Maria and I share a passionate belief that there is really little or no distinction between our art and our life. Our art is our life, our life is our art. There is no distinction between my writing and my life, there is no distinction between Maria’s art and her life.
We are both fiercely committed to staying with our dream, which is the fulfillment of our creative destiny, for better or worse. I visited my friend Scott Carrino in his sugar house.
Scott has had an exhausting year or two, starting his much loved and wonderful cafe. He is struggling to make room for his creative life.
Scott is trying to stay with his dreams, all in the face of running a seven-day-a-week cafe and dealing with money and bills and staff and food and regulations and brutish hours and pressure – the travails of the new business, his Round House Cafe.
It is sugar season, and the sap is really gushing in the winter that wasn’t. Scott has retreated to his sugar house, where he is making gallons of his very popular brand of maple syrup. And thinking on his life.
He is also working on his writing and his music, two critical elements of his life that sometimes get lost in the hard business of making the cafe prosper. For all history, creatives have been confronted with this choice: how to do out work, how to pay our bills.
As the sap boiled and bubbled, Scott read me the first two verses if a new song he is writing, Like I Used To.. It touched me and made me think of the dream, and how we must never lose touch with it.
“I would love to feel like I used to – young, vibrant and immortal.
A youthful body that could go and go and serve me well.
I’d like to fee just like I used to, young, happy and free.
I’d like to feel just like I used to – impetuous at times,
At other times, thoughtful, I want to feel creative and passionate.
I’d love to feel the wonder of the world – like I used to.”
Scott very much feels the wonder of the world, and so do I, I love his song and am eager to see him finish it and perform it, perhaps in his own cafe. It comes to a very good place.
Wonder is an important part of our friendship. I know so many people who were not able to stay with their dreams, they got worried, tired, broke, discouraged. They live substitute lives. I hope to never give up on my dream or the wonder of the world.
A friend sent us this quote by Rilke about the great sculptor Auguste Rodin:
“…You see, Rodin has lived nothing that is not in his work. Thus it grew around him. Thus he did not lose himself; even in the years when lack of money forced him to unworthy work, he did not lose himself, because what he experienced did not remain a plan, because in the evenings he immediately made real what he had wanted during the day. Thus everything always became real. That is the principal thing – not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it all into things. As Rodin did.”
This is what I wanted to tell Scott, that there is nothing in life that is not in our work. We can never lose ourselves, no matter how hard life gets, or how drained and overwhelmed we sometimes feel, because in our own time and place we can always make real what we had dreamed during the day. If he were young, happy and free, he could never have written those lyrics, or made such wonderful syrup.
In that way, understanding that we live nothing that is not in our work, everything becomes real. We may not always be able to stay in the dream, to be-in-the-mood, but we can always convert the dream into our lives, and our lives into the dream. Perhaps that is what creativity really is.
In that way, I will always feel young and vibrant and immortal, because in that way, it will always be true. The wonder of the world lives in our hearts and spirits, not our bodies and our struggles. It can never be taken from us or wither in the true course of life.