living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.

insouciance.

There’s no dishonor in having a job. What is dishonorable is scaring away your creativity by demanding that it pay for your entire existence.

Which means that my fear always made predictably boring decisions, like a choose-your-own-ending book that always had the same ending: nothingness.

Without that sense of relationship, Robin warns her students, they are missing out on something incredibly important: They are missing out on their potential to become cocreators of life. As Robin puts it, “The exchange of love between earth and people calls forth the creative gifts of both. The earth is not indifferent to us, but rather calling

that it would be unreasonable and immature of me to expect that I should be allowed to have a voice of expression, but other people should not. If I am allowed to speak my inner truth, then my critics are allowed to speak their inner truths, as well.

“My creative expression must be the most important thing in the world to me (if I am to live artistically), and it also must not matter at all (if I am to live sanely).”

Over the years, Tom Waits finally found his sense of permission to deal with his creativity more lightly—without so much drama, without so much fear. A lot of this lightness, Waits said, came from watching his children grow up and seeing their total freedom of creative expression. He noticed that his children felt fully entitled to make up songs

However, I’ve always had the sense that the muse of the tormented artist—while the artist himself is throwing temper tantrums—is sitting quietly in a corner of the studio, buffing its fingernails, patiently waiting for the guy to calm down and sober up so everyone can get back to work.