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Makers Are Heroic.  Photo credit: Thomas Lloyd Qualls Let’s talk about the perceptibly impossible task of juggling life with art. The elusive balance between art on one side of the equation. And family. And money. And other jobs. And difficult kids. And countless pulls and tugs of meetings and school and bills and doctors and oil changes and shopping for health insurance and pulling weeds and cleaning the garage and shopping for clean food and paying attention to the cyclone of disastrous political shenanigans and the daily researching of a hundred different things for as many reasons. Of course, there’s also the sway of whiskey. Which sometimes brings gold but more often is just a waste of time and calories. And then there’s sex and what it is and what is could be and what it should be and when it will come again and whether you did all the things you should before during and after it. There’s also the finding time (and energy) for it. Still there are innumerable other unreasonable demands on your time and energy. And maybe I shouldn’t even mention sleep and vacations. These and other superhuman tasks we are just supposed to figure out. To make good art requires us to know and feel our emotions. To bear our souls while we also bare them. To be vulnerable enough to lay out hearts out on the table for the world to see. And then be strong enough to remain standing if they are judged too harshly. We are charged with this work and more. Like holding the light with one hand, while stitching the world together with the other. We must be shape-shifters. We must walk in multiple worlds, serve as ambassadors to each one, remember the different languages and customs here and there, and not completely crack the fuck up. If we succeed, we are gods. If not, we’re dreamers and castoffs. Fledgling humans who couldn’t make it in the world where the grown-ups live. We must simultaneously love the world, and also know when to tell it to fuck-off. So we can do our work. We must resist being thrown off kilter by the siren call of mediocrity. We must question everything and still have the confidence to follow our own voices, to be focused enough not lose them in the crowd. And you probably know, the pull of the crowd is strong. I don’t just mean wanting to fit in or be liked. I mean the ever-rushing current of the modern world. I’m not saying I have definitive answers to any of these riddles. My best advice is to do like Same Phillips says and no matter what happens, hold on to your voice. * * * This is one of 66 essays in the Gold Nautilus Award winning collection, Happiness Is an Imaginary Line in the Sand. The book is available here: https://bit.ly/40s3Gh0 Subscribe to Substack for more fun with words: https://thomaslloydqualls.substack.com/
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Your life becomes the shape of the days you inhabit. -John O'Donohue  Photo Credit: Thomas Lloyd Qualls To a Foodie, you are what you eat. Buddhists say you are what you think. And for Fashionistas, you are what you wear. To me, you are the stories you tell. The stories you watch, the stories you read, the stories you live.
If this is true, then if I watch too many movies, or read too many books, or if I'm too involved with pop culture, will I lose touch with reality? Put another way, will I create a false reality, one that’s not really mine? I know people who live in these fantasy worlds, where they are more involved in the lives of imaginary characters than in their own. Living other people’s lives instead of theirs. One’s real life is often the life that one does not lead. - Oscar Wilde These questions lead to another: What is reality, anyway? I remind myself of the importance of myth. I remember the vital purpose of imagination. And I resolve that the retelling of human stories is essential to our humanness. Before there were movies and books, there were stories. Usually told by elders around fires, these stories wove together the people and the land, the wind and the sun, the animals and the rain. The stories were their lives, just as the rivers were their blood. There was no separation. In modern life, most of our storytelling is done through movies and books (also television, theatre, opera, video games, and urban legends). Though any stories that people tell, however they tell them -- on video, paper, canvas, or clay -- they all tell us something, not just about the subjects they depict, but about ourselves. Where our lives begin and the stories end is perhaps not so important. Because the stories are really pieces of us. Reflections. Living metaphors. By allowing these stories to blur the edges of reality a little, we may come to see ourselves more clearly. When having a smackerel of something with a friend, don’t eat so much that you get stuck in the doorway trying to get out. -Winnie the Pooh Stories -- and the myths they represent -- are great, that is to say, until we get stuck in one. Like good books, we are meant to finish one and pick up the next. Not to read the same chapter, page, sentence over and over. One way to break out of a story is to go see something of the rest of world. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I took a months-long backpacking trip through India. I was stuck reading the same story and decided there were no books in my part of the world that could tell me anything new. So I took off in search of buried treasure in the East, to a place where ancient treasure is reported to be hidden. I put aside television, movies, and everything I thought I knew about myself and my place in the world and just went in search of a new story. It was transformational in ways I may never fully digest. I did find treasure there, though not quite the ones I set out to find. Among the stories which India told me was the one where I needed to go to India to figure out that I didn't need to go to India. And I couldn’t have known that any other way. Because familiarity blinds us to these kind of simple truths. There are billions of universes inside every one of us. We carry them in our blood, our breath, our DNA. And in those universes, every particle of every star, every atom of every moon, each drop of water, has its own history to uncover, its own path to travel, its own story to tell. Each one unique. Each one waiting to be discovered. But you have to know how to listen, and you have to know how to look. You have to put down that same book you’ve been reading, turn off the reruns, mix up some new paints. You have to pull out some fresh paper and pick up a new pen. Let me know what you find. I love a good story. * * * This is one of 66 essays in the Gold Nautilus Award winning collection, Happiness Is an Imaginary Line in the Sand. The book is available here: https://bit.ly/40s3Gh0 Subscribe to Substack for more fun with words: https://thomaslloydqualls.substack.com/  Photo Credit: Thomas Lloyd Qualls We are allowed to grieve, even for things not right for us. The wrong career path, the faithless lover, the secure job that doesn’t feed us, the accidentally deleted chapter, the abusive parent, the lottery ticket that blew away. We are allowed to grieve our youthful recklessness, our wavering self-confidence, our blissful ignorance, our will to live. In other words, we are allowed to be human. A while back I turned down the job offer of a lifetime. A position in that would provide two paychecks a month, health benefits, and retirement, for something I’m already skilled and experienced in doing. Why would any reasonable, rational person do this? The answer is that no person in that frame of mind would. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t have good reasons. Not the least of which is: I need to write. It is that simple. Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls. So said Joseph Campbell. How many of us truly believe in this? How many act upon that belief? Do I believe? On good days. Do I act on that belief? Well, in that case I did. In truth, I have been for years. Every time I put words to paper. So far though, most of those doors I’ve had to kick down or pry open. I’m not whining. Ok, I’m whining a little. I understand that most writers work in the dark, with mostly self-manufactured hope. Which is known to wane from time to time. Unless you are one of those blissfully self-confident types. Which probably means you’re not a writer. So forget that last part. As a writer, I believe in a few irrational things. One is that I can make a decent living as an artist. Despite society’s reluctance to do things like fund the arts or pay for books and music, I believe we still live in a world where the gift of art is essential to our lives. Also, I still I grieve. For the opportunity I passed up, for the simplicity and stability it would have offered. And I also know myself well enough to understand that I am simply unable to cut the rope on all my head-banging-against-walls aspirations. On the writer’s shack in my backyard. On becoming living proof of the ability to live our dreams. We cannot see into the future to determine what will be, what would have been. We cannot see into past lives to recapture what we learned there. Even looking backwards into this life, we are unable see clearly. Our vision is clouded by the lens of perception. Blake said, If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. But absent the aid of mescaline or DMT, this is a difficult state to achieve. What are we to do then, those of us so unavoidably fixed in our artistic inclinations? I see plenty of ridiculously talented artists around. Those who work the scene constantly, are connected and knowledgeable, and still must bartend or pull espresso in order to pay their rents. There must be a way to rebuild our communities, our society, our nation-state, our world, so the bankers and defense contractors have to bus tables on the side. And the artists of the world, who enrich our lives so much more, could just focus on their art. True, it isn’t just about money. Money, though, is an undeniable fact of life. Money is energy, a spirit made flesh. Like air or food, we rely upon it for our existence. If we had a thought to completely eschew money, we wouldn’t have incarnated here. We’d have stayed in the unbroken realm of light. Because we are here, we agreed at some point to take on this messy state of being. We agreed to ride the ever-shifting balance between the mud and the rays of light. Wearing this skin means we not only experience joy and happiness, but doubt, grief, and sorrow. One of the tricks to being human is to master the alchemy of turning these states of being into beauty. If we want our lives to be filled with beauty, we must be brave enough to create it, generous enough to pay for it, compassionate enough to support it, and bold enough to see our vision through to fruition. When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. –Paulo Coelho Despite my occasional frustration, I still believe. And I still grieve. And this is the clay from which art is made. _______________________
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This is an excerpt from the Nautilus Award-winning book Happiness Is An Imaginary Line in the Sand. If you’d like to own the whole collection, it is available here. |
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