(You can hear this read with special music here.)
Late in 1980, in New York City, Keith Haring looked up where a subway advertisement once stood and found a long piece of black matte paper. As soon as the ad expired, they’d cover them in black. It was one of those things you notice when you’re an artist. Legend has it that he exited the subway immediately, bought chalk, returned to the black rectangle, and turned it into a makeshift public canvas. He began drawing what would become his iconic subway art style.
With bold lines and simple shapes, his work spoke to people; it was instantly popular and recognizable. Haring’s visual vocabulary—human bodies, dogs, radiant babies—became icons conveying messages about love, birth, death, and social justice. He wanted art simple enough that children could enjoy it but complex enough that it made adults think. It became an obsession—he would ride all over the city looking for the black canvases, exit the subway, draw whatever came to mind as quickly as he could (so as not to get arrested), and then jump onto the next train. 5,000 chalk drawings later, he was a public art icon.
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Someone told me once that traditionally publishing a book was like having a baby with someone you don’t really know. First of all, comparing things to having a child usually annoys me slightly because, while I do see what they are getting at, there is nothing I have EVER experienced so personally transformational, physically seismic, reality-altering as having a child. Another thing that book-writing and child-having do not have in common is that it is actually much quicker to have a baby. All told, The Artist’s Joy, my first book, will enter the world 18 months after I signed the publisher's contract. That's 72 weeks, pregnancy is only 40!
Do you remember when you were doing something big, crossing one of life’s thresholds into a “before” or “after,” and all the people who’ve gone before beckon you with the best words they can find to signify what it's like? Childbirth and publishing, but also running a marathon or losing a parent. And I don’t know about you, but I hold so tightly to the testimonies of those who have walked ahead, maybe out of an effort to control my surroundings or to want to feel known and less alone, and yet time after time, when I push through into my own state of “after,” echoes of their words ring false. Some things you can’t quite describe. And since I’ve only had babies with someone I know rather well, I’m not sure that’s what publishing a book is like yet, entirely.
What it’s been like to me: a long effort to sustain hopeful energy.
Things I was not prepared for: by the time you get this book, I would have its almost 300 pages memorized, down to almost every subhead and punctuation mark. I didn’t realize how different the end product would be from the proposal, and similarly, how much I would have to constantly let go, of paragraphs I loved, of covers I envisioned, of dreams of this or that person endorsing. Publishing (maybe all art) is about letting it go.
Open-handed: that’s the posture I have learned from book writing and publishing, and truthfully, from pregnancy, child-rearing, and marathon running, too. And lest you think me magnanimous, hear me when I say I did and do let go begrudgingly. I’m more of a white-knuckle-it kind of girl, myself. What’s the point of making a thing if it can’t be the exact thing you want? It’s hard enough to muster the courage to make it; now I have to relinquish my expectations and let it go?!
Besides abundance, which I wrote about last week, open-handed is a word I carry into this year with me, an intention I want to name as I walk into this specific after of sharing this book with the world. As much practice as I have, it does not come easily to me. And from knowing many of you readers, from coaching artists from all types of creative disciplines, I know it isn’t something that comes easily to all of you, either.
A few weekends ago, I was in a shop, and I came across a wind-up butterfly. It was a simple toy made of paper and elastic…you twist him a few times and then close him up inside any book. The magic happens when you open it again, and the paper butterfly flutters out. I watched as people paused before opening the cover and cringing a little, bracing themselves for the fluttering, unpredictable flight, the paper wings unfurled, wild with joy.
We forget that the work is not really ours. Don’t we? When we let anyone else see it, it flies from our hands. We hold so tightly to the outcomes, and we don’t realize that the process of making creative choices (when they are ours to make) is much more satisfying than any product we could end with. We cannot control how the world views our work any more than we can chart the trajectory of a wind-up butterfly. And so we must open our hands.
So let me ask you: what are you holding on too tightly to?
Joy is a posture of open hands. It is believing in abundance, yes, that there is more where that came from, and it also means releasing the pressure of having more, needing more, being more, by letting go. Letting go of the good and the bad. Letting go of both the anxiety and the accolade. Taking ourselves a little less seriously, staying awake to what creative call we hear next. As I release this project into the world this year, I want the butterfly in that book to fly in whatever trajectory it is supposed to. I want it to be like Keith Haring buying chalk and lighting up the dark spaces with subway art.
I give you the gift of my words if you need them, understanding that not everyone will, believing the book will find its reader.
I know that if the book is a commercial success, it will be in spite of me, not because of me. I will set boundaries to not sink my energy into tallying the numbers. I will not give reviews the power to tell me if it’s good. I believe it is already good in the way that no critical acclaim can validate or take away; it’s good like I am good… like you are good. Not perfect, but loved and held and imperfectly whole.
Keith Haring loathed the power that critics had in the art world. His inspired public art was a perfect example of how he longed to bypass the galleries and exhibitions and go straight to the people; he believed that that was where the joy was.
In 1988, Haring was diagnosed with AIDS, an illness that ravaged the art world in New York at that time. But he faced death bravely. He said,
‘No matter how long you work, there’s always going to be things left undone. And it wouldn’t matter if you lived until you were seventy-five. There would still be new ideas. All of the things that you make are a kind of quest for immortality. Because you’re making these things that you know have a different kind of life, they don’t depend on breathing, so they’ll last longer than any of us will.” 1
What part of your life could benefit from some open hands?
What gifts are waiting for you when you loosen your grip?
Whether you care about your legacy or seek critical acclaim, it’s ok to care. Keith Haring was after immortality when he sketched temporary chalk drawings in a dark and dirty subway. You have known what he describes: the thrill of new ideas, the excitement of chalk in hand, the spontaneous joy of making things you care about. The immediacy and urgency of it. And yet his subway drawings remind us of the fragility of life, the temporary nature of this place, and all the ways we work to make it more beautiful anyway.
Before Keith Haring died, he established a foundation, so his wealth went directly to support children and AIDS organizations. He let go.
We may not see how our work echoes after we are gone. And honestly, I think it’s best not to know. What we can be sure of is when we open our hands and let go, we are connected to each other and something larger than us.
There’s this quote from Annie Dillard’s book, The Writing Life,2
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. So make the dingy corners of your world more beautiful with whatever materials you can, pour out all that you know to be true, give it, spend it, stop waiting for some recognition to validate you, stay focused on the process, stay connected to those whom the work is for, create not for critics or the cultural elite.
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Return now to the New York City subway. Close your eyes, and put yourself there with me.
Standing in a smelly, muggy subway station, water dripping somewhere, trash at your feet, light flickering overhead, you present yourself before a large black ad poster, as tall as you are, about three feet wide. You hold in your hand the chalk you just purchased from a bodega up above on street level. This tool in your hand is almost weightless. Its powder makes your hand dry and dusty; you move your arm across the matte texture and begin to draw.
Did you know that the chalk in your hand, specifically the calcium carbonate that we call chalk, carries its own history? Made over millions of years, the rocks that makeup chalk are the compression of shells and skeletons of sea creatures, the organic remains of life in another dark and wet place, and here they are coming to life again… through you.
What if nothing was ever ours to begin with?
What if creativity is really the impulse to give back what was once borrowed? To participate in the cycle of life’s tenacious delight, the broken things made beautiful in deep time, eons, thousands of millennia, unquantifiable by our simple human brains. In one way, we cannot grasp these mysteries, but in another way, we can and do understand: we grasped them with our human hands, dusty with chalk.
You can let go of your work’s reception or legacy not because life is meaningless and nothing matters but because embedded in the very nature of creation is something waiting to be reborn, resurrected. Even solo work, then, is an act of collaboration. It’s adding your voice to a chord that’s already ringing. Creativity is enacting life’s persistent hope, and no matter who sees it or what they say about it in this lifetime, in the act of making things, you, too, are being made new. Whatever you create with your heart and hands, I pray you live this life holding them both wide open.
(Hi there! This is a partial transcript of my award-winning podcast Artists for Joy; you can stream the episode wherever you listen to podcasts and hear this essay read in its entirety and with special music and sound design. Search Artists for Joy on your favorite podcast app or listen on our website here.)
https://www.haring.com/!/about-haring/transitions
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-writing-life-annie-dillard/1452363?gclid=Cj0KCQiA2eKtBhDcARIsAEGTG41FgKVPmqi6vl4l_FhU-6DwFc3b0kAf0rjlSc3HcaFsIEq-W1uE724aAs47EALw_wcB
This is an absolutely lovely reminder of how we have to let go of anything we create, and that act in itself is an invitation for more. Sometimes beautiful things more wonderful than we ever imagined happen when we let go. Thank you for this!
Really inspiring thoughts. Going now to journal on the question of what am I holding too tightly that I need to let go.