July 11, 2012

Are you **it-ing** me?

Inspirational Cat Print by Stephanie Lin Roth of SWLstudio -- click for more info

But, more importantly, are you “it-ing” yourself?

Nearly 90 years ago, Martin Buber published I-Thou and introduced a new way of thinking about how we relate to others. In “I-It” relationships, we see others as objects. In “I-Thou” relationship we recognize one another’s whole divine-spark-filled humanness.

Recently, I began thinking about our own tendencies to “It” ourselves — that is, to see ourselves as objects, to see ourselves from the outside in instead of experiencing life from the inside out.

I see this most clearly in my voice students. We “It” ourselves when we guide our singing based on an imaginary sense of what we sound like to other people (as if, from inside our own heads we could even know what we sound like to outside ears). As a voicefinder, it is then my job to hold up the mirror of I-Thou love and help them experience the sensations of letting voice move through them.

Sure, outside perspectives are important.

But using this “It” view of our work, our voice, our bodies from the outset only leads us to be cut off from the Source.

Yes, God willing, your voice, your art will go winging out into the world and have a life of its own. But in its making, in its birthing, it does no good to feel it as anything but internal to you, rooted in the core of your being.

What helps you stop it-ing yourself?

Filed Under: Finding Your Voice, Plot Notes Tagged With: , , , , , 3 Comments
June 13, 2012

A parfumier I shall never be

Spider Mums by vicci

Spider Mums by vicci -- click image for more information

In my mind’s eye, I can still see it: a glass jar filled with water speckled with bits of dirt and spices. Various flowers and grasses float in the water and stick out of the top of the jar. It smells ever-so-vaguely floral but mostly like dirty water. In reality, it is nothing at all like the magically pungent potion I had imagined making from all the ingredients I lovingly collected and thoughtfully mixed.

And that was that. A child’s experiment failed and a life’s work in perfumery easily abandoned.

Thankfully I did not give up on songwriting quite so easily even though the songs produced by my earliest attempts bear a strong resemblance to that jar of dirty flower water. Each overly long song resembled a jumble of too many undigested and indigestible ingredients swimming in a watery soup, never releasing their truest scents.

Here the ingredients were images and story snippets that each meant something very complex and important to me as an adolescent. I knew how to collect them, like so many bright dandelions, but I had to put in my now-proverbial 10,000 hours in order to learn how to cook them to get them to yield their essence.

The best perfume travels lightly on the breeze, touching our senses without overwhelming.

Most importantly it communicates between people: floating with the heat off one person’s skin until it reaches the next person’s nose. My early songs didn’t quite communicate. Perhaps I was afraid of stripping my precious stories and images of their original forms. But this kind of processing is an important part of turning such ingredients into song. I wasn’t willing to play with the ingredients and then play with them again.

As I continue to grow as a songwriter, I want to honor both parts of this process: the child-like instinct to collect a song’s ingredients and the hard, if playful, work of mixing and processing those raw ingredients. The dreaming and collecting part of the work is where the wonder comes from.

The girl who collected the flowers and the grasses was fully aligned with her own “What if?”

Process song ideas too soon and I end up with the musical equivalent of processed cheese: a song that sounds cheap and disconnected from its deeper source. But leave those collected words and melody snippets overprotected and under-processed and the song is a dud – it can’t quite float from my heart to another’s.

What lessons do you learn from early – if failed – attempts at your art? And what helps you keep both these parts of your creative self alive and well?

Filed Under: Finding Your Voice, Plot Notes Tagged With: , , , , , , , 1 Comment
May 16, 2012

Piece by piece

At the Edge of the Unknown

Making art and making a living. Lots of folks here on Scoutie Girl and elsewhere have plenty of goodness to share on the topic.

My angle: I agree with Lewis Hyde – author of The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World – that artists (and other folks with gifts to give to the world) have always put food on the table in a few different ways. Looking at this historically can help us creatives remember that we are part of a long lineage of those who have gone before.

Hyde writes:

[T]here are three primary ways in which modern artists have resolved the problem of their livelihood: they have taken second jobs, they have found patrons to support them, or they have managed to place the work itself on the market and pay the rent with fees and royalties.

I want to look at the last of these first: selling the actual products of your artistic labor.

With my new album, “at the edge of the unknown,”  being released as we speak, issues surrounding selling our artwork is definitely “up” for me right now. Every time my phone buzzes with an alert from Paypal that someone else has bought a CD (a CD, can you believe it, in this day and age?!?) I feel a little thrill. And when I put them in the mail I know I will be thinking: “There it goes, one sweet shiny disc with all of the love that I tried to squeeze onto it, winging out to spread hope in the world.”

At the same time, I feel torn. Do I actually want to try to make money from selling CDs (or downloads) or do I want to be able to give my music away freely? Which approach will actually feel more nourishing to me? And how can I make my approach to sharing my music with the world best line up with my larger mission of helping people find their truest voices? As another recent post here on Scoutie Girl pointed out, we don’t want to monetize everything we make.

One danger Hyde points out is that relying on sales of your art to feed your family can lead toward making pieces based too much on what we think will sell.

How do we balance the urge to give people what they want with the need to return over and over again to that deepest Well of Creativity itself?

And then, some art is priceless; we give away what is most precious, like the quilt my sister-in-law is making in honor of my wedding.

Are you wrestling with questions of selling your art? How to price what feels priceless? Does the question of making things for market trouble you, or do you feel like: “People pushing to pay vast quantities of money for my art? I should have such problems!” Or have you made peace with piece work? Let me hear you!

Filed Under: Buy You, For You, Finding Your Voice Tagged With: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
April 25, 2012

your gift: a pickle waiting to happen

photo by pking Design

You are here to share your peculiar gifts with the world.

Some gifts are peculiar indeed.

Rereading The Gift, Lewis Hyde’s wonderful study of “the commerce of the creative spirit,” I was reminded of one gift in particular which truly embodied Hyde’s claim that “a gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift.”

One summer I was working at a program for young writers and foreign language students at my alma mater, Simon’s Rock College. One of my fellow staff members was going into town and I told her I hoped she would bring me back a snack. When she asked what I wanted I said, “I don’t know, get me something crunchy…surprise me.” She came back with a Pickle in a Pouch. If you’ve never seen one, it’s exactly what it purports to be: a large pickle encased in its very own pickle-sized plastic pouch.

We never did eat the Pickle in a Pouch. Instead, we continually re-gifted it to one another in new and increasingly creative ways. It circulated among three or four of us all summer. Sometimes it wore its own custom-made construction paper costumes; once it had a whole diorama made for it to pose in; at least once it ended up hidden under a pillow, and I also have a vague memory of it being ingeniously suspended from a dorm room ceiling. In the end, we held a burial ceremony for it and laid it finally to rest.

Hyde describes this kind of gift as a “ceremonial gift” and says, “The clear uselessness of such objects seems to make it easier for them to become vehicles for the spirit of a group.” The value of the gift was in the giving itself and in the bonds of friendship that it strengthened among those of us in that tiny crunchy circle of givers and receivers.

With each act of giving, the pickle inspired us to reach for greater and greater acts of creativity and ingenuity.

As Hyde writes, we must think of the gift “as a constantly flowing river.” Try to dam it up or horde the gift for ourselves and it goes bad. “What is kept” he writes, “feeds only once and leaves us hungry.”

Now imagine that your gift – your voice, your art, that which is uniquely yours to give to this world – is like the precious Pickle. It may not seem to have any “practical use,” yet it goes about in the world, bringing joy or introspection or maybe wondrous puzzlement and it creates a bond between giver and receiver.

Once you find your own true gifts (your art, your voice, your listening ears), you will feel the same way we did about that pickle: we could not wait to find some new and unheard of way to give it. The giving itself was a source of great joy. The opposite is also painfully true: to have something to give and no way to give it – that is one of the most excruciating things of all.

With the urge to give so energizing, it’s no wonder that thinking about how our gifts might interact with how we put food on the table might pull us up short.

Hyde offers some wonderful wisdom for thinking about making art and making a living and I am brimming with excitement to share those gifts with you in future posts.

For now, I would love to hear: What is the one gift that you are bursting with readiness to give to the world no matter what?

Filed Under: creative thinkers, Finding Your Voice, Plot Notes Tagged With: , , , , , 5 Comments
March 8, 2012

The passionate creative as symbolic exemplar

Minna Bromberg

“Really? He said that?”

That’s usually people’s reaction when I tell them that even as a singer, songwriter, and voice-finder, I have a story of someone telling me to be quiet. In my case it was my seventh-grade choir teacher who used to tell me “shut up” so he could “hear the other sopranos.”

Why are my voice students surprised by this? My students find me because my voice suggests to them that I have something to offer about how they might better use their own voices. For some, the fact that I, too, have experienced being told not to sing seems not in keeping with their image of me as a confident singer and loving encourager of their song.

More and more of us as artists, coaches, yoga teachers, makers, and creatives of all stripes are working in the world by cultivating a “personality brand” – growing (God willing, growing!) businesses based on passionately bringing our truest selves to the world.

All of this got me thinking about the “symbolic exemplar” and the pros and cons of being one.

The term “symbolic exemplar” comes from the writing of Jack Bloom, a rabbi and psychologist who wrote about how rabbis get authority as teachers and leaders, not only from our actual years of training, but from everything that we represent to the people we serve (e.g., every other clergy person they’ve ever met, Torah, the whole of Jewish tradition, even God Godself). We learned of Bloom’s work in rabbinical school because it’s important for new rabbis to be aware that when we walk into a room we bring with us not only a set of skills, strengths, and weaknesses, but also everything that everyone in that room projects onto us.

Similarly, a yoga teacher may come to symbolize “health” to her students (who would be shocked to find her eating a cheeseburger), or how a successful indiepreneur, in teaching others to thrive in business, is partly relying on how he himself symbolizes “success” and even “wealth.”

There are obvious cons to being in this position: If something happens to my voice, will my students stop trusting me to teach them to sing strongly and healthily? And as a rabbi, if you catch me having a bad day in the grocery store and I’m not able to be 100% present to you, have I impacted your view of Judaism, Jewish tradition, and God Godself?

We can easily feel trapped by what we come to symbolize.

But Bloom is very helpful here in his advice to rabbis, and I think all creatives have something to learn from his work: being a symbolic exemplar may have its claustrophobic moments, but resisting it or pretending the phenomenon doesn’t exist will only take us down a bad road.

Instead, like any other form of power or privilege, it is our responsibility to use it for the good. As a voice-finder, this means embracing my own diva self and continually trying to use the supreme confidence that others project onto me (whether I’m feeling it in the moment or not) to help them find greater confidence in themselves. And as a rabbi, to the extent to which others will always see me as a stand-in for the Divine, I want the image of the Divine that I strive for to be one of compassion and love.

I completely agree with our Buddhist friends: The finger pointing at the moon is not the same thing as the moon itself.

But if you find yourself in a line of work where people are going to be looking at your finger anyway, you may as well commit to pointing in the direction of wholeness, abundance, radiance.

Filed Under: action, creative thinkers, guest posts, Plot Notes Tagged With: , , , , , , 9 Comments