for the love of it.

"without love in the dream it'll never come true..."

I recently rewatched Adaptation, one of my favorite movies from the early-aughts. What I love about seeing great films years (in this case, decades) later is that it felt like I was seeing it for the first time. Not because I had forgotten the film. But rather, my worldview has evolved, which allowed me to get more out of the story as a 41-year-old versus the twenty-two year old who just put the newest Spike Jonze film on her Netflix queue (red envelope days, baby).

There’s one scene, or rather theme, in particular that has been on my mind ever since. It’s when Susan Orlean (a real-life journalist for the New Yorker played by Meryl Streep) begins her research on her newest subject, orchid hunter John Laroche (played by Chris Cooper). In her Manhattan high-rise, she marvels at this toothless Floridian’s do-or-die love of the flower. Orlean is portrayed as your typical, cynical New Yorker who enjoys wine-fueled dinner parties with intellectual elite to go with her coveted writing career, but even so, she seems amazed and even envious of Laroche’s passion wondering what it must feel like to love something so much that you’d dedicate your life to it. When I first saw the movie, this detail didn’t strike me much as I was more interested in the journey of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) where I looked forward to my own days of ‘glamourous’ writer’s block to go with my included-with-purchase crippling self-doubt and self-medicated anxiety. But at 41, this bit stood out for me and has been on my mind ever since because isn’t this what it’s all about?

After many moons, this is how I finally feel about writing. It’s different from my love of my family, my pet, my home. It’s different because my small contribution that sits among millions of others in one tiny corner of the internet feels like it’s mine. The gig lacks prestige and at times, readers but I do it because…well, I can’t not. Writing is my ghost orchid.

It reminds me of a lyric in the song ‘Help on the Way’ by the Grateful Dead: “Without love in the dream it’ll never come true.” Jerry doesn’t elaborate on what a fulfilled dream looks like because I think it looks different for everyone. But maybe…just maybe…it can look like doing what you love and letting go of the results.

In the Bhagavad Gita, it says: “You have the right to work….desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working….renounce attachments to the fruits…work done with anxiety is far inferior to work done without…”

Sorry, I really didn’t mean for this to go down a pretentious-seeming rabbit hole (for even measure: I did read an entire issue of In Touch this morning), but it serves as a reminder for the creative process (which also looks different for everyone) and the mindset required to create for self-fulfillment.

It’s a noisy world right now. And it took a long time for me, but I do remember when I found the freedom. It was when I stripped my soul of external influences and decided that my need to write wasn’t driven by the results but for the love of it. My novel was born out of this thinking as I rejected the “I should do this” and “Everyone is doing that” mind chatter and just wrote. I try to apply this logic in other aspects of my life like my lazy home yoga practice and even gardening… but with anything worth doing, it’s an on-going process taming the scattergories that reside in my brain as the journey continues knowing all I have to do is show up. Whatever happens next is none of my business.