Sit and listen, go and do
A remix on jump and pray.
I was going through some of my old art yesterday. I love how distance gives perspective. Trash, trash, save, trash. It feels great to throw things out and it feels great to know how you feel about your work.
I also hate this. Why can’t I know in the moment if an idea is good or not so good? It would save me some time, ya know?
My musician friend, Michael, taught me this trick of creative work. I remember asking him how he writes his songs. I keep notebooks and then I go back and pull the good ideas when I’m ready to make an album, he said. When you look back, you know which ideas are good.
Reminds me of this parable in the Bible where Mary, Martha and Jesus are all hanging out. Martha is working hard, busy about the kitchen preparing food, making things nice for Jesus. Mary just sits with him, is present with him, listening.
This annoys Martha. She’s like — Hey Jesus, make Mary help me! See, back in the day, in Jewish culture, the women were to be in the kitchen, doing all the things. Only the men would sit at their teacher’s feet.
Jesus, being the flaming feminist that he was, goes, Mary made the right choice. Okay, Jesus. You can’t blame Martha though. She was just doing what was culturally expected of her. But no Jesus was like, f that, f these cultural norms, let’s chill.
Many of us have been running all our lives, Thich Nhat Hanh said. Practice stopping.
In 2018, I moved from the Silicon Valley to a little mountain town between LA and Santa Barbara called Ojai (Oh-hi). I manifested my life here. Really. Life in the Bay was hard on me for many reasons. Before moving was even an option, my therapist at the time asked me to design my dream city/place to live.
Why would I do that? I thought. Wouldn’t it just cause me more pain, imagining a life some other place? Sensing my hesitation, he said, Just make some bullet points. Reluctantly, I did.
There’s a lot more to this story — how we stumbled upon Ojai and how this city flung the doors wide up for us, and how it matched all of my bullet points and then some. And how, had my therapist not asked me to stop and imagine something different, something better, we may not be here.
It may sound like I’m team Mary. I’m not. I happen to think there’s a place for both Sit and Listen, and Go and Do. Everything in moderation, like my Nonna used to say. And I also think most of us are pretty good Martha’s. We like to go and do and get shit done. Sit and listen? Not so much.
But we need to stop. Our bodies, our art, our lives, (our politics) — they need the rhythm of Sit and Listen, Go and Do. If we’re all-listen-no-do, we don’t grow or change. And if we’re all-do-no-listen, we don’t learn, we don’t dream, we don’t imagine something better for our lives.
This morning, I made a cup of coffee. I sat on my back stoop, sipped, and marveled at all the leaves on the ground. We have two, giant eucalyptus trees that drop leaves year-round and especially in the summer. It’s hot and dry in Ojai. Dropping leaves allows them to retain water, breathe, survive.
I took my last sip of coffee, grabbed a broom, and swept.
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I like Michael's comment. I have gone back and looked at my art and those pieces I really love now, I didn't like at all back then. Of course, there is a lot of crap, but so many of those pieces I thought were hardly passable, are now my favorites. Great post. Thanks.