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Hand+Brain+Heart=Art
So, about that job interview…
…You know, the one I wrote about in my last post?
…You know, the one with all the gravitas and questions that made me ponder how I do the work?
Well, I was offered the position! And I accepted it!
And I took all the unicorn smarts and BIG IDEAS (!) to someone else’s office,
where I sat at a computer
with all the e-mail,
and all the systems,
and all the passwords,
and all the plans,
and all deadlines,
and all the importance, day after day,
after day,
after, day,
afterday,
afterdayafterdayafterdayafterday
…like any normal person might!
(I really, really wanted “normal person” to work for me in this instance.)
And that went on for 11 weeks until I realized:
No!
and also:
whycoloured worlds of because do not stand against YES which is built by forever & sunsmell
(thank you e.e. Cummings)
…and then I quit.
Nearly everything.
All at once.
I recently went on a job interview that was conducted with a considerable degree of gravitas. It was an affair that required metered parking, a conference room, and an entire assembled committee present to ask questions. This is exactly the sort of thing I have been doing my best to avoid for the last decade of my work life. Yet, there we all were sitting at the table with all the questions. One of the questions posed in the interview was an unexpected delight:
How do you do the work?
That’s it.
That’s the whole vague and fantastic question.
At the time it was posed, I was confounded. I had never given voice to my process. How I do the work has been a very long and winding road across time and country, over the river, and through the woods. While the answer I gave summarized that journey, there is something about that question that has been revving and honking (with a Klaxon-like “AHOOGA!” sound) at me ever since it was posed. That question feels like a tiny clown car that I could get inside with twenty friends, and we could go anywhere in it.
So today I am here still mulling over that question with the intent to share some thoughts and scenes from my everyday work life that may help shed additional light on the answer as it continues to unfold. As Rainer Maria Rilke has written,
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
How do I do the work?
First off, there is a generous supply of silliness in my work, and that is by design. I have to do quite a bit of work on myself on a regular basis to get my mind-set right. That work begins with Shakti-building exercises and intentional goal-setting to keep me a happy, healthy human. I guess other people would probably call this “planning” or maybe “self-care.” Anyway, the way I do it looks like this:
Having the right mind-set prepares me to deal constructively with the obstacles and menacing hindrances that inevitably present themselves as I’m going about the work, whatever that work may be…
When working through problems and I get stuck, allowing time for conscious play, or blending the lines between work and play does wonders for unsticking the stuck.
A lot of the work I do is setting the stage with the right props and providing the space, time, and encouragement necessary for other people to play and learn and express whatever it is they want to say. Serving as a witness for this self-discovery is one of my favorite things about my work.
It isn’t all fun and games. Yesterday morning’s work was a frenzied internal battle to get idea from brain to paper. When the dust settled this was the scene that remained:
There have been times I have been crushed by the work and fellow passengers pulled me from the wreckage. Other times, Good Samaritans have come along to fluff me back up when I’ve gotten deflated. Never underestimate those singing spirits of the world who hide right out in the open.
~*~
How do YOU do the work?
What questions are you loving and living?
…a great deal of real art is made under the radar. We barely know we are working. We just suit up and show up and grab what moments we can, and it is only in cozy retrospect that we can see the level of skill we were able to muster. It is humbling, the degree to which we are like automatons. Our art moves through us despite us.
–Julia Cameron, Finding Water
The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don’t do is quit.
–Kevin Ashton, How to Fly a Horse
Today’s retrospective analysis of the last 10 years of My Little Spacebook revealed an overarching theme running through many posts. Since the beginning, that theme is showing creative work – my own work and other people’s work that I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with or to witness.
In the last decade there has been a lot of work shared and a lot of shared work!
There’s been knitted work, decoupage work…,
…messy work in progress,
…incredibly weird work,
Herman the Hypertufa Planter
outside work…
messy inside work…,
mosaic work….,
…and exhaustion from the work.
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
-Pablo Picasso
“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”
–Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Last week I heard myself say possibly the weirdest thing I’ve ever said at work:
“Ooh, that’s right! Today is the day the ponies have to go to outer space.”
But that’s exactly the sort of thing you have to say when zombies, aliens, and monsters invade Pony Land and the battle lasts several days. Fortunately, the ponies are a forward-thinking species that have resources and contingency plans to deal with such problems. While the Pony Queen fended off the monsters, the little ponies said their magic words to make the door to the rocket ship open and allow them safe passage.
The ponies blasted off and flew through outer space and arrived safely in their haven on the moon. Meanwhile, Fred the taxi driver loaded up the defeated monsters into the back of his dump truck and hauled them off to their monster hideout.
The ponies are doing well colonizing the moon. The monsters, aliens, and zombies are on the road to recovery.
———————————————————————————————————
A job title doesn’t even come close to answering the question: “What do you do?”.
It’s December and I am on a mission! There is a bunch of stuff I need to get done to wrap up the year. I have added new goals and resolutions to this month’s spreadsheet.
Today I decided to tackle the toy collection that is taking over my office.
With the closet and cabinets crammed with tests and materials, the bathtub has become a make-shift toy box.
Before
I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond hoping to find inspiration to organize this mess. For under $50, I came up with this solution:
After
I’m not done yet! I need a couple more hanging organizers, but already that feels sooooo much better!
We show up,
burn brightly in the moment,
live passionately,
hold nothing back,
and when the moment is over,
when our work is done,
we step back,
and we let go.
-Rolfe Gates, Meditations from the Mat
Beneath those flames
the charred remains
of four years of work.
Therein the ash and smoke
lie thousands of hours of
hopes
dreams
plans.
The fire ate them all
with no regard
for the size or shape of the ideas.
I stood and fed the greedy tongues
as they hissed and sputtered,
devouring it all indiscriminately–
the fire and I whispering
all of your names
on the wind.
–Lunar Euphoria
And within the course of a week life went abruptly from this
to this
My Little Spacebook 