She did a little soul-searching, the way one does on the big birthdays. She asked herself when was the last time she’d felt truly light, joyous, and – yes – creative in her own skin. To her shock, she realized that it had been decades since she’d felt that way.
Then my mercy swelled, and for just a moment I felt mercy for everyone who has ever gotten involved in an impossibly messy story. All those predicaments that we humans find ourselves in – predicaments that we never see coming, do not know how to handle, and then cannot fix.
They loved each other, she realized. They loved each other, because they knew each other.
If inspiration is allowed to unexpectedly enter you, it is also allowed to unexpectedly exit you.
We can do it, whether it can be done or not.” Eventually, all of us will be called upon to do the thing that cannot be done.
Of course nobody is required to stand in the field of honor... If you find it too challenging, you may always exit, and then you can remain a child. But if you wish to be a person of character, I’m afraid this is the only way. But it may be painful.
The essential ingredients for creativity remain exactly the same for everybody: courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust – and those elements are universally accessible.
I am a child of God, just like anyone else. I am a constituent of this universe. I have invisible spirit benefactors who believe in me, and who labor alongside me. 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.
Famously, Gloria Steinem once advised women that they should strive to become like the men they had always wanted to marry. What I’ve only recently realized is that I not only have to become my own husband, but I need to be my own father, too.
Martyr says: “Life is pain.” Trickster says: “Life is interesting.
The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.
We need you to reveal to us what you know, what you have learned, what you have seen and felt. If you are older, chances are strong that you may already possess absolutely everything you need to possess in order to live a more creative life – except the confidence to actually do your work. But we need you to do your work. Whether you are young or old, we need your work in order to enrich and inform our own lives.
There were pages and pages of this. It was a confetti of thinking. It began nowhere, led to nothing, and concluded nothing.
Possessing a creative mind, after all, is something like having a border collie for a pet: It needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble.
What do you love even more than you love your own ego?
British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington’s memorable explanation of how the universe works: “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.
Creativity is a crushing chore and a glorious mystery. The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.
There’s something about a showgirl that always breaks my heart. Youth and beauty-they’re such a short lease, girlie.
Not everything has an answer.” Alma found this to be such a staggering piece of intelligence that she was struck dumb by it for several hours. All she could do was sit and ponder the notion in an amazed stupor.
If you really want to get to know someone, you have to divorce him.