And another book I’ve read these days: „Big Magic“ by Elizabeth Gilbert. Yes, I loved „Eat, Pray, Love“, and I can still remember where I read it. Shortly after my father’s death on a holiday on beautiful Kos/Greece. I also spent 6 months in Ubud 2014/15, in the beginning unaware of the fact that a part of „Eat, Pray, Love“ took place there. And I even ended up staying overnight in Wayan’s shop because she had given me some herbs that made me puke for hours, so that I simply couldn’t leave – talking with her among other things about Elizabeth Gilbert and „Eat, Pray, Love“, which was somehow surreal. But the universe has always had quite an interesting sense of humour.
So while in Ubud, I had a look at Elizabeth Gilbert’s Facebook page, and I must say, I like the way she looks at things. How she’s not all loving and hugging, in order to come across as superspiritual, but speaks her truth, which may sound like this – probably my favourite sentence from „Big Magic“: „If you don’t have a clear passion and somebody blithely tells you to go follow your passion, I think you have the right to give that person the middle finger.“
So Big Magic is all about creative living. And I can definitely recommend it to everyone who’d love to be more creative, but at the same time doesn’t really dare and finds reason after reason why not to do so. The book will encourage you to go after it, neither caring about the outcome nor success, but to just do it because you love and therefore need doing it. To let inspiration work with you, flow through you. As Elizabeth Gilbert puts it:
„…[T]he results of my work don’t have much to do with me. I can only be in charge of producing the work itself. That’s a hard enough job. I refuse to take on additional jobs, such as trying to police what anybody thinks about my work once it leaves my desk.“
„Recognizing this reality – that the reaction doesn’t belong to you – is the only sane way to create.“
„Possessing a creative mind, after all, is something like having a border collie for a pet: It needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble. Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to do, and you might not like the job it invents…“
angry princess blue 