Glasses

Lovelies,

Last month I collected every last bit of Muzi content into a single document for copyrighting.

(Sixteen months after going live is a good time to copyright something, right?)

I expected tedium — but also a welcome break from my thought-heavy work of March and April. 

But downloading, organizing, I couldn't help but read.

And reading, I couldn't help but notice: Everything was wrong.

Exercises lost their center. Paragraphs sat stale. Introductions created false expectations. 

This will never not fascinate me: You set out to make something great. You labor until it's perfect. A year later you see a hundred errors.

Like time is glasses. 

So I promptly rewrote the methodology. Or I should say, I essentialized it. The foundation is still there. My conviction that creativity is our natural state. My belief that creativity thrives when we resource ourselves for it — with inspiration, courage, discipline, rest, and connection. But every Mission got a soul search. Every Reflection got a haircut. 

My favorite project was "First Aid": tools for key moments of the creative process. I revised Start a New Project and Heal a Disappointment. Then I tried something new, Integrate Feedback. I went on an evening walk and thought about the 11pm text messages from artists devastated by a friend's response to a poem. I ate my lunch and remembered the eight rules I instituted to keep people safe during song workshopping.

I lay in bed and recalled reviews of my albums, advice from producers, vetoes from co-writers, compliments from listeners.

I decided, as I have decided many times before, that feedback is a crisis.

It's a disorientation. It's a dislocation. 

Even if it's positive. 

(Sometimes especially if it's positive.) 

Feedback splits our creative trajectory. It can knock us all the way over or it can send us with momentum toward our sparkling creative futures. What makes the difference is us: our ability to sort, process, and land, ultimately, on our own feedback for ourselves. 

With love,

My production year is shaping up into something beautiful.

First is David Hobbes, for our third outing, and our second full length album. David's writing is forever wonderful yet somehow now better. I'm looking forward to the inevitable complete immersion.

Please recall some of my favs from his first album here, here, and here. 

Rest is not the absence of activity!

For the Muzi-curious, your Rest Mission if you choose to accept it:
 

Make Soup

Balance the wildness of creativity.

Remi owns a one-man business making soup in Oakland, CA.

Every Thursday he sets up shop at the Berkeley Farmer’s Market: cloth draped over a folding table, mason jars stacked with bisques, creamy split peas, chunky leafy green stews.

At any given moment there are six people gathered at his stand. A few to buy soup. But the majority just to be near him. His presence of calm and openness is utterly magnetic.

This is a man who was born to make soup.

So you’d be surprised to discover Remi’s passion is not soup making at all. Remi’s passion is music.

“I make soup for the music,” he tells me in a rare quiet moment. “Music isn’t grounding. Music is… woo-weeee!!” He whistles and gestures towards the clouds. “But I get a couple root vegetables in my hands, I chop chop chop. It brings me down to earth and after a while I can go up there and write songs again.”

Creativity, bless its heart, is not a grounding activity. It is electric. It is ethereal. It’s a sort of wild, unbridled, expansive energy that unfolds only into more of itself. It’s never going to suggest we dial it back. It's never going to suggest a slow, deep breath.

Creativity will smile coyly and lure us ever further into its dreamy chaos.

It is more than tempting to ride higher and higher. It can be actually addictive. You see evidence of this in how happy yet depleted many artists find themselves to be.

So it’s on us: Every time we create, we must know the power of the forces we deal. We must acknowledge the other-worldly creatures we are when we pick up our paintbrushes and autoharps.

And then we must make a point to keep a foot in the physical world.

We do this for our very survival. However creative we are, we must balance it with the embodied. The nurtured. The reposed. We must give strong and consistent shout-outs to this adorable earthly form of our bodies.

We must MAKE SOUP.

Or yes, you can make an omelette. Or a cake. But seriously, make soup. Choose some vegetables, the rootier the better. Hold them in your hands. Smell them. Chop them. Lose yourself in the rhythms. The textures. The smells. The utter sensuality.

Don’t distract yourself with anything as you cook. Just this once, turn off the podcast, put down the phone. Just be with the all-five-senses smash of a show taking place right before you.

Use this Mission to bring yourself back to earth.

And then enjoy your bowl of soup as a thanksgiving for your body — that beautiful vessel for the creativity that will course through you again soon.

To do this and more Missions download Muzi for free in the Apple App Store