December 10, 2012: I've moved

I've moved and morphed. You can find me now at http://www.mindfulmusement.blogspot.com/. See you there!

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The Energy Agreement: Becoming a Freelancer

Some of us at some point in our lives feel an inner pull to try making a partial or full living as a freelance writer, artist, musician, film creator, or some other kind of creative solo worker.

I am here to say it's possible.

You may have tried to disregard this little tug. Maybe, like me, you've spent considerable time in the 8-to-5 (or 6-to-6) workplace, toiling away for The Man. After all, freelancing is not for those who get the shakes just thinking about giving up their dental and vision insurance. It's entirely appropriate that "Precarity (Uncertainty of Work) is a "see also" entry at the end of the Wikipedia entry on "Freelancer."

In spite of precarity -- maybe even because of the allure of it -- some of us are simply called to venture into the territory of the freelancer. I believe that when freelancing is your right livelihood, the universe opens up the possibilities. Call it spiritual, or metaphysical, or mystical: something opens up for those who puruse the lives they're meant to lead. We may not get rich in the process, but we certainly lead very rich lives when we listen to our hearts.

Joseph Campbell, the late scholar who studied myths and religions across cultures, said, "I have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time -- namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a akind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one that you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and the doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be" (Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth).

I do believe there's an invisible-hand layer of freelancing. There's something about hanging out your shingle that triggers the work to start coming your way...work that's suited to you just when you need it, although sometimes not a minute before.

In fact, about every six months I make an agreement with the hidden hands. I call it "The Energy Agreement." I renew it every six months, and it goes like this:

"For the next year I will base my exchange with the world around me on energy, rather than money. I will give my best and most joyful, creative and playful energy, and I will trust that my needs for resources will be met. I won't worry about money or time. In exactly six months, I'll see how this trust experiment is going."

I put a time frame on my Energy Agreement because even with the best, most earnest Energy Agreement, freelancing isn't all about hidden hands opening doors and leading us to pots of gold. Otherwise everybody's brother would be doing it, right? There are plenty of downs with the ups -- maybe more than most jobs. You're working without a net, after all, and it's very easy to lose your balance -- if not financially, then mentally. It takes discipline and stamina to work instead of go hiking, to to deal with the solitude that at first seemed appealing but eventually can get overwhelmingly lonely.

Still, with current technology, it's never been easier to work from nearly anywhere with a laptop, printer, and cell phone. (I'm sitting in a coffee shop as we speak.) If you are disciplined, and if you are willing to trust the hidden hands for help, and if you have a partner who carries benefits or if you are willng to purchase benefits like many other self-employed people, and if you're willing to accept work that may feel "beneath" you or not as "creative" as you'd like, then freelancing can be a viable option for a livelihood.

Making your own Energy Agreement may be just the place to start. And you don't have to quit your day job just yet to get the cosmic ball rolling. My advice is this: go slow, but if you think freelancing is for you, give it a try -- even if it's just a few hours a week at the beginning -- and see if you notice invisible hands starting to help.

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Eastern Iowans' Portraits in DC Until July

I'm very excited to be heading to DC this week for the opening of "Portrait Of Maquoketa" at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Artist Rose Frantzen painted 180 portraits of her local townspeople in Maquoketa that will be on display through early July.

I met Rose and her artist husband Charles Morris about a year ago and had the pleasure of working with them over the spring and summer on their book, Portrait of Maquoketa, which is being sold online and will be sold at the Smithsonian gift shop while the exhibit runs in DC.

After I conducted a number of interviews with Rose last spring, I wrote an introductory essay for the book and helped her write and edit short reflections about the people, their portraits and her artistic process.

Later in the summer, I listened to Chuck read his essay aloud, which relates biographical information about Rose, discusses some of her other works besides Portrait of Maquoketa, and periodically reveals snapshots of what it must be like to be part of such an amazing marriage of two talented artists. Chuck not only wrote this marvelous essay that ends the book; he also labored on the layout design book all summer long. Then, together with Rose in the late summer and early fall, he saw the book through the many steps involved in the printing process.

The opportunity to work with these remarkable people was handed to me out of the blue from the Freelancing Gods via friend Al T., who thought my husband Chuck would enjoy Rose and Chuck. That's how freelancing can work sometimes -- opportunities sometimes just seem to fall from the sky.

So I'm feeling very lucky today as we prepare to head to DC tomorrow to see the exhibit at the Smithsonian, honor Rose, and celebrate the 180 Maquoketans whose faces will grace the halls of the National Portrait Gallery for the next 7.5 months.

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Art and Writing Matter

At my writing group last night, one member – I’ll call her Julia – said she was recovering from the flu. Possibly the dreaded H1N1, we decided after hearing about her symptoms. On one day, when she became dehydrated and nearly delirious, she said she kept torturing herself with the thought that her writing was worthless, that she should be spending her time doing something to “help people” instead. “I still am feeling that way a little bit,” she confessed. “It won’t quite go away.”

I know so well this tricky turn of mind, this saboteur, this ambivalence toward creating art that arrives with sickness or other vulnerabilities – an uncertain income, a move to a new city. The rest of us rallied for her, trying to dispel her grey sky that wouldn’t clear. “It helps people to write something that is cathartic for them to read.” “When we’re creating, we’re more alive, and when we’re more alive, we’re more useful to the world.” “Besides, we don’t choose our art; it chooses us. We create because we must.”

Someone asked Julia, “Is the act of writing important to you?” Suddenly our friend’s face shifted from worried to peaceful, residually sick to the picture of health, dark cloud to beaming light. “Of course,” she said, smiling.

When I took Eric Maisel’s class on creativity coaching, he asked us to begin each day by writing “I matter and my writing matters.”

Art does matter. Writing does matter. Of course.

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Take a Break

“In the relentless busyness of modern life,” Wayne Muller writes in Sabbath: Finding Rest and Renewal in Our Daily Lives (Bantam, 2000), “we have lost the rhythm between work and rest.” He explores the concept of “Sabbath” and its rituals and references in Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism. Muller says the Sabbath is celebrated in various forms because it is in our nature to need a day a week to rest, celebrate, delight in, and savor our lives. During the rest of the week we may be driven by work, tasks, and worries, but once a week we’re supposed to chill out.

A true Sabbath, he argues, is a day of reflection and a day of no activities done out of obligation. Whether your Sabbath is spent alone or with friends or family or the larger community, the only goal should be rest and renewal.

Which is why when my friend Sheri prefers to stay home from church on Sunday mornings to garden, I think she is taking a particularly special form of the Sabbath. And why this morning when I hiked along the Coralville Reservoir, thinking about John Muir’s enthusiasm for nature as the greatest of all temples, I too was “obeying” the Sabbath…as I was later this afternoon while working on my novel, feeling the warm sun coming in my office window, enjoying the rush of a scene coming alive on the page.

If you’re a creator – an artist, writer, gardener, musician – and if you’re looking for an excuse to work on that creative project you’ve shelved for awhile, just remember that you owe yourself – and life itself – a Sabbath at least once a week. If on that day you are creating with joy and peace and delight, you’re honoring the Sabbath.

On the other hand, sometimes we need a break from everything. Doing nothing is an option, too.

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Canna-tastic

All summer long our canna plants have vigorously grown broad leaves of light green or variegated burgundy and forest green. Now, finally, the plants have brought forth their flowers, which are bright red, but so disproportionately small that they look a little silly perched on top of those magnificent plants.

When I work on my novel, my creative process feels like the growing canna plant-in-progress – complex, broad, and expansive. I show up at the computer a little afraid of the blank page on the screen, yet something happens if I make myself sit there, even if just for a half hour. Miraculously, sometimes characters interact, plot develops, and the research I’ve been doing magically finds its way into the material. Once in awhile I’m so pleasantly surprised that I dance around the room, like Geoffrey Rush neurotic writer’s character in The Banger Sisters. Remember that scene? He’s all by himself in a hotel room; his words are flowing after a long period of writer’s block, and he’s absolutely full of joy.

But sometimes the next day, when I look at what I produced, it seems disproportionately small in comparison to the feelings of discovery I experienced the day before. Which begs the old question: do people who create like to create because of the feelings of limitless possibility that accompanies the creative process – the variegated leaves pushing toward the heavens – or because of the products we produce – those shy red flowers that don’t quite convey the heightened experience we had while creating them?

Maybe if the flowers were as large as the feelings the creator experienced while making them, it would just be too much excitement for the reader/viewer/listener to bear all at once.

It doesn’t always happen, but I sure love that rush that sometimes accompanies the creative process. Guess I’ll keep making stuff. It’s canna-tastic.

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Iowa Writing Coach: Poem in Your Pocket Day

Everyone should live near a resident poet. My husband, sons, and I were lucky to have that privilege from 1990-1996, when we lived across the street from Robert Dana and his equally wonderful wife, Peg.

Originally from Massachusetts, Robert attended Drake University and the Iowa Writers Workshop after serving in the South Pacific at the end of World War II. He taught 40 years as Poet-in-Residence at Cornell College. I didn’t realize until recently that he was the founding editor of the revived North American Review, one of my favorite literary journals. He’s published many books of poetry and has also has served two terms as Poet Laureate of Iowa.

Here’s what I learned from Robert during the six years we lived in his vicinity: Gardening is serious business, as is good food. Neighbors are to be greeted enthusiastically – and maybe worked into a poem now and then. Cats make good fodder for poetry, too, and can shade a poem with humor, or lightness, or darkness, or all three. It is an honor to be invited to help proof a poet’s galleys while he reads them out loud, but you’ll be nervous as hell and will wonder if you’re doing it right. And…you don’t have to be religious to see the miracle in the everyday. In fact, too much looking for God can mean missing “air raw with rain” or “the dead blue crab in all its electric raiment.”

Cheers to Robert Dana on Poem in Your Pocket Day. When he read at Cornell College two nights ago, he told the audience that of all his lines of poetry, the last line in the following poem is his wife Peg’s favorite. I think it’s mine now, too.

“Chimes”

Mid-August. Evening. Rain falling.

Cold, bright silk where the street fronts the house.

Out back, it laves and slicks the parched leaves of the trees.
Ragged hang of summer’s end.

I lean against the doorway of the poem,
listening to old patter.

My cat, Zeke, lays himself out imperially.
Eleven pounds of grey smoke
with tufted ears and a curved plume of tail.

Now, a slight wind,
and The Emperor of Heaven’s chimes intone like distant bells,
his court musician’s 4000-year-old pentatonic scales
pealing in slow, clear ripples.

Occasionally, a chord.

Every day I live I live forever.

--From The Morning of the Red Admirals (Anhinga Press, 2004) by Robert Dana

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