To eat breakfast in the morning, at a table adjacent to my husband, before I leave for work, without being late to the office (mostly).
In a small but significant way, I’m finally learning how to show up for the day, coffee already downed.
And if this isn’t me conquering fear, I don’t know what is, but morning has finally become my friend.
(I think the promise of pumpkin butter over an English muffin has helped.)
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It wasn’t always this way. When I was a little girl, I lived in a world of crayons and crepe paper, paint and pencils, making messes of my imagination and exploring worlds made of words. But like all artists – all children, really – the encroaching world of productivity suppressed my instinct to create just because. Even now as I write this post, my thoughts are disjointed and my words fragmented by the big picture, the full post, the comments and the stats and the why am I really doing this mentality that always ails my writing and blogging.
One over-arching theme that I took away from STORY was the idea that expectation can cripple my work. When I cannot see the fruits of my labor, when my expectation for growth and productivity is centered on accolades and attention and conventional success, my well runs dry.
If I create for my own glory, rather than as an outpouring of relationship to my Creator, my work will only appear dim, fragmented, broken.
Of all the STORY sessions, Makoto Fujimura’s message left the deepest impression on me. He drew a parallel to the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13, and though I grew up hearing that story, I love how he used the metaphor of soil to speak, not trite words about individual hearts and salvation, but about the work of creating art to cultivate culture.
“Real artists don’t think about 15 minutes of fame. They think about 500 years from now, what kind of culture will our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, live in?”
and also :
“Culture too is an environment, an ecosystem; it needs stewardship. Artists cannot survive in this culture.”
An artist’s purpose is to plant the seeds faithfully, to write words and paint pictures and melodize stray notes into music. Yet we do this not for the seed’s sake, or for art’s sake.
As sowers of seeds, we have to know our soil and yet plant faithfully, writing the words, painting the pictures, melodizing stray notes into music, whether or not we can predict the outcome.
“The Parable of the Sower is not about the seed. Where the seed lands matters more. Soil is layers and layers of dead things – ground zero. Good soil has gone through many winters. Spring is coming!”
Mako gave the example of Emily Dickinson, whose cache of work lay undiscovered in a box beneath her bed until after her death. Though she had a few poems published while she was alive, most of them were significantly altered, stripped of her slant rhymes and em dashes – all the things that made Emily’s work unique. She never saw her seeds come into full bloom, yet she still created over 1,000 poems because she was devoted to the act of creating, the art of sowing.
“Emily Dickinson’s desk was 17 1/2 inches by 17 1/2 inches. This is all the space you need to change and shape culture.”
Over and over again, STORY reminded me that my purpose as an artist, a sower of seeds, is to create even when the effort feels fruitless. Our work is important, vital even, to the culture we cannot even envision yet.
“Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.” – Ecclesiastes 3:11
[Images : 1, 2] [All quotes listed by Makoto Fujimura, as transcribed furiously by hand in the dark of the auditorium at STORY 2012. Please forgive any variances from actual speech.]
I always think that I know why something is important before I do it. I thought STORY 2012 was an important conference to attend because I wanted to hear speakers I respect, like Anne Lamott or Bob Goff or Rachel Held Evans. I thought it would be a great opportunity to connect with my Prodigalfamily and the bloggers and writers whom I’ve come to regard as friends, kindred spirits. I went thinking that if I could just put myself in a room with other more successful creatives, then my dry well of words would be filled with advice and insight that would fix my dreams, teach me how to create better.
All these things took place this weekend and touched me deeply, yes.
But after the last session ended, after the last remnants of tapas at dinner were shared on Friday night, after I hugged everyone goodbye and after I dropped Lore off at O’Hare early yesterday morning, sunrise bursting across the sweep of Chicago skyline behind me, I realized :
My reasons for going to STORY 2012 were not the only reasons God brought me there.
Tomorrow I will share more about what I took away from the STORY experience, but for today, I will say : I took away so many quotes and ideas and I solidified friendships. I left with that rare and oft longed for stirring in my heart that the people I had communed with not only understood who I am, but why I am, and what I was created for. But I also came away from it with the reminder and the challenge that my work is of more importance than mere ambition. My creativity must begin as an act of worship, as an outpouring of my relationship to my Creator and my relationships with the people around me. I have forgotten that, and maybe that is why I needed to be there, to find my way back to the Source of my creativity.
“Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees takes off his shoes. The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.” – Elizabeth Barret Browning
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Though these past few months I have been retreating quietly from my beloved blogosphere, there has been some excitement in these parts. The unforeseen upside to blogging is the real relationships that it culminates, the connections that it derives, the tangible opportunities it gives. One such opportunity to celebrate takes place this week, and miracle of miracles, I will be there.
STORY is a conference for the creative class at Park Place Church in downtown Chicago tomorrow and Friday. And you guys, Anne freaking Lamott is speaking. If you have followed this blog in any capacity over the last nine months, then you know how out-of-my-mind excited I was to know she would be there. And then I was devastated when I thought I couldn’t go due to financial reasons. And then I jumped up and down and all around my office when I got an email with the news that there was a ticket with my name on it.
As if that wasn’t exciting enough, there will be hundreds of other people in attendance, and several dozen of them are people that I’ve “met” online, but have yet to greet face-to-face. People like Lore Ferguson (she’s staying at my apartment! Woot!) and Elora Ramirez and Kristin Tennant and Addie Zierman and Rachel Held Evans and Matthew Paul Turner and Tony Alicea and Katie Axelson and Brandon Clements and Ed Cyzewski and Alece Ronzino and Sonny Lemons.
And there are people I have met that I haven’t seen in awhile that I will get to reconnect with, like my favorite Prodigals Darrell and Ally Vesterfelt, and Tammy Perlmutter and Emily Miller. And to top it off, my husband gets to go with me!
These last few days I’ve been contemplating why this opportunity means so much to me, why meeting these people that I’ve “met” but never met matter so much. I mean, not that long ago, meeting someone you only knew online was a taboo thing. Even talking to people about it now, the idea that this group of people matters this much to me when I have never met them in person raises some eyebrows.
And yet, when I am feeling withered and wallowy about writing and other struggles, these digital connections feel so tangible to me in a way that other parts of my life don’t.
Honestly, up until this point in my life, I have never had a community of people that have understood my creative drive. Or even more to the point, I have never been a part of a community of writers. In high school? Don’t make me laugh. In college? Creatives : Yes. English majors : There were only 2 of us. Writers : Zip.
The people that I am meeting at Story 2012 make me feel like I belong. Like I am understood. Like yes, I’m crazy, but so are they – in a good way! We’re all in it together.
If I’ve made you gag with my mushiness, I’m sorry not sorry. As you can tell, I’m totally geeked, and for good reason. Expect a full recap in the coming week.
Once upon a time, I tried to write a novel. For class credit. I got 60 pages in before my computer ate it. Every single word, all 20,000 of them, were wiped away with the rest of my hard drive just two weeks before the end of my junior year of college.
My attempts to rewrite the damn thing were feeble at best. I pretty much bombed the class from there on out. My professor tried to be understanding; it was completely outside of our control, sort of like a natural disaster – a tornado had hit my hard drive, destroying everything in its path, including the only draft of my novel. No, I had never even bothered to print it.
But I think he and I both knew the unspoken issue that kept me from a better grade.
I didn’t want to rewrite it.
Oh, I cried and bit off all my finger nails over whether I would earn the credit for the class and graduate on time.
But secretly, I was relieved.
Secretly, I had hated all sixty pages.
Even though my prof had diligently met with me and talked me through the process of writing fiction and the importance of story arch and character development and setting and the whole shebang, my nugget of an idea about the story and every word I wrote slowly soured in my mind and began to feel wrong all wrong what the hell am I doing this sucks its all completely WRONG, as though my vision for the story was a piece of fruit that rotted away over the course of the semester. Possibly, my demon laptop sensed how terrible this was and mercifully decided to execute it so that I wouldn’t have to.
I rewrote the bits and pieces I remembered, and I still have that on an external hard-drive. Sometimes when I am looking for another stored file, I wander into that folder and take a peek, wondering if this rotting piece of fiction has fermented into something fabulous, like a good bottle of Merlot. But no, still terrible awful no good very bad fiction. The kind that I hope no one ever finds in the event of my death.
So why do I keep it?
Maybe to remind myself :
Once upon a time, I did manage to spend a semester writing fiction.
Be humble. Failure is just as important as success.
Be vulnerable. My real failure was in my unwillingness to let myself be vulnerable enough to write even the crappiest first draft of a manuscript. I became afraid of my own ideas, of the clumsiness of learning to write fiction.
Buy an external hard drive. And don’t forget to “⌘ + S”.
I don’t know that I’ll ever be a fiction writer. I still wonder if I have the imagination for it, or the patience, or the vulnerability. But I write this as an admission of my fear. Maybe someday I won’t be afraid of fiction anymore.
So tell me : what are you afraid of?