From “Readers Write”, The Sun magazine, October 2009:

One summer afternoon, while my mother and father weeded the garden and my brothers and I played in the yard, the sky darkened without warning and released buckets of rain. My mother leapt toward the house, head tucked under her arm to keep her hair dry, but my father stopped her. She was trying to figure out why when he pulled her to him and kissed her. My brothers and I squealed with disbelief at what we were witnessing: Mom and Dad kissing right out in the front yard, in the rain!

This was when we still lived in the tiny ranch house and watched Laugh-In on our small black-and-white television; when my brothers and I would jump on our parents’ bed on Saturday mornings and beg for pancakes, and our father would simply ask, “What kind?”; when he sometimes packed us in the station wagon before dawn — my brothers and I huddled under a blanket in the back seat — and drove us an hour to the beach to watch the sun rise.

After the kiss ended, our father took off his sneakers and socks, rolled up his trousers, and pranced around the yard. “Come on, kids!” he yelled. We couldn’t get out of our shoes fast enough, racing to get in line behind our father. The four of us marched across the grass, legs and arms pumping, mud oozing between our toes. Our mother soon joined our procession, and there we all were, on a rainy summer day, my father leading us in a parade on Garfield Avenue.

We moved to a bigger house a few years later. The change in my father was so slow, it was barely perceptible. He worked more, talked less, made fewer pancakes. He asked about school and friends but didn’t seem to listen to our answers. By the time I was in high school, he seemed worn down by a marriage he no longer wanted to be in. He sat in his chair after dinner, sucked the last drag from his cigarette, and rattled the ice in his drink. And when a storm came, he stayed inside and swiveled his chair so he could watch the rain through the window.

–Kristen Rademacher

About a year ago, increasingly annoyed at the fragility of teflon-coated skillets and worried about the health risks, and having no success at keeping food from burning in a stainless steel pan, I bought a cast iron skillet. I was a little freaked out about the idea of not using soap nor scrubbers on it as my friend warned me I MUST NOT DO lest I ruin it, and that kept me from buying one for a long time because I have sort of a clean cookware fetish and excessive fear of rancidity. But I finally succumbed to the tantalizing claims of excellent heat distribution and durability, as well as the fact that it is a good source of iron.

My first attempt at frying was a disaster. I kept adding more and more oil, yet the food stuck and burned. According to the manufacturer the pan was supposed to be already seasoned, which clearly was a big fat lie. So I went online where I found hundreds of thousands of people (per google) extolling the virtues of non-stick cast iron and knew exactly how to get it. I backed away slowly from the ones who claimed that proper seasoning took years of cooking to obtain, because who in their right mind would use a pan that burnt food every time you used it for years? I read several that said that regular cooking oil could be used, and that’s what I had in the kitchen so that’s what I did.

After it had been in the oven a while the kitchen started to fill with smoke which was unpleasant and inconvenient, but I’d read that this was just the sacrifice one had to make and I thought well, if that’s the way it is I’ll just have to deal. But when I tried to use it the food was still sticking and burning. I thought (thinking of those people who claim it takes years,) well, I guess I just have to season it more.

So I kept trying. I fried hamburger and bacon which still stuck some but I guess due to their high fat content (and type of fat?) not nearly as much. Also, I could make quesadillas as long as I was very careful not to let the cheese melt over onto the pan. After using it in this way quite a few times I could see a dullish dark spot beginning to develop in the center of the pan, although the sides were still a light brown (where most of the food was sticking.) I felt like I was getting somewhere with that black spot, but the food was still difficult to get off afterward, and the “seasoning” was clearly coming off when I rinsed and wiped out the pan, with the towel I was using turning brown every time. And I certainly couldn’t make anything like eggs. Meanwhile between using it to cook food I’d again work on seasoning it in the oven with oil. After a couple of weeks of this nonsense I was fed up, put it in the drawer, and went back to my evil teflon pan.

Well, time passed and I again heard people talking about how great their cast iron pans were and I thought, look, I’m as smart as anyone else, I should be able to figure out how to use a @#$%ing piece of kitchen equipment. So I got on the internet just to make sure I was doing it right, coated it up with oil, waited as the house filled up with smoke, and got pissed when all I had for my troubles (again) was a gummy black stuff that came off with the slightest pressure from a spatula. But this time I went back to the internet, and this time, miraculously, happened on a website where they said DON’T USE OIL. They also said that if you’ve been using oil you must SCRUB IT ALL OFF before seasoning it correctly. I was a little taken aback by this — I was afraid of losing all the work (that dull black spot!) that I’d already done. What if they were wrong? But in the end I really had no choice because I wasn’t frigging waiting several more years for the oil to finally take.

So I scrubbed off as much of the gucky stuff as I could and dried it in the oven. I then melted a little bit of bacon grease in it and spread that around thinly, and put it back in the oven at around 325°F (there seems to be no consensus on what the best temperature is so I just made a stab) and baked it for two hours, then let it cool in the oven.

The first thing I noticed was that smoke was not filling the kitchen. That was interesting. The second thing I noticed was that there were shiny black spots on the pan. They were smooth to mildly tacky to the touch but not sticky like the oil coating had been. That was also very interesting and seemed promising, so I continued the seasoning process in this way.

I think I’ve had the pan in the oven now four times to season (at varying temperatures, up to 400°F) with the shiny blackness covering more and more of the pan each time, and I’ve cooked with it also four times, to make grilled cheese sandwiches and fried eggs, using butter to grill/fry them in. I would have to think that it’s not totally seasoned yet, as there are still dull spots here and there on the pan, but it is totally black, and it has worked wonderfully well with the eggs sliding around like they’re in a teflon pan. After all my previous trouble it feels nothing short of miraculous.

After I’m done cooking, I wrap a small towel around the hot handle, hold it over the sink, and run hot water over it, nudging off any stubborn bits of food with a plastic spatula, then I wipe the water off with a towel (which comes away *clean*, wahoo!) and set it back on the burner to dry, after which I coat it with a thin layer of bacon grease, and if I have time I put it in the oven to bake again. After I feel confident that it is seasoned really well I’ll try a fat that is more stable (takes longer to go rancid) for between-use applications.

ETA: Some sites say to bake the skillet upside down so that the layer of fat stays thin. I’ve been getting some spots of build-up that are a little stickier than I’d like so I’m going to try that.

Recently I wrote about my absence of concern about my 7-year-old’s absence of arithmetic skills. She’s just turned 8 and would be, I believe, in third grade if she were in school. The past few days she has exploded with questions about money, playing Pay Day and counting out coins from the money jar, in stark contrast to her previous dearth of interest save for a few times when she asked for addition problems (in a desire to be part of her brothers’ games) and was entirely uncomprehending, which, if she had been in school all this time, would have been a big issue. There would have been conferences, there would have been special testing, there would have been special accommodations and pressure, and along with that lots of special worrying. We’d already learned with my oldest child what the consequences are of pushing someone to do something they are not interested in or not ready for — they get angry, the relationship suffers for it, and they start doubting themselves. And also, that it’s not necessary — that when they are ready and interested, it comes easily and their self-confidence remains intact. And this is exactly what we’re seeing with my daughter and math.

The schools are making an enormous mistake by classifying children who are “behind”, i.e. not matching some arbitrary definition of “on time”, as learning disabled, which is commonly defined as a brain disorder. Now, certainly brain disorders do exist, but in this case I wonder what the evidence for it is. Diagnosis does not normally come from the neurologist, it comes from a gradeschool teacher (or other childhood education “expert”) who simply observes that the child does not seem able to do the work, apparently without the understanding that a child who is mentally normal may not have a particularly mathematical mind (just as there are people who are not naturally musically or artistically or verbally or physically gifted) and needs a different learning method or timing or emotional environment to acquire the basic skills, or that a child may have a mathematical mind and likewise need a different mode of acquisition and timing and emotional environment for that to manifest via performance; both of which are very different situations from having an actually abnormal brain.

Forrest wrote in a comment here:

I’m new to unschooling and am curious about ideas/resources for social development — if I were to keep my 9 yr old daughter home I’m afraid she would get pretty isolated/socially challenged.

Of course you don’t and wouldn’t literally do that, she has a family and friends and I’m sure it’s not as if you never go out of the house. But I do agree there’s more to it than that — I think it’s important that a wider social environment be provided in a casual, comfortable way, as part of your family life, so that she has a sense of herself as belonging to a community. In my experience that is an extremely important protectant against social anxiety, especially for people who tend to be introverted.

(Ironically, though I went to school I had to learn this as an adult, because my parents relied on the school to provide it when in reality the system’s artificiality and compulsory nature undermined any natural inclination toward it. To be fair a sense of community does often develop around schools in which there is a high degree of parent intentiality, e.g. Waldorf, Montessori, etc. but if the common interest (educational philosophy) binding the group isn’t shared by you then that sense of community won’t be imparted, and as well there are sacrifices made in terms of loss of flexibility, and family and alone time.)

For us, moving to a new town halfway through the making of our family, being essentially uprooted, we found it incredibly useful to seek out the local homeschooling groups, and to go to events and conferences. In that way we found a great number of families locally who hold similar values to us (gentle parenting, peaceful partnerships, natural living, life learning, etc.) and several who have become good friends. But more generally, community-type relationships develop around interests, don’t they? That’s how it works for adults and how it works for kids too. What does she like to do? What do you like to do? (It’s just as important for her to see you getting this for yourself, how you accomplish that, even being indirectly a part of it though you.) And you just go from there. For instance, I know a lot of unschooled kids for whom dance and theater and music groups act as social hubs. I know people for whom neighborhood pick-up sports (like Ultimate Frisbee) function in that way. If you think about it it’s a much more sensible approach to the social world because it is what uninstitutionalized life is. It makes no sense to precede “real life” (as people tend to think of the end of school as graduation into “the real world”) with something that doesn’t look even remotely like it. Why not just live it from the beginning?

From my notebook dated December 2008.

Last night as were lying in bed getting ready to go to sleep, Noah, who is 9 years old, requested “math problems” as he is wont to do. We did some basic two-column addition and multiplication, and talked about the incredible memory needed to calculate huge sums like this guy does. He tired quickly of the usual and asked for something new and exciting — fractions. We’ve talked about fractions very little, just enough really to make chocolate chip cookies with, but apparently he was ready enough for it that it sunk in, because he aced the first simple problems I gave him, and then when I tried to give him a challenge, “What is 5/3 plus 1 and a third,” he came up with the answer faster than I did. Meanwhile, my seven-year-old can barely add 2 and 3. And I’m not worried. It would be a big problem, of course, if she were in school. But she’s intelligent, and she’ll need it, therefore she’ll want it, as mentally healthy people want what they need. Making her do it before her natural readiness and interest would compel her to do it herself would be taking such a risk — as with reading, if a person experiences a supposed norm as frustrating and difficult, what is she going to conclude about herself, and how long will she keep trying before deciding she’s just not very smart? I also don’t want to make the mistake of undermining the intuitive process of the brain in picking it up organically, which is so superior to rote memorization.

A common question about math (usually from people whose five-, six-, and seven-year-olds have no interest whatsoever, or from people who can’t wrap their minds around learning math well without being schooled in it, from a curriculum) is, “Well, we have to make them do it, because what if they never want to do math? What if they want to be an engineer and can’t do math???”

Well, if they aren’t attracted to math does it really make any sense for them to pursue interests that require it? Do we want our children to live in an authentic way, true to what they are, or are we just trying to produce machine-workers with no concern for their individual loves and strengths? The moment a person decides they want something, they can then choose to make it happen. There’s no need for me to try to predict what sort of learning will serve their future interests best (as if I could anyway,) no need to waste valuable learning time and life forcing them to work according to my guesses.

Some people would consider this neglectful. A while back on my local public radio station I was listening to a program about unschooling, and a caller who claimed he’d been unschooled said that he regretted that his mother hadn’t made him do more math. But here’s how pathetic this fellow was — he was 35, just finding himself fascinated by math for the first time in his life, but despairing because he had so far to go to reach the goal of being able to impress people with his proficiency, when he could have already been there if not for that damned freedom. This is a person, really, whose desire isn’t for the thing itself. If it were, the actual doing it, in itself, would satisfy him. His desire rather is for a sense of accomplishment. And what he doesn’t understand is that real accomplishment — having a passion and satisfying it according to one’s own drive — doesn’t come from having someone standing over you saying, “do this, now do that.” He might get a good feeling from having pleased someone, but that’s a hard way to happiness because it requires continual reinforcement. He’s misdiagnosed his problem — it’s not that he’s “behind”, it’s that he’s dependent on the praise of others. I once dated someone like that. His thing was that his parents hadn’t made him practice piano. If they had, he would have been a great musician by now. And of course he wasn’t taking steps to learn piano now; again, his desire wasn’t for piano, it was to be great for the purpose of garnering praise. And he wanted it now, and because he didn’t have it now it was a lost cause.

By his logic, of course, I should be moaning about not having been coached in childhood to be a world-class sailor, so that I wouldn’t have to start from scratch as a middle-aged person who has only recently developed a love of sailing. It could apply to anything: my interest in birth issues, or vernacular architecture, or foraging for food, or ceramics. Oh woe is me, if only my parents had made me learn those things, I would already be an expert in them! Probably would have published books and be famous and rich! I feel badly for people who think like this, but not for the same reason they feel badly for themselves.

Everyone’s in a different place in terms of their needs, desires, goals, fears, and I wonder so often if we are really that unusual in ours. I don’t think we are, but I could be wrong. Granted, I’m privy to the private feelings and thoughts of very few people and see incomplete pictures of others from the discussion forums I read. I make assumptions about the rest based on what I know of our society. From my vantage point, it doesn’t look like a healthy society. In some ways we are a relatively rich society, not in just material ways, but arguably intellectually and even spiritually. But almost everything, everywhere, in my eyes falls short. Maybe that’s just a feature of the inherent chaos in any system made of millions of little parts for which their relating to each other is unplanned and in constant flux. Maybe it’s a feature of human nature and has always been this way. But then, of course, I see what goes right and don’t understand why it couldn’t potentially go much righter, in general. Obviously some things are wrong, we disagree as to what they are, but not that they are. So we agree: we are rich, and there is something wrong.

Why are so many people on anti-depressants and seeing therapists? Why do so many people need to use legal and illegal substances to self-medicate? Why are there so many “addictions” people feel they have to struggle with, from TV, to porn, to food, to…? Why are so many people angry and aggressive? Why are teenagers so full of angst and so maligned? Why do so many children struggle with school? Why do so many people hate their work? Why do people hate on people walking down the street, simply for dressing a certain way or having a certain body type? Why are there so many marital problems? Why do so many women resent caring for their children? Why are we judgmental of others’ situations and hardships? Why are we so stingy with our wealth? Well, and the list goes on.

So, individually, we do what we can do deal with all that unhappiness. We suppress; we control; we pretend; we follow the rules with hope that it will help. We go on vacation. We go to self-improvement seminars, read philosophy, find religion. We diet, and buy, and take classes that we hope will get us a better job. We admit it’s our fault, we’re weak. We blame the fascist government or the blacks, or the whites, or the Mexicans, or women, or men, or the homosexuals, or the breeders, or what-have-you.

I’m one of those people who’s particularly good at pretending. The thing is, there’s got to be an outlet somewhere. It’s the people I love most, then, who suffer my suffering. Forget society. I don’t care anymore, it can do what it likes as long as it leaves me alone. I’m concerned right now only with what I’ve done to my family and what I have to do to make it better. There is a right and a wrong, and every day I’m living in a way that is enabling that wrongness. I am taking responsibility for that, but I also need the right tools to work with. Sometimes, you know, we counsel people in bad relationships to just leave, because some people just don’t fit each other. It’s not true that anyone can make a marriage if only they just work hard enough at it. Sometimes we mistake a square peg person for a round peg person, when we have a round hole person to fit it into. This is like that, only the relationship is between us and everything we’ve accepted as a framework for our life: the marriage, the house, the job, the car, the vacation, the television, the consumption. Oh, the sheer consumption.

Every once in a while I come across a person who seems okay. Really, truly, okay. Not manic, not depressed, not angry, not sarcastic, not anxious, not worried, not in a hurry. They seem a little odd, too, because happiness is something that people in our culture (I specify because I honestly don’t know about other cultures) are really not familiar with. I wouldn’t mind being that kind of odd. It’s really the only thing that I do want anymore. And these people, they have all whittled down their lives. They figured out what was unnecessarily weighing them down, and they threw it out.

So, here is the story. The man, who was playing the traditional role of leaving his family and real life every day too early in the morning to have his work dictated by others with more power than he, was angry and with no more patience. The woman, who was playing the traditional role of keeping the house and the kitchen and the children, was resentful, and guilty and depressed besides, and scared as well. Despite their full bellies and pretty house and lots of machinery, she saw how they were falling apart and she tried to fix it but failed continually. She remembered vaguely a time when it wasn’t so hard and knew exactly why that was. She had glimpses, searingly beautiful, of peace and contentment. She believed in God, or meaning (and perhaps they are the same thing,) then. It was absent otherwise.

She got angry in a desperate sort of way, and started saying ‘no’. She said it to the people who wanted her to prostrate herself before men in white coats and to put her baby down and walk away. She said it to the institutions, big and small, to all those mandates of education and career and body image and parenting. She wasn’t ungrateful for her privileges, and didn’t do it just to be ornery or different. It was survival. (A different kind than physical, obviously.)

Still, there came a time when everything was turning sour. She was hurting and more scared than ever. And she said, “I want you to quit your job.” And he immediately softened and shone brighter and she knew she’d hit on something key, this was fundamental, maybe more so than any of the other ‘no’s had been. He said “what will we do?” (He meant: how will we survive?) And she said, “sell the house and get a bus.” (She meant: do whatever it takes to live wholly within our means and be and work together.)

*

I’m not sure why people think it’s so crazy. We can do it, financially speaking, and we want to; and life is short. God, how am I feeling that, being now halfway through life. When I think about it I start to feel panicky; I have lost so much time to all this nonsense, when it wasn’t at all necessary, and while I sit here brooding about it, every new moment is slipping away. I don’t see how we could not do it, at this point. Staying would be madness.

My mom told me that I am brave. She’s said that all along, to every non-conventional thing I do. I can’t say this vehemently enough, but it’s not true. Oh sure, there’s a little fear involved in bucking the system, and hurt in the disapproval, but that is nothing compared to the internal discord that I feel when I just go along with the plan that’s been set up for me since birth and which isn’t working.

So, we have a bus. A 36-foot long bluebird school bus to be precise. It’s enormous. You know how some things feel so much smaller when you encounter them again in adulthood? This is having the opposite effect, for the simple reason, I think, that it is ours and we will be the ones driving it. Or rather, Scott will be the one driving it. Maybe I’ll be able to handle it on the highway. Not that I’m not capable of actually maneuvering the thing, but he has much steadier nerves than I and I just don’t think my heart can take a tight corner. I can’t even play most video games because of my propensity to become panicked under pressure.

It’s got a shiny white curved ceiling inside. I am really in love with that ceiling, which is something that I couldn’t have predicted. It’s beautiful. It also has black numbers over the windows, which I take a little quirky pleasure in. I was even going to keep up the list of bus rules (enjoying the irony) that are glued to the wall but Scott already started taking them down. Clearly we have entirely different visions for the place, hmph.

I have a little fear about how it’s going to be living in such close quarters with each other. But then I think, well, you wanted to travel didn’t you, and this is about as expansive as it gets. When I frame it that way, it doesn’t seem scary anymore. And we’ll have a tent also. I have more fear about what we’ll do when we come to cities. Where will we park the bus? How will we get around? We are planning on buying bikes, but that is scary too for someone who has only ever got around by car. I have to keep reminding myself that whatever it is, it is, and that is fine. We do not have to be in a hurry, we do not have to do anything in particular. In fact I would be happy just to meander. Strategy for the entire trip: first remember that, then breathe.

One of the funnest things so far is just clearing the house of things we don’t need and don’t care about that much. This house that has been weighing me down — oh, now I can live here. It’s funny that it took the plan of leaving for me to feel able to carry that out and realize that it’s true what I have always intuited. I really am a minimalist at heart. The ownage of stuff fills me with anxiety. Interesting, considering that I grew up in a house filled with stuff. My mom said that my grandma saved everything because of going through the depression. My mom didn’t go through the depression, but she was poor, and she carried on the tradition. Big time. My parents now have a 3000 square foot home filled to the brim with stuff. My brother and I joke that we will have a bonfire when the time comes. My conscience wouldn’t let me be wasteful and polluting like that, but oh would it be fun.

But my house. I am starting to love it again. I know that partly it’s because I don’t have to be here anymore. And I will not ever love it enough that I will change my mind and want to stay. I have a woods in my future. But for the time being I feel that finally I can settle in and relax and call this home. The bus, the escape plan, makes it possible. The same goes for Scott’s job. Our physical reality is not any different, it’s just that we don’t feel forced to be here any longer. Freedom is powerful.

I just realized something. The happier I am with what I am doing with my own life, the less I worry about what the kids are choosing to do with their lives. I’ve been inappropriately targeting them when the issue was me.

I wonder if all the worry and all the control we try to put on children and others is based entirely in our own fears and feelings of inadequacies — itself a result of having worry and control put on us. Similar to how the abused often become abusers. If we could just be left alone to pursue what we care about, what we love, what we feel compelled by, without any judgment as to what is talent, how much income is praise-worthy, what is statistically safe, what is fashionable, what is impressive… would we have a basic culture of well-being?

So smart we think we are as a society, we highly evolved animals. And yet I’m hard pressed to think of anyone I know that really feels at peace.

The time cannot come soon enough for him to quit his job. It was at one time something he was happy to be doing — important work for people in real need, and he liked the people he worked with well enough, in some cases quite a bit. In the mornings I am pretty sure he didn’t mind too much zipping off in his little Karmann Ghia to get his morning jug of coffee at the local cafe, when I clearly did not have a moment’s rest from the demands of small humans, struggling to make peace with the work that I had the luxury (in this culture) of choosing. He’d rather have been home with us, but still he liked his work well enough and would come home with stories of the people he’d helped that day, sometimes bearing gifts from them. That was edifying. But then things started deteriorating. Management started making decisions from on high that did not even attempt to take into account the well-being of the employees. People making more money than he were doing stupid, wasteful things with no repercussions. A contract was proposed with no cost-of-living increases for a long period of time, and when it was voted down rumors started of the angered overloads threatening to fire everyone and contract everything out. This is in a non-profit, mind you, which is supposed to be about people, who are already making salaries that put them close to the federal poverty line. And the final and worst injustice perhaps: when competence, experience, and seniority is flouted for a whim. Oh, I’m sure management has their own side of the story and perhaps it’s not their fault — it’s true that human beings in general aren’t capable of handling power. It gives them funny ideas and feelings that pit them against the people they’re entrusted with governing. It’s incredibly difficult for fairness to exist under those conditions. It has to be forced, or it just doesn’t happen.

My dad’s union became one of the most powerful in existence. The type of people that do his job tend to be really, really tough people that you don’t want to try to take advantage of because they just might hurt you really badly if you do. They were able to make it happen, I’m sure, because they were constitutionally meaner than the management. And getting what they deserved did not make that business fail. In fact it continued to boom. But they wouldn’t have gotten anything if they hadn’t fought hard for it.

This union isn’t like that. I’m sure some people are apathetic, and others are scared. Some feel we should be grateful for what we’re given. That’s hard for me to understand. No one asks to be born in a place and time where the hierarchical dog-eat-dog system of business is ubiquitous. Honest work isn’t the same thing as acceptance of charity. To frame it that way is just another way to manipulate people into believing they are miserable failures who don’t deserve to be treated decently. And then there’s the notion that you have to work to change things you don’t like, or you shouldn’t complain. In abstract, that sounds reasonable. But we’re not interested in starting a business, that’s not where our hearts and talents lie. And it doesn’t matter — regardless of what we’re doing, it doesn’t change what they’re doing, and what they’re choosing to do isn’t right. I am not going to be bullied by aspersions cast against my own supposed character — that’s irrelevant — into saying nothing about that.

But all this bullshit is killing us. He is even one of the most mellow, unaffected people I’ve ever met, but he’s coming home quiet and serious and withdrawn, smoldering. Meanwhile, I currently have it relatively easy — no babies, no whacky hormones, even the sibling bickering is at an all time low. We could be having a lot of fun, but we can’t because he’s not in it with us. The difference between his world and ours is gut-wrenching. It is not sustainable for there to be this difference. I’m very afraid of what it will do to us, if we stay here.

Again, there are the moralizing voices: You don’t know how good you’ve got it, in this economy no less. You’re spoiled. There was a time when people would feel grateful to have what you have, and they would be happy about it, thrilled. It’s all what you make of it.

But I’m not falling for that anymore. Those voices are delusional. If I’m dying of dehydration, I will be grateful for a cup of murky, stale water. But here I am surrounded by fresh-water lakes — albeit with possibly imaginary monsters lurking in the depths, and certainly reachable only with courage and some sacrifice, yet fresh nonetheless — and you are telling me I should be happy to stay with this dirty cup?

I don’t think so.

I’ve never been very good at assignments. Terrible, actually. It’s the school thing. I get this feeling that there’s something I have to do, and that kills it for me. Any natural inclination vanishes. One of the many ways school has spoiled me with bad programming. It feels like the rest of my life is going to have to be used up ferreting out and digging up one bad piece of code at a time. I hate that. Maybe I’ll be 90 years old and finally find lasting peace five minutes before I die. But then again, I’ve done enough recovery at least to have the occasional epiphany, the occasional moment of bliss. I just want to be there all the time. I want to go there so I can live there. It feels much better to frame it in that way — thinking of it as getting there rather than thinking of it as simply getting out of the other place.

I’ve been reading this morning about Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat Pray Love. I was thinking about that book this morning when I woke up, about how I love how it started but did not like how it ended — the love story seemed to me to be wrapped up too neatly, almost unbelievably. I decided I did not really like Elizabeth Gilbert. I often decide I don’t like people when I think they’ve been very successful and the value of their work doesn’t warrant it. I thought that way about Jo Rowling before I actually read the Harry Potter books. This time, though, I’d read the book before making my judgment. And for some unfathomable reason, when I got on the computer to check my email this morning I did a search for “eat pray love”. I didn’t have any curiosity I wanted information to satisfy, so it really makes no sense that I did this search. And I happened upon her website where I was met first by a picture of her and thought, “well, of course she’s successful. Look at how pretty she is.” And then, still inexplicably, because remember I don’t like this person, I clicked on the link right below that picture to a video of a talk she gave on creativity. And immediately upon hearing the first words come out of her mouth I fell in love with her. She’s a gifted speaker, and part of her gift is that she is able to impart a sense of herself as a real person, rather than just a pretentious facade, and I appreciate that in an person.

And then I found that she had something quite profound to say as well. I’ve heard the sentiment before that beauty and creation and meaning are not of us but come through us. And of course our culture with its modern scientific sensibilities has decided that’s not true. But it hadn’t occurred to me before that this is why modern artists are such tortured beings. They have to take full responsibility for what they create, and that is psychologically precarious. Actually, that can be extended to any vocation — you can always be not smart enough, not quick enough, not powerful enough, not understanding enough, etc. To feel responsible for your performance, which will almost always fall short, is surely a major cause of depression in our society. But most so, it would seem, for those who feel called to any creative endeavor, because there’s no possibility of just doing your job as there is with, say, for someone whose job it is to put books back into the right places on library shelves. And that’s because the just-doing-your-job part of creativity is so comparatively tiny; it is the difference between a simple mental task and being responsible for figuring out the job itself, and the meaning of it, which can be very complex and difficult, for the purpose of giving pleasure or being thought-provoking or saving the world, and with the knowledge that most will be apathetic about all this difficult work you’ve done, some will hate you for it, and if you’re very, very lucky, one or two people might appreciate it.

The sensitivity that enables one to know what that job is, and that it needs doing, that same sensitivity is what makes the responsibility for those things a burden, and sometimes unbearable. It keeps people from manifesting the urges inside them — too scary to consider failing in doing so — and for many who suppress that fear enough to be able to actually do something, that sense of responsibility results in coping behaviors that are ultimately self-destructive. That’s the theory anyway, and it makes absolute sense to me.

Anyway, because I liked this I went back to my internet search and looked for more of her. Here is something else I liked, from an interview (reported on this blog): “Wake up, with a journal, and ask “what do you really, really, really want? […] At the end of every day, write down the happiest moment of every day.” It invokes journaling so in that way is similar to the assignments Julia Cameron gives in her book The Artist’s Way, which I want to like because she’s so zen, but which never, ever worked for me. They are way too much like school assignments which pretty much guarantees that I’ll be able to bring nothing good or authentic out of it. But the nature of Elizabeth’s assignment feels different. I can ask myself what I really, really want, and have my answer be real. I can describe the happiest moment of my day, and just have that be what it is. I find this idea that there is work that the “shoulds” can’t touch really compelling. I’ll let you know what happens.