Dear Riehlife,

I feel swamped after my first week teaching. Is my extensive creative life outside school as a dancer and workshop leader a dodge or escape or a wish for failure for my main work as a poet? What am I in quest of? Instead of spinning off in so many different directions, I resolve to focus in the coming 12 months, rather than undermine and fragment myself with too many commitments.

Can I just let myself be a poet without adding challenges on top of that? Can I feel good enough as I am? Can I simply express myself in my art? I long to feel that I am worthy without adding another layer (say becoming a nature mystic before I can be a worthy poet).

Creatively Swamped

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Dear Swamped,

From where I sit, focusing your prodigious talent and energies makes perfect sense. What are you in quest of? Wholeness, as I see it. But there is only so much of you to go around, and so the quest leads to fragmentation. I can relate, quite naturally.

It's okay to be the poet you are without another layer. Part of the layering is a creative impulse, I believe, though. The layering is a quest for richness. Simpler is easier, and those that have trod that route have it easier. But, all that you have taken in through the quest for richness and wholeness and layering...all that is now you. All that will make your poetry richer. Do not renounce an iota of it. Going forth with focus makes sense, however.

We've both experienced that outside North America, "people appreciate and honor artists, seeing them as cultural makers and part of the intelligentsia". They value such "meaning makers" (to use Eric Maisel's phrase) and don't need to ask how many millions they have made. In Europe, there is such a different response when I say I am an artist or a poet or an actress-storyteller. People become interested and ask intelligent questions about my work. In North America there is a commercial bias: "Have you sold anything? Can you make a living doing that? Would I have read anything you've written?"

Some creatives do hit commercial success. Others, such as myself, have simply made an agreement with themselves that they will support their projects and allow these to be a labor of love. These are different paths. Each of us finds our own. The important thing, I feel, is to consciously choose a path, allow the path to support your creative life, and give you enough happiness that your urge to create has a safe container.

Be well. Be happy. Yes, be focused.

"All will be well and all will be well
and all manner of things will be well." --Dame Julienne of Norwich

Affectionately,
Janet, a sister poet, also a layer-seeking-and heat-seeking-creature

"Garden Creek Path," photo by Walter Hawn (copyrighted by http://westernlightphotographers.com)
Walter Hawn, Fine Art Photographs of Wyoming and the West, "It's fraught with possibilities."

I Get Creatin' in the Mornin'
or
It Ain't Practice Unless It's Work

"Creativity Practice" is just that, practicing your own version of the creative urge. An actor acts, a writer writes, a dancer dances, and so on. Creation, of any sort, is a profession, just as the more recognized 'practices' are: A doctor practices doctoring, and lawyer practices lawyering, a plumber practices plumbering.

The problem we artists face is that what we do looks 'way too much like fun. It's treated in school as ancillary and unimportant. Many of our parents thought the same, and threw in "frivolous," besides.

Because creative practice isn't honored as work, it's hard for us to face as work. It seems like it ought to be fun, always, and fun you can pick up and put down whenever you like. When something stops being fun, we tend to stop playing. So, the ideal is to generate the same practicing mentality of a professional engineer or optician. Or truck driver. We go to work, we do our work, we experience our fun (for it is fun), and we set it down at quitting time and move on to other things.

The appointed time for many creators is the morning. Twyla Tharp says she starts her day with a cab-ride and a workout, then gets to the dance studio. Robert Silverberg, for years, took himself to a cheap, low-rent, run-down office first thing after breakfast, where he wrote non-stop for hours. My friend Spencer Bohren, as a high school kid, practiced on his (I was jealous) Martin Guitar every morning before school. He plays so much better than I, even though I now have an Alvarez that he might covet....

For myself, I am less certain "the morning" is necessary. For one thing, I don't have a time-bound job, so I can awaken when I like, and my body prefers to awaken at around nine-thirty to ten. I do find though, that if I postpone beginning my creative practice very much beyond an hour after waking, I never manage to get to it. For those with the nine-to-five syndrome, I suspect that an early morning practice an hour long is preferable to trying to squeeze it in after supper.

A meditative practice can be helpful, but it's not the creative work we're trying to accomplish. For some, it's foreplay for creation, for others it's post-creation cuddling.

Most creators find that three to five hours a day is about all the concentrated effort the human mind can stand. After that, we find easier things, like income tax preparation, to slow the mind down to a 'normal' pace. Sadly, some use various substances to put the brakes on. At quittin' time is when I find meditation to be most helpful. It slows things down, and it helps fix accomplishments in place, so that I don't go wondering, "What is it I just did?" for I have a tendency to be amnesiatic about what I do while in the creative trance, and meditation helps me find my center again so I can do the dishes and sweep the floor.

© 2008 Walter Hawn