, new treasures to display, even new reading pleasures.

Back in college, I learned to write in textbooks, but I never got comfortable doing so with books I bought for my “collection.” A collection should be pristine in order to have value. Or so we’ve been taught. But when I started writing my WWII novels, I began treating my research books (both fiction and nonfiction) like the tools they were meant to be. I marked them up in order to use that information in my writing. Then as life started getting busier, and I started learning more about things that could really benefit me—books about health and wellness, parenting, spiritual growth, etc.— I realized marking up books saved time, enabling me to quickly find passages I wanted to reread or share. It also helped me remember key points.

From there, I slowly gave myself permission to mark in novels I read for pleasure. It began as it did for my friend, with dog-earing pages, and moved on to underlining or starring beautiful lines or favorite paragraphs. Initially, I thought I could learn from that, that it would make me a better fiction writer. In time, it felt more like a compliment to the author, as if I were saying, “Hey, I see this. This is a great line. Wow, you should be proud.”

I almost stopped marking in my books last year once I vowed to give more away. I worried I’d “ruin” the experience for the next reader. Now I like to think if I do wind up giving that title away, a fellow bookworm might stumble across my very few notations and pause to really take in that line or paragraph. Will they agree that it’s brilliant, or will they wonder why that line meant something to me?

You’ll still never catch me leaving a book outside on my reading chair, exposed to the elements. I’ll never be one of those readers who bends back the cover. And my markings will always be spare and intentional. But I’m learning to accept that not all art is sacred. You don’t have to keep the whole calendar if you really just like one of the photos. Tear it out! Maybe it’s better to frame a single square of your grandmother’s quilt for your kids rather than passing her handiwork unappreciated from closet to closet. It’s okay to donate or sell a piece of art that someone gifted you if it no longer fits your décor. Far better to give it to someone who can love and appreciate it anew.

I still thrill at the sight of an impressive home library. I can’t help myself. But for me, I’d rather the books I thought worthy of my purchase actually have a chance to be read again by someone new, rather than gathering dust on my bookshelves.

If you’re an art collector (and sometimes we all are), you serve an important purpose. You preserve art for the next generations. If you’re an art lover, love your art enough to wear it until it’s in tatters, play it until it’s too scratched to play, scribble your appreciation for a passage into the margins of that book. In that way, you close the circle between you and the artist and share a deeper connection with everyone else who has found and loved their work.

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