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QUESTION OF THE DAY: Is it maybe time to stop asking for permission? One of the…
QUESTION OF THE DAY: Is it maybe time to stop asking for permission?
One of the luckiest breaks of my life was to have been raised by an anti-authoritarian father. In many ways, my dad lived (and still lives) the normal, stable, respectable life of a good citizen. He is a Navy veteran who worked the same job for 30 years, has been married to the same woman for almost 50 years, has lived in the same house since 1973. But underneath that veneer of respectability, there lies a man who quietly does whatever the hell he wants. A man who has no respect for professionals or degrees. A man who, for better or worse, does not necessarily believe that you need permits in order to do work around your own property. A man who does not believe in experts, but in taking action for himself, no matter the result. A man who does not even really believe in doctors, but is very happy to let his seamstress wife stitch up an injury, if it saves the trip to the hospital. A man who decided he wanted to raise bees and Christmas trees, figured out how it was done, and became a beekeeper and a Christmas tree farmer — just through the decisive action of going for it.
And then there was my mother: A woman who believed that she could make, sew, grow, knit, paint, create anything she needed. She fed her entire family out of her massive garden, made all of our clothes, raised the goats who brought us milk, wallpapered her own living room. And also did not believe in seeking the opinion of experts, or being impressed by degrees, or bowing to the necessity of permits or certification.
They also did not believe in accumulating stuff that they did not need, or driving fancy cars to impress anyone, or dressing in a way that signified social status.
They were not hippies. They were definitely not punks, though I feel like there was something decided punk-rock about their willful resistance to consumer conformity. They were not artists, so to speak. They were simply really self-reliant people. And if they wanted something done, they just damn did it. Sometimes, admittedly, that stubbornness of theirs veered into the realm of slight social pathology, but mostly I think it was really cool.
Honestly, more than anything else, I think this example of quietly impudent self-action is where I got the idea to just go out in the world and be a writer. It never occurred to me to ask anybody whether I could be a writer. People in my family never asked anybody's permission to make or be the things that they wanted to create or become. It never occurred to me to go get a master's degree in creative writing. My mother did not have a master's degree in gardening, but she made a really bad ass garden.
You guys, we live in an age where professionalism has never been more respected. But I still don't really respect it. Especially when it comes to being any kind of an artist. I simply do not believe that you need a permission slip from the principal to live a creative life. Go online and look at the statistics for how many Nobel Prize-winning authors finished college. Then see how many of them even finished high school. You might be surprised. You know what they did? They just made their thing.
Don't wait for anybody in any position of authority to grant you some sort of certification to begin creating, inventing, producing.
Just do what my mom did when she commenced her garden: Get a shovel and start digging. Shovels are cheap. So is writing paper. So are watercolors. So is melody.
Start making your thing.
Today feels like a good day for it,
LG
Here’s a cool new game…can anyone guess the location?
Here's a cool new game…can anyone guess the location?
Photos of Elizabeth Gilbert
Where do you think this is? 🙂
THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS in Kerala, India — one of my favorite places…
THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS in Kerala, India — one of my favorite places…
Photos of Elizabeth Gilbert
Proud copy of SOAT with a hot cup of Chai, from Kerala, India!! Bought this for my daughter who loves Botany, and for myself because I love your work which is seeped in reality, however resonating spirituality…..Regards to you, and a lot of good wishes…..Come over to our part of the world too…..
BOOK OF THE DAY: “The Little Locksmith”, by Katharine Butler Hathaway. Dear On…
BOOK OF THE DAY:
"The Little Locksmith", by Katharine Butler Hathaway.
Dear Ones –
Please read this luminous, intelligent memoir by a forgotten genius of a woman. Originally published in 1943, this remarkable work of spiritual, emotional and artistic exploration has come into print again recently, thanks to the good folks at The Feminist Press.
My friend, the writer Darcey Steinke, recommended it to me, and I have fallen in love with every page.
Katharine Butler Hathaway was born in 1890 to an affluent Massachusetts family. She was afflicted with tuberculosis of the spine as a child, and spent her entire childhood confined to her bedroom, pinned down to a board (with her head and neck held in place by weights.) It was the hope of her doctors that this restriction would cause her spine to grow straight. But the treatment didn't work, and she was left both stunted and hunchbacked, never growing past the height of a ten year old child.
But what did happen in those isolated years of stillness and restriction was the evolution of a most extraordinary mind and imagination. Staggeringly, Hathaway tells the tale here of a happy childhood — one rich with limitless invention. Later, when she leaves her small room and enters the world, she suffers humiliation and isolation, but in the middle of her life she embarks on a brave and fantastic story: She buys a giant house, and (despite the approbation of her family and community) moves into it alone, in order to become an autonomous artist at last.
And I must tell you — the story of this woman buying her own sanctuary reads like one of the great adventure stories of all time.
I highlighted dozens of sections of this book, but here is the phrase that moved me the most, when Hathaway discusses her decision to move away from home (and from the care of her mother and nurses) in order to live alone:
"I discovered that my decision was only a question of whether I preferred to be governed by fear or by a creative feeling, and although I was very frightened, I knew I could not choose fear. The panic terrors that came in the night might scare me half to death, but I would never let them decide things for me. Then and there I invented this rule for myself to be applied to every decision I might have to make in the future. I would sort out all the arguments and see which belonged to fear, and which to creativeness, and other things being equal, I would make the decisions which had the larger number of creative reasons on its side. I think it must be a rule something like this that makes jonquils and crocuses come pushing through cold mud."
Oh, friends. I would love to buy this book for you, but I can't figure out how to buy it for everyone, so all I can do is implore you to get it for yourself.
And to always, always, always choose creativity over fear.
Heart,
LG
The Little Locksmith
www.goodreads.com
The Little Locksmith, Katharine Butler Hathaway's luminous memoir of disability, faith, and transformation, is a critically acclaimed but…