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Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?
The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to uncover those jewels—that’s creative living. The courage to go on that hunt in the first place—that’s what separates a mundane existence from a more enchanted one.
“Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them.”
creativity is a gift to the creator, not just a gift to the audience).
So I don’t sit around waiting to write until my genius decides to pay me a visit. If anything, I have come to believe that my genius spends a lot of time waiting around for me
All I know for certain is that this is how I want to spend my life—collaborating to the best of my ability with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand.
The fact that I am here at all is evidence that I have the right to be here. I have a right to my own voice and a right to my own vision. I have a right to collaborate with creativity, because I myself am a product and a consequence of Creation. I’m on a mission of artistic liberation, so let the girl go.”
Everything reminds us of something. But once you put your own expression and passion behind an idea, that idea becomes yours.
If it’s authentic enough, believe me—it will feel original.
The rewards had to come from the joy of puzzling out the work itself, and from the private awareness I held that I had chosen a devotional path and I was being true to it. If someday I got lucky enough to be paid for my work, that would be great, but in the meantime, money could always come from other places. There are so many ways in this world to make a good enough living, and I tried lots of them, and I always got by well enough.
pigeonholing is something people need to do in order to feel that they have set the chaos of existence into some kind of reassuring order.
I submit that this woman has the God-given right to misread my book however she wants to misread it. Once my book entered her hands, after all, everything about it belonged to her, and never again to me.
Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it’s a gift.
Sometimes you have to let it go. Some songs just aren’t serious about wanting to be born yet, Waits said.
The Central Paradox
Instead, I simply vowed to the universe that I would write forever, regardless of the result. I promised that I would try to be brave about it, and grateful, and as uncomplaining as I could possibly be. I also promised that I would never ask writing to take care of me financially, but that I would always take care of it—meaning that I would always support us both, by any means necessary.
Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process. The fun part (the part where it doesn’t feel like work at all) is when you’re actually creating something wonderful, and everything’s going great, and everyone loves it, and you’re flying high. But such instants are rare. You don’t just get to leap from bright moment to bright moment. How you manage yourself between those bright moments, when things aren’t going so great, is a measure of how devoted you are to your vocation, and how equipped you are for the weird demands of creative living. Holding yourself
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“What are you passionate enough about that you can endure the most disagreeable aspects of the work?”
Because if you love and want something enough—whatever it is—then you don’t really mind eating the shit sandwich that comes with it.
I never wanted to burden my writing with the responsibility of paying for my life.
This is a world, not a womb. You can look after yourself in this world while looking after your creativity at the same time—just
People don’t do this kind of thing because they have all kinds of extra time and energy for it; they do this kind of thing because their creativity matters to them enough that they are willing to make all kinds of extra sacrifices for it.
we all need an activity that is beyond the mundane and that takes us out of our established and limiting roles in society
It doesn’t have to be perfect, and you don’t have to be Plato. It’s all just an instinct and an experiment and a mystery, so begin. Begin anywhere. Preferably right now. And if greatness should ever accidentally stumble upon you, let it catch you hard at work. Hard at work, and sane.
Do what you love to do, and do it with both seriousness and lightness. At least then you will know that you have tried and that—whatever the outcome—you have traveled a noble path.
Onward ever, backward never.
“The exchange of love between earth and people calls forth the creative gifts of both. The earth is not indifferent to us, but rather calling for our gifts in return for hers—the reciprocal nature of life and creativity.”
“The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.”
“To attribute to the Muse a special fondness for pain is to come too close to desiring and cultivating pain.”
Why would your creativity not love you? It came to you, didn’t it? It drew itself near. It worked itself into you, asking for your attention and your devotion. It filled you with the desire to make and do interesting things. Creativity wanted a relationship with you. That must be for a reason, right? Do you honestly believe that creativity went through all the trouble of breaking into your consciousness only because it wanted to kill you?
approach my work from a place of stubborn gladness.
Inspiration is always trying to work with me. So I sit there and I work, too. That’s the deal. I trust it; it trusts me.
The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.
(It was like one of those dreams where you discover a previously unknown room in your house, and you have that expansive feeling that your life has more possibility to it than you thought it did.)
What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life.
inspiration will always be drawn to motion. So wave your arms around. Make something. Do something. Do anything.
But you must stubbornly walk into that room, regardless, and you must hold your head high.
What you absolutely must not do is turn around and walk out. Otherwise, you will miss the party, and that would be a pity, because—please believe me—we did not come all this great distance, and make all this great effort, only to miss the party at the last moment.
