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How To Be Yourself
“I have often worked with people we would consider extremely accomplished by external standards but inwardly have never particularly felt permission to be who they really are; permission to feel what they really feel; permission to desire what they desire with their life and to pursue that. And therefore they become maybe very adept at serving the ideas and values that were given to them by their family of origin or their culture, but again, the wedge within their own psychological reality is driven deeper and deeper and deeper. And the distress goes straighter.”
~James Hollis
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“It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive.
In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the…
