Brandon: Welcome to Within, the contemplative edition of the Leader’s Way podcast. I’m Brandon Nappi. I’m so thankful that you’re here. And I’ve been thinking a lot recently about creativity and inspiration and what it feels like when I have inspiration and when I’m at my most creative. And then, what it feels like in those moments when I’m completely bereft of inspiration and I feel like I can’t create anything. I can’t write anything. I can’t get out of my own way. I think we’ve all been in that stuck moment.
And theologically, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be made in the image of a God who is a creator. What does it mean to be made in the image of a creator?
And I think what it means is that constitutively, part of the who we are, part of our humanity, is that we are created in order to create. And this has been a really important revelation for me. I’m not sure that I would have seen myself as a creative, as a kind of creator in the past, but as I’ve been more and more online creating my Instagram feed on nearly a daily basis–and feel free to follow me there. Feel free to follow me there, where I offer musings about life and creativity and inspiration and what it means to live wholeheartedly. It’s been an amazing source of gratitude as I’ve connected with so many souls across the world. I’ve been thinking on a daily basis about what does it mean to create and what are the disciplines and habits that support a creative life.
And I’m so, so thankful to have stumbled upon the work of Carey Wallace, who’s just written a wonderful book called The Discipline of Inspiration, where she’s kind of reflected deeply about inspiration and how we can prepare our hearts in order to receive inspiration and how we can foster the creative life within us.
And when I’m talking about creativity, I’m not just talking about, you know, writing or painting or creating or music or, you know, the traditional ways we think about creativity. I’m thinking of my, of my grandmother, you know, someone who had an eighth grade education, but created these amazing meals. I still think about, you know, her lentil soup as one of the most beautiful acts of creation from my … from my childhood. Or I think about people who love to gather other people. You know, you create dinner parties and, you just gather people together for tea or for coffee. That’s an act of creation. You know, creating a piece of music. But it could also mean just, you know, creating a phone call together, creating a conversation, creating a flower arrangement, creating, I don’t know, a car. You know, I have great respect for people who renovate cars and repair, can fix things. Right? You know, my plumber and my electrician are these amazing magicians and fixing things is a creative act and all of this is an act of service in the world.
So I’m so excited that Carey Wallace has joined us on the podcast. She is the author, as I said, of The Discipline of Inspiration. She’s also the author of the Blind Contessa’s New Machine, Stories of the Saints, Psalms of Wonder, and The Ghost in the Glass House. She speaks in Leeds workshops and retreats on the creative life, on the saints, on Psalms, and works to help people from all walks of life build strong creative habits that welcome more inspiration in both art and life. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Welcome to Within, a contemplative segment within the Leader’s Way podcast that explores the convergence of mental health, art, and spirituality through authentic conversations across wisdom traditions about personal and collective transformation. We welcome artists, musicians, spiritual teachers, and healers to reflect on the sacred wisdom needed to heal the world’s deepest wounds. Within examines the inner path to wholeness, not through quick fixes or spiritual bypassing, but through courageous engagement with life’s profound challenges.
Carey Wallace, welcome to the Leader’s Way podcast. It’s so great to have you here.
Carey: It’s so great to be here, Brandon. Thanks for the invite.
B: I am so loving your new book. It’s like nourishment for my heart and my soul and my creative life: The Discipline of Inspiration, and I’d love to ask sort of a meta question. And that is, what inspired the book on inspiration? Tell me about the genesis story of the book.
C: Yeah, that’s a great question. I actually had just published my first novel with a big publisher, so I had some time on my hands and I was interested in helping other artists create more art, not because I am a good person, but because I am like a greedy person who needs art to survive in the world. And I knew there were a lot of people not making things who had things in them to make. And so I started a program to help people form strong creative habits, and I created a curriculum for it. And I wanted the curriculum to be primarily artists talking about what their experience had been. And if you look at what the great books on art are out there, the books that people read, the tomes on art, and I am afraid that my book may eventually fall into this category. They are not usually written by the greatest artists, right? Like the long disquisitions on art were not written by Rembrandt. Rembrandt wrote like a lot of letters asking for money, right? That was like his literary output, basically.
So what I did was go through, you know, sort of detritus of many artists’ lives across genres and throughout history to look at letters and interviews and places where they had spoken about like what it was like to be an artist. And I was interested in a whole bunch of things. I was interested in the artist’s life: Do you have to be unhappy? The artist’s character: Do you have to be a jerk? The definition of art. The purpose of art. The artist’s religious experience. Because my faith was really intimately connected with my art. And what I found was just like radical disagreement about all of these topics, right? And from people who like neither you or I have the wherewithal to like … referee if they’re having– if like Toni Morrison and Tolstoy are having an argument, who of us gets to say who’s right?
But what I found in the midst of this melee was this very interesting place of like total disagreement, which–total agreement, pardon me, which was the experience of inspiration. You know, inspiration is all over our culture now. Like you can … like there are faux places that advertise inspiration with your faux now. Right? But like when I use the word inspirational, I’m talking about is the thing that tells you what to make and the thing that tells you how to make it.
So you have talent, which means it’s like a little easier for you to like sing in tune or draw a perfect ellipse. And then there’s also technique, which is the time you spend like honoring your inspiration and your talent by learning a craft, right? The principles of craft. But inspiration is the thing that like lights that all up and makes it worthwhile and lights again in your viewers when they–or your, you know, your readers, or whoever the the audience for your work ultimately is there usually I think experiencing in the best case scenario, some of that same inspiration that you had.
And when people talked about this artist like going back to the Greeks and all the way up to actually Toni Morrison today, talk about it as being something that comes from beyond that there is a sense that it pre-exists them. There’s a very strong sense that it is not them, that it is at odds with sometimes even their own beliefs, their own desires, their own plans. And it also doesn’t have to come into the world through them. Like there’s an idea that like if you don’t take it, it will continue, you know, through the world and find somebody else who is willing to be the vessel for that … for that prompt.
And I got very, very interested in this. And I was also interested because I am a person of faith in the fact that people were constantly using religious language to describe it, even if what they needed to do was deny that what felt like a divine visitation was in fact a divine visitation. So you get songwriters like Carol King actually tells everybody that her songs come from God and her songwriting partner, Jerry Goffin says, Well, I’m not so pretentious that I would say that my songs come from God, right? But everybody has to wrestle with this idea that it feels like it’s coming from something divine.
So I thought, What happens if we go ahead and believe this testimony of artists that they are actually in touch with something divine in the act and in the process of creation? And there was a whole book worth of ideas there when I started asking that question.
B: Oh, my gosh. Were there were there any big surprises for you or or even disappointments? You know, were there some really creative folks who you wanted more from or you wanted a different answer from?
C: Well, I think one of the places that this applies actually is with the profound disappointments that many of us have with the artists that we love, right? How they have lived or even some of the things they have made that stand alongside other things that we think are like precious and holy and they seem like much less than those things to us. And to me, recognizing the spirit of God as the prompt of these creations is a wonderful way to be like, this is precious and holy. And we don’t actually have to necessarily throw it out because of the personality of the artist.
And I actually think– I also am not saying that everybody has to accept everything because God made everything. I think artists, the category is really distinct from some other categories of cultural production. And I think people who have been harmed by various things, people are very directly impacted by whatever the artist has gotten themselves involved in are not required to ever have anything to do with that artist again. And I do actually think that there are forms of problematic behavior that call everything else that you’ve done into question. This is not sort of like an anti-cancel screed, but it is a way to reckon with … I love this song so much. This artist has been so terrible. And I think the flip side of it is it gives us a place to go with that worship response that we have to it, which is God and not the artist. And it also maybe gives us hope for ourselves because none of us have been perfect in our lives. And all of us will probably betray what we wanted to be and who we wanted to be at some point. And what the fact that this stuff still comes through those kinds of artists tells us is that God is still capable of working with people who are profoundly compromised. And I feel like there’s some hope and some evidence of like a profound honor and grace in that.
B: It is the miracle of life that God gets through. Past our idiosyncrasies, our profound brokenness, you know, is just sitting with a person in the spiritual direction recently who’s really struggling with the theodicy question. I think the question of how an all loving God, all powerful God can allow evil in the world. And obviously there’s no great answer to this question. And I always like to make this question even more complicated: It’s not only that we don’t have a good answer for evil. We also don’t have a good answer for beauty. We don’t have a good answer for much of anything. And yet, as a person of faith, I have encountered grace and beauty and creativity. And your book sort of tells the story of so much of this creativity. Are there some favorite stories that you have or favorite learning around inspiration that come to mind?
C: One of them is just the … in just sort of putting together the quotes that people have, you know, the ways that people have talked about inspiration. So, Ernest Hemingway talks about the fact that when he reads his old stories, he can’t believe that he wrote them. He figures he must have read them somewhere, like in the Saturday Evening Post. And Hogy Carmichael, who wrote Georgia On My Mind, says that great melodies aren’t written. They’re discovered. That’s that idea that it’s somewhere else and you find it. And one of my very favorite stories is kind of tragically, it’s from the end of Michael Jackson’s life. And he is about to go out on tour. Before he passed away, he was preparing for a tour. He was also getting up at night and feverishly recording and telling his entourage that his higher power was giving him these songs. And they were like, Michael, can you please get your higher power to give you these songs after the tour? And he said, “I can’t. Then he might give them to Prince.”
B: That’s amazing.
C: So those are some of my favorite stories, but there are a ton of them. And I think my favorite thing is like when you look at the scope of human thought on this, like there is another personality that emerges from it, the actual personality of inspiration. Which is – it’s recognizable across times and places. And actually, Borges writes really beautifully about the idea that it feels like all art is written by one author. And maybe the whole world was also made by that author. Right.
B: So you’ve established this this common theme that the inspiration comes from beyond as much as it comes through. There’s a kind of instrumentality going on here. And I presume artists have something to say about the kinds of habits and attitudes that that need to be cultivated. Can … can we prepare?
Can we, you know, till the ground and be ready when inspiration comes?
C: Yeah, I so I absolutely believe that. And I think that if you look at how art education happens, the vast majority of it, honestly, the vast majority of it is just cherry-picking people with talent. And then we apply a veneer of technique. And if we’re really lucky, we have a handful of teachers who teach us something beyond that. Right. But there’s very little sort of rigorous thought on like inspiration, how we get more of it. And if I’m correct that that’s actually the fundamental ingredient in art, that’s a surprising omission. Right. And also not so surprising because inspiration feels very unreliable. It’s like, where do we get it? What is it? How do you know, how do we get more of it?
And when I started asking that question, because I immediately asked the question of if this is true, how do I get more of it? And what I realized is that there’s very little in modern life that shapes us to surrender. Like almost everything is like thinking harder, trying harder, optimizing, grinding, you know, like is it, you know, consuming? And but … I when I started thinking in my life, how did it … how had I learned anything about this? I realized that my spiritual practices as a Christian believer, which I am not an expert in, like I’m not an expert in prayer or rest or like–I am stumbling and like bad at all these things. But to the extent that I had learned anything about surrender, it was through these these ancient spiritual disciplines, which we again, we discover across actually all world religions and through much of time.
And so I started to believe that one of the major things that we can do as artists, regardless of whether we have a faith practice or not, is apply these disciplines to the practice of art and as a way to prepare ourselves, not just to have a quick hand when an idea comes, but to be the kind of person who can respond to ideas that are beyond our plans and are beyond our imagining even.
B: Yeah, I mean, so much of modern life and maybe life in America with its sort of capitalist texture drives us toward efficiency, drives us toward motion, drives us toward competition, comparison, makes us resist, rest. I presume this is not very helpful for creativity. And I wonder if you could say more about the practices that you’ve discovered in the lives of artists or even in your own life, because you’re an author with a lot of writing behind you, published writing. And so both what are you learning from artists in history? But then how do you internalize that and embody that in your own life? What are the practices that really nourish your heart?
C: Yeah, well, I think what you see with artists through history is a lot more rest, a lot more time staring into space, a lot more comfort with wasting time. Sometimes that’s because creation was a luxury sport, right? Tolstoy is like royalty, right? So this is why he can do what he does, because he’s got time on his hands with the landed gentry. But that kind of time does like very consistently lead to outpourings of creativity.
And I think you see that even with little kids, like when you when you unplug them from the TV, if they’ve had enough, if they’ve had enough time to kind of become the kind of kids who can play, they will figure out a way to play, and they’ll figure out a way to play even if the playground equipment is broken, they’ll make a game out of the broken playground equipment, right? It’s interesting when you ask what I am, what practices have meant a lot to me. I came to this book with an almost 20 year practice of really consistent creative production, like a really strong discipline of writing, which is not something that most writers come to very early in life. But I did because I was born into a family of musicians. And when I started thinking I wanted to be a writer, they were like, well, of course you’ll practice. And so I was like, oh, I better figure out a practice schedule. So I started writing a couple hours a day from the time that I went to college and that into daily life and took a bunch of like non-fancy jobs with a fancy college degree.
So I worked as a waitress and a maid so that I would have the flex to do those two hours a day, which is still a practice that I continue. So I thought I had really figured it out. That it’s just, you know, you just got to show up. Raymond Carver talks about being at your station. And it is true that if you don’t have the pen in your hand, you will not write anything no matter what ideas you have. And I think a lot of people have had the experience that they have a bunch of ideas. And then when they don’t do anything about it, the ideas don’t keep coming.
And conversely, when you do do something about it, suddenly you find that that one idea is a whole book. Right? As you like just show up and spend the time. But I also discovered relatively early, actually, like after a couple of years of doing this in college and, you know, I’m very committed to this idea that it’s just a grind. I remember really clearly having a problem in a story that I couldn’t solve. And I like, you know, spent my two hours turning the story upside down and inside out and shaking it and like couldn’t figure out how I wanted to solve this problem, which I don’t actually remember the problem.
And–but I do very clearly remember getting up afterwards, being very frustrated and throwing myself in a chair and looking out the window for like three minutes doing absolutely nothing and immediately having the answer that I could not get by working. And that was a really significant clue to me that … that it was not just about time put in, that it was not just about my willingness or my work ethic or talent or technique. There was something that was coming from outside me, or felt like that it was coming from outside me. Even if it was coming from inside me, it could only be released by something other than work behaviors, you know.
B: Yeah, this is something I think a lot about as I watch our students here at Yale Divinity School. And … we expect a kind of grind from them and a pace that is pushing them in a way that I question the health of from time to time. And, you know, they’re going to need to work hard and learn to work hard and I’m all for hard work. And I wonder if what gets lost in the process is learning how to structure rest and play and even boredom into life, because all those things are so healthy. And yet I don’t know that there’s realistically time for those really healthy components of life. And I’m heartened to hear you talking about sort of a balance, I guess. Am I hearing this right? Between a kind of structure and work on the one hand and a kind of spacious graciousness on the other hand?
C: Yeah, and I think it’s a balance between work and rest simply because you have to rest to work, right? But it’s also a recognition that some of the work is actually rest, or some of the work can only be done in rest, right? Like you actually can’t do many of the most important things. Like you cannot arrive at many of the most important answers by like conscious linear thought.
And if you believe that there’s a God out there, that’s probably the worst way to approach that God. And my experience of God is much more like, I actually want to say sneaking up on me. I think that’s actually a lot of people’s experience. And it does have something to do with like Rudolf Otto’s idea of the numinous, that like God is actually pretty scary. Like when you don’t know who God is, you have the sense that there’s a presence there and is that a ghost or is it God or is it some other?
But also sometimes it’s just a pleasant recognition of a presence or a personality that is not yours that is somehow interacting with you, even though you haven’t been like pulling at his coattails in any conscious way.
B: I’m curious about ordinary people who might struggle with creativity or even struggle with the idea that they’re creative in any way. I hear this often–like “I’m not a creative person.” And yet I really believe that everyone is creative, is creating all the time. Though maybe they don’t think about their lives, whether it’s like hosting a dinner party or how they style their clothing or how they decorate their office. But I wonder, I’m sure you’ve heard this in response to your book, you bring this home to your family over Thanksgiving dinner and they’re like, that’s really cool, Carey, but I’m not creative anyway. What did you learn over this process about sort of everyday ordinary creativity?
C: Well, one of the fundamental conclusions that I drew from the book was that if the ability to welcome and surrender to inspiration is really the fundamental gesture in art, then it’s actually open to all of us. And it’s open, you don’t have to have talent, you don’t have to have earned technique. You might drive yourself crazy trying to answer inspiration without some of those. But there are a lot of people who make really interesting things without like a lot of talent and technique, and they just respond to inspiration and sometimes the things they make are like really extraordinary.
The corollary to that for me is that if the gesture is welcoming inspiration into a human activity, any activity can be an art form. So I do think that it’s for everybody everywhere. And I think it’s really interesting how much people feel they need to deny these artistic impulses and it’s because everybody has them. And I believe that it’s fundamental to like, I do believe that humans are stamped with the image of God and that one of the most fundamental traits of God is creativity and that we are all feeling–first of all, you’re totally correct. We’re all making aesthetic decisions when we get dressed or like serve somebody dinner or all these, you know, all these things. We’re all like creating the world around us by our mood for other people, you know. But we’re created– like if we have children, that is a profound and like very intense creative, long term creative project, right? That requires a lot of the same things that any other creative project requires.
And what I’ve discovered as I tell people about this book, as you’ve mentioned, I remember I wrote a book about I wrote a young adult book about a little girl who falls in love with her. Who falls in love with a ghost who can’t remember who he was before he died. And when I published that book, all these people who seem like really stable, normal people were like, here’s my experience with a ghost. Like I heard all these ghost stories from people.
And when I start talking about creativity and the fact that I think that God is like is speaking to us all about, you know, creative prompts all the time. People are like, first of all, when you’re a writer, everyone has they want to tell you the book that they’re going to have. But also people are like, Yeah, I hear music in the morning and it’s music I’ve never heard before and I don’t play an instrument. I don’t know how to write it down. Right? So like, not everybody is having experiences that intense, but I think virtually everybody has had these prompts to do many, many creative things. And the reason that we resist it is because we … the reason we resist taking that name is that this culture has told us that only Beyonce gets to sing. And I think that is like– I don’t know what your rules for speaking French in your podcast are, but I think it’s like solid BS.
B: Full French access here. I wonder about the seasonality of inspiration, and I’m just sort of reflecting on my own experience. You know, I felt really moved or so I thought about seven years ago to write a memoir. I’m not really sure I had too much to remember in my life, but I thought, Well, you know, I’ll write this for my kids. I started writing. It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced. Now, writing has never really come naturally or easily to me. And yet this was exponentially harder than I ever imagined. And I finally just stopped and I just thought, This is so painful. And I just told God, You know, if in fact you want me to write something, I need you to be clear about when and what exactly. And until then, I’m just going to let go. I’m just fully surrendering this idea. And I nearly forgot about this project for seven years.
And then a year ago, almost to the day, I woke up at five o’clock in the morning and, you know, I don’t know that I would call this a mystical experience, but maybe a mystic with a lowercase “m”. I felt like every cell of my body was being commanded to write, like I couldn’t not write. And so every day at five o’clock in the morning for the last year, I’ve gotten up without an alarm, easily. And I’ve written a book of daily meditations that, you know, who knows, maybe I’ll get published or maybe I’ll just hand on to my kids.
But at least for me, in my own life, what I realized is like there was a season of being fallow and surrendering and not creating. That was really necessary for me, at least in terms of my writing. And then the last year has been just bananas bonkers writing. I wonder if you found this in any of the experiences. I know it’s been sort of all over the map, but do other creatives experience this seasonality in inspiration?
C: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s one of the troubles with the industrialization of art production in our culture. You actually just need to sleep for three years, but you have a contract for a record, or for a book. And actually, you have a book that’s pretty good and it needs to sit for a year and then you need to come back and look at it. But you’re going to actually hand it in and publish it to everybody before you get a chance to do that.
And to some extent, Shakespeare, as far as we know, never had that time. He dies very young. He seems to write one of those plays, let’s say, every half a year. He is writing more than one of those plays a year. So extraordinary things can be done under consistent pressure, consistent workload. But I do think that that sense of waiting for what’s coming is really important. The thing that I would probably add to it is a sense that it’s still worth it to show up, even when you don’t know what’s coming yet. And I think your story seems like a very personal and very beautiful one. And the pain in the beginning, I think, is really significant. And the fact that you were willing to back out of that and wait for the word, the literal word, I think is really important. But I also think that if somebody is on the track of wanting to be an artist with a practice, it makes sense to keep showing up and keep sketching and keep capturing little things that might then become part of some other thing that you do, or might turn into something that’s not even the project you think you’ve been beating your head against all this time.
B: And in fairness, I had the luxury of not needing to support myself through that project. It was a passion project. I wonder if you have a personal story about inspiration showing up in a surprising way or in an unexpected way. Unlike me, you are sort of a professional writer. And I wonder if you continued to be surprised by the way in which inspiration and grace sort of arrive in your lab.
C: Yeah, I do. And I’m grateful to be surprised by it. I’ve actually been surprised by how long I’ve been asked to rest. In some periods, we’ve gone through things that happen in families, illnesses where I was helping people through an illness, that kind of thing, where I just was not able to write. And thought I would be able to get right back to work. And actually wrote an entire novel shortly after one of my relatives recovered from cancer. And that is like, that will hopefully one day be a really good book, but that draft is unusable. Because I did not have any inspiration. What it is, is a record of what I can do with my talent and technique. And it’s garbage. That was a surprise. And also, you know, an underlining of this theory for me.
B: So I wonder maybe if you can translate your learning for a lot of our listeners who are clergy and spiritual leaders, and many of whom have to get up on a Sunday morning and preach a sermon. And I mean, spiritual leaders and clergy have many ways in which they’re being creative throughout the week. But this weekly discipline of standing up and offering a teaching, offering a word, creating a sermon, is often the most exhilarating, daunting, scary, burdensome, enlivening experiences in the life of certainly our graduates. And I wonder if you can sort of translate some of your work to the weekly rhythms of clergy life and sermon production.
C: So I have for some reason done a bunch of the work around this book with clergy. So the classes and some of the speaking that I’ve done has been with clergy members. And one of the things that I think is really interesting for them to do is figure out what their own thing is that is not their sermon. So I worked with a group of clergy most recently where one of them was working on an essay about the foundational story of his own faith and whether he had remembered it correctly or not. So it gave him the space to work on something that was not for others. And another one of them was a person who had really significant trauma in their body from medical stuff and from other things. The idea was to form a creative habit in this group. And they were just doing the simplest craft projects. To just come back into their own body and have their hands be moved by their own spirit and to connect their body and spirit again. When their spirit had kind of wanted to flee this body.
And I actually think that that work is a kind of self-care that is profoundly important for clergy who are never supported well enough and who are always doing four full-time jobs without enough resources. Everybody who’s clergy is like, “Yeah, but when am I supposed to do that? That’s impossible. What are you talking about?” I still want to make that pitch for looking for a moment that you can do something that is a creative thing that is your thing for even a half an hour during your week. And even carving that out of your sermon prep if you need to.
One of the major things I hope that this line of thinking can do is take things that we were experiencing as duties and reframe them as art forms. And I think there is … some lip service is paid to the idea that sermons are art forms, but I suspect that in people’s daily lives, they’re operating a lot more like duties. And so I think that practices that might help you reframe it as an art form, might reframe it as play, and I suspect for every person, it’s going to be different. I suspect there are some people that have no problem sitting down and punching these out like clockwork. And those people maybe need to rest until the last minute and then write whatever’s there. And there may be other people who have a format that works really well for them or whatever. Departing from that, I think might be really interesting, but I think that probably most of the people who are listening in a very short meditation could have some idea about what practices they’re using to do those sermons. And you might actually already have some ideas of what changes might welcome God more deeply into your sermon prep.
But at the same time, I realized that it’s a beautiful tile work can be an art form, but also sometimes you just need tile in the kitchen, you just need the tile laid in the kitchen on time. And beautiful things can still come of that process as well.
B: Well, as a parenthetical note, I want to put in a plug for all of the fiber arts. In my life, crochet, knitting have been a big part of a stillness practice that’s also kinesthetic, that’s prayerful, that’s a creative practice in itself, but also a practice that seems to open me up to inspiration and other aspects of life. So whenever I’m finding that I have to write, that I have to create a sermon or a talk, doing something like crochet is very monastic, very repetitive. Really opens something in me. So it’s been really helpful.
C: Yeah. Well, and visual artists historically have spent all this time building canvases, and just sewing them. And there’s a whole manual labor built into it that we don’t have for writing as writers. Interesting. So we can create our own manual labor processes around there. And I think that manual labor is actually–like it provides rest for the brain and things can emerge in that rest that wouldn’t emerge if we were just sitting still trying to figure out what to do with our energy.
B: Right. I presume that when you lead workshops around inspiration, this topic of the inner critic comes about this little voice that just tells us to stop even before we start. Yeah. It tells us everything we do is a mess. It’s not even worth doing. Someone else has already done this better. Why should I even bother? I wonder if you can speak to the fiercest, most bitter inner critic that lives inside of all of us creative souls.
C: I think that that is actually the voice of the devil. And I think it should be responded to as the voice of the devil, even if you don’t believe in the devil. I think the way out of it is to talk back to it in the most uncompromising possible terms, just to be like, This is not true. I reject this idea to replace it with other better truths about yourself. And I also think that just continuing to claw your way up or down the mountain is a really potent way to just not give up.
And I actually have quite a bit of grit in terms of I keep moving sometimes to my own detriment. It’s not always like the quality gets a lot of praise in this culture, and I’m not sure it should get as much praise as it does. But I have it because I was trying to figure out when I first learned about grit, how did I get so much of it? And what I realized was that whenever I said I couldn’t do something, if I was like, I can’t learn this song, it’s too hard on the piano. I distinctly remember my mother walking by one time and laughing at me when I said tha– in the best possible way. “That’s ridiculous. Of course you can.” And she didn’t do any like, oh, honey, of course you can. You’re so great. You’re wonderful. There was no self-esteem building. Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you don’t want that.
I think actually to some extent, God can be that figure in our lives. To the extent that we can access that idea of–who but you could learn how to do this. You have everything. You’ve been given more than enough to be whoever you have been called to be. There’s a very ugly way to play that out, because there are times when we profoundly know that we do not have enough. We are limited beings and we are up against the absolute end of what we’re able to do. That happens especially to clergy, I think all the time. I’m not saying that we spread toxic positivity over that and move on, but I am saying that that attitude of–we’re actually not even going to engage with this giving up part of you. We’re not even going to engage. You just keep going because you obviously could do it.
B: I really resonate with how you frame this. Evil, or Satan, the devil, never really featured largely into my theology throughout most of my ministry of almost 25 years now. Up until recently actually. It took a Jewish psychiatrist by the name of Phil Stutz, whose wonderful book, True and False Magic, is a beautiful book about partnership with the divine. I really appreciated the way in which he’s taken a very spiritual, but not religious, but a deeply profound meditation on sort of the Judeo-Christian contemplative tradition.
Highly recommend it. Anyway, he would call this little voice in our head Part X. He said, “I don’t know what it is, but there is a voice in my head and in the world trying to sabotage our own growth. Sabotage goodness.”
You don’t need to be a theologian to see this. Look out into the world. Look at your experience. At every turn, there is a force trying to stop you. And he’s clear. I’m not sure that I can even say what this is. He uses the kind of algebraic variable to say it’s this mysterious force pushing up against you, but you must resist with your whole life. Yeah. And the light bulb went off and I thought, “Oh, right. That voice has been there the last 50 years of my life. Why am I pretending like it’s not there and it doesn’t need to be resisted?” I’m really curious about how you’re thinking about generative AI these days. Depending on what I have for breakfast, I think it’s this really cool tool, or I think it’s coming for us and it’s already come for us and it’s ruined humanity. These, in some ways, still feel like early days in terms of our ability to conceptualize and think about generative AI, and yet it’s moving so much faster than even our ability to reflect on it. I’m wondering how you’re metabolizing this moment and the possibility and also the potential threats of AI to human creativity.
C: Yeah. The most important thing for me to start any conversation with the AI on is that it’s just all fully based on plagiarism. The people who create… you know, Google paid Time Magazine for their content of their writers, but their writers did not get paid for it. And I just signed up for a fun lawsuit where somebody might pay me $3,000 for every book that I wrote that was eaten by an AI and spit back out because they didn’t get the rights. Whatever we’re possibly being paid even at the very top end is not anything like the lifetime of income we need to continue doing our work.
The other thing is that it’s actually not, I don’t think, generating anything. It is recombining things. It is, to my mind, basically showing you the limits of what you can do with stolen talent and technique. Right? But it doesn’t ever have actual inspiration. Nobody ever wakes a machine up in the middle of the night with an irresistible sense of being compelled to write. I think it is a civilization-ending, potentially civilization-ending event. We’re sort of in a bizarre place because I haven’t heard anybody really asking the question of … if we’re going to depend on this AI for the rest of time and nobody is really going to be able to afford to write articles or books or songs or plays or any other stuff and paint paintings. Because I just, one of my favorite TV shows is now using AI drawings instead of hiring an artist to draw the drawings. “Oak Island” using AI drawings, right? But what does that mean for, what is cultural production going to be? Are we going to be stuck in basically the cultural pinnacle of the late 90s, which is sort of the midstream of where all this stuff is coming from for the rest of all time? Are we just going to be recycling those songs and ideas and images?
The positive flip side of all this to me is that I think we have been using humans as machines for a really long time. I think that we’re human cultures for a long time have been trying to find out more efficient ways to enslave each other. And we don’t even want that anymore. We don’t even want humans who don’t get to make their own choices. We want humans to act like machines. And if you talk to kids these days, they’re terrifyingly aware that they need to be better machines than the other kids. And I think that the only way out of this, the only hope that we have in this is that it will make it even more clear what is actually human and how valuable what is actually human is.
And the fundamentals of that will be … one of the fundamentals of that will be the ability to wealth and inspiration, which no computer can do. And to respond to it in ways that no computer in the unpredictable ways that only human in the unpredictable environment of this actual world could do.
B: Carey, I’m really intrigued by something that I think has been a part of your inspiration workshops. And that is assigning an inspiration practice or a creativity practice. And how does that work? Do folks get to design their own? And give us all that instruction so we can leave after the episode and go and practice this in our own lives.
C: Sure. And my workshops are basically open source workshops. When I created the creative discipline class, which is just straight habit creation. Just like get yourself a habit that works for your life. That is something that I want people like anyone all over the world can form a group and do that. And I will not come and sue you. I think that that is something we should all be doing with each other. And then the other thing I do is actually work through the discipline of inspiration and talk about how we think about how specific spiritual disciplines could work within our specific creative practices, whether that is parenting or painting.
So what I would challenge anybody who’s listening to this today, I suspect you have been having some sort of inspiration, not from me, but from something that is not me. During the course of this conversation, I would actually challenge you to just take one step in that direction sometime this week. So if you’re like, “Oh gosh, I’d really like to do this,” please go do it. And actually, if you’re like, “That seems really hard,” maybe that is actually the correct direction to go. I think Brandon is right that we do have… That resistance can actually be a signal to us. And one of the things I realized that connected creativity and spirituality for me was that I had a habit of prayer. I had a habit of creation. And both of those got challenged in the same ways. It was hard to do both of those in the same ways.
And it made me realize maybe there’s actually maybe creation as a form of prayer, if prayer is a connection with something spiritual beyond us.
So I would just encourage you to make that connection, either figure out a way to just make a little something here and there, or think about one of these spiritual practices and how you might want to spend even a few minutes each day doing one of them in a way that might open up more art and less duty in your life.
B: The Discipline of Inspiration is such a sweet, beautiful offering to the world. Carey Wallace, thank you for being here and for giving this gift to the world at this important time. We’re so thankful for you.
C: Well, thank you so much for the conversation, Brandon. I always love talking with you.
B: Thank you for listening to Within, the contemplative segment of the Leader’s Way podcast. We trust this conversation has provided nourishment for your own growing and healing. Until next time, may you find deep peace and courage in all you do.