Be Your Own Damn Muse

Why Art in a Burning World ?

• Sam Garland • Season 2 • Episode 19

We are witnessing new climate disasters every day, and it can be hard to wonder the point of creativity, of making anything, when the world around us is in such peril.

But art is how we process what is happening, digest it, and find new meaning in it.

Art is also how we dream of a better future. It's how we inspire each other to keep going. How we amplify a vision of living in community and respect for each other and our planet. 

It takes real imagination to see the potential of humans to solve all of these problems we've created. It's much much easier to sink into despair.

So put your creativity to good use, and help change the stories we tell about who we are, and who we could be. 


Come check out the Hot Mess series on TikTok, and watch as I lose my mind - and find it again - writing, producing, and acting in a show!

#CreatingIsHealing🦋

Speaker 1:

Hi, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. Um, as usual, I'm terrified to hit record. Um, but I've been thinking a lot about something that I wanted to share that I don't fully have an answer for, which is usually the scariest things to be talking about. Um, but maybe that also means you guys are grappling with the same things. So the world is on fire and or flooding. I feel like we're living in biblical times. I don't know what recent tragedies have affected you , um, because they change day to day and location and location, but , um, in upstate New York, there was incredible flooding. Uh, and in Vermont there was incredible flooding just recently. And I have family in Vermont and I have friends who live in upstate New York. And so it hit close to home in a way that other things hadn't. In the same way that the wild flat , wild fire smoke coming down from Canada into New York City. I drove through that and out to the film festival that I attended in New Jersey in that smog. And it looked like the apocalypse, like it just legit looked like a , like a movie that , um, oh, I'm blanking on the name of the director who always makes apocalypse movies , uh, and makes them look so epic and amazing. I , I just, you know, it's, I joke a lot. These are end times. Um, I don't actually believe that, but it is really scary to see what we have known was coming for a long time is actually happening and how quickly it's happening and how unprepared we are for it in so many ways. And that things like the flooding. I had a friend who said that, you know, a town over where it really hit hard, it looked like a tornado had come through. And this was just based on heavy rains. This wasn't, we were comparing it to Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City in 2012, but that was a hurricane and we knew it was coming and it was still incredibly devastating. But this seems to be happening faster and faster. Anyway, I am sure you're well aware of this. Um, and I'm not here to , uh, scare everybody cuz I think that's already in the air, but I'm, the thing I grapple with the most is what the hell are we doing as artists when the world is on fire? Right? And, oh, I have so many thoughts about this. Um, I, I think it's a really interesting question because there's a way in which I use that fear against myself. I use that. So we talk a lot about how the brain's sole purpose in life is to keep you safe. How being vulnerable, sharing something, sharing your art, expressing yourself, vulnerability, even if it's emotional and not physical, feels like dying. So it feels incredibly unsafe. So your job's brain is to tell you do not do that. It's a terrible idea. One of the shortcuts doing that is your brain , um, uh, it's very smart and it learns the ones that shut you down fastest and easiest for me. One of them is money. When I start thinking about how I might not ever make money or I can't secure income, or I don't know where the money's gonna come from, I just shut down. It just freaks me out when I think about how the world is ending and I should be out there on the front line , saving the planet, that also shuts me down. And it's a way in which my brain gets me spinning in circles. And then, and then there's no room for art to breathe because I'm just busy panicking and feeling hopeless and powerless. I'm like, I'm not doing enough. And so I wanna call out that , um, not to say these things aren't happening and don't require serious attention, but that they can also be hijacked by the brain as a way to say, this art thing is a dumb, dumb, dumb idea. We should just panic about the world and just do that. So, I, I, for me, I wanna be aware that it's a bit of a boogeyman. It's one of the things that , um, my brain knows is a very expedient way to get me to not pursue something that matters to me. So that's one. Two is, if I did quit being an artist, a I would just, like, I can't quit. It's just not a thing that you quit . I can't quit wanting to make music or wanting to draw and doodle or wanting to tell stories. It's just not a thing. Like I have tried quitting, legitimately, spent most of my twenties quitting, acting repeatedly, and it never stuck. So I don't think I could quit. But let's say , um, I, you know, felt this deep need, which I do to save the world, which I do co-dependent no more. We need a book on not saving the world. Um, and or co-dependent evermore is really where I'm at still, but I feel the thing to save the world. And so it used to be, you know, this is such a terrible phrase now, but go to Africa and save the starving children, right? Like certainly in the nineties, this was this thing of, of , um, western countries sending money and raising money for, there was , um, and there's still are, but there was a lot of famine , um, in different countries in Africa . And it felt like that was the place to go, that there was a lot of suffering to go to. Um, recognizing now in hindsight, there's a real colonialist idea of like white savior going and fixing. So I'm , I'm gonna acknowledge that and move on. But definitely it's always filled this sense with me of like, what is the thing that I can do to help people? One of the reasons I have this podcast, one of the reasons I'm a life coach also, this is the stuff that matters to me. And compared to that, again, the boogeyman, but my brain kind of goes, what's the point of everything else? And so let's say I did drop acting and went, I don't even know where the front lines are, honestly. I am not an engineer. I do not know how to solve those kind . I'm very smart at many things, but I do not understand engineering. I also cannot keep a plan alive. I'm looking around cause I'm actually my sister's apartment and she left me in charge for two weeks and I think the plants have already died. Like, I don't know what is wrong with me. I'm gonna try to take a class, but it's bad. And I think a lot about how like I don't have skills to grow things and I don't have skills to kill things and feed myself. And , um, so I don't know what I would do. What I do know I would do is make sure that I'm, I'm , uh, keeping pressure on elected officials, you know, making sure that we're really looking at what policies might help better. We're really looking at , um, where the conversation's going in terms of what we can do for the planet. And also just honestly investing in hope. Looking around at, I'm in Toronto and I'm in downtown and there's these incredible high-rises all around me. And I keep looking around and thinking we built those like, not me, not an engineer, no idea how this went up in the sky, but I'm like 15 flights up, which is terrifying when I sit in the patio cause I'm convinced I'm gonna fall off, but I'm not because somebody built this and they built it well. And I look around and I think at the magnitude of what we've been able to create, and I think we can solve this problem, we haven't wanted to, it hasn't felt urgent. It hasn't had political pressure or economic pressure to do it. I think those wins are shifting, which is really, really what's giving me hope. But we are like brilliant at solving problems. So I, and I've had to work on this really hard. I again spent my twenties and thirties just being convinced, you know, everything was gonna go up in flames , uh, and or water. Like that was just my, people would ask me why I was afraid all the time. I was like, I'm just sure that like the world is gonna end. And then the world actually started ending and it was less terrifying, weirdly. A it felt like when the pandemic hit, everybody caught up to my anxiety. Like suddenly everybody was afraid to go outside <laugh> and thought the world was ending . And I was like, oh, I've been here the whole time. Welcome to the party. Um, but also it just felt more concrete in a way that , um, just imagining and not knowing how everything was gonna go bad versus actually seeing the floods happen versus actually seeing all tar , terrible, terrifying things. But for some reason it feels more concrete and it feels more like everybody's in this trying to figure out, oh, this is here now and there's stuff we need to do. So , um, I think, I think I went from a place of feeling incredible fear and panic and hopelessness. And I work on investing in myself and in my brain into my thinking to look around and see hope to read the articles that show how much has already been done, innovation wise , to figure out the carbon issue, to figure out, you know, how to change our , um, fossil fuel reliance to change , uh, our water issues. Like there's so much thought and brilliance is going into these things already that we're not even hearing about. So I practice imagining with this great artist imagination that there are even more things that I'm not hearing about, that people are discovering or that people are being born now that we'll discover. And like, and I'm not saying that in a pie in the sky kind of way. I'm saying that we all need to know ourselves best and know what amount of hope and what amount of fear keeps us motivated. And for some people dreading something like the absolute panic gets them moving for me, it will shut me down and send me to bed . So I know that's not good for me. I know that just looking at the news and all the headlines is not good for me. I will just think the whole of humanity is not worth it and we're just gonna all kill each other. Like it's just, there's a , in this building, there's the news just kind of going all the time when you wait for the elevators. And I have to train myself not to look at the news cuz literally it is these people were hit by a car. These people were hit by, these people were gunned down, these people were in the hospital cuz something else had like, every single news item is how somebody died. And I'm aware that a, the human brain cannot handle that much information and be like, that is not the whole story. That is the stuff that scares people, that gets them to watch the news. And I do not to be scared more about the world, I do it all myself. So the news is not good for me. But reading long form articles about the innovations about people who are thinking about these things, reading about people coming together, solving problems, looking for the silver lining look , not the silver lining, but looking for the hope, the places of hope is what keeps me motivated and moving forward. So investing in how I think about the future has been really, really important to me. And the third thing is that I think about how there are so many different pieces to change that being an activist on the street, you know, someone who goes to a senator's house or goes to Congress and stands in a million person march. I, I can't imagine doing that. I hope someday I'm healthy enough that that doesn't freak me out. But like I have so many things I have to be careful of in terms of food access and in terms of like overheating, in terms of people being close, claustrophobic, there's just like so much anxiety involved in that, that that actually would not be good for me and therefore not be good for anybody else around me, for me to do that. So I feel a lot of guilt for not being a person who signs up to go and do those kinds of things. I have a friend in Brooklyn who does this stuff and it's incredible and it's so energizing to her and I love hearing about it. And I'm just in awe of her ability to stand up and put her body on the line for things that she cares about. But there are other things that we can do. Some of them are phone banking or phone texting. Some of them are writing letters and some of them too are about storytelling are about changing. Minds are about thinking about how the need, the the ways in which we tell stories, right? Going back to hope, but also going back to do we tell stories that bring people together? Do we tell stories that highlight our intelligence and our problem solving? Do we tell stories that highlight our need for each other and need to solve things together rather than, than invest in division and hate? Um, because division and hate sell too, they sell really, really well. They're very good for capitalism. Um, and when we're scared we buy more. And when we hate, it's easy to blame somebody else and therefore not have to invest in a solution. And those are very easy scapegoats, but they're politically really powerful. So it actually takes more effort to tell stories that are about hope and the future and building the future that we want. And you have to invest in that work. And that's what artists do, right? They, they take all the possibilities that a world could be and they take all the possibilities that the world is now, and they think about what that future could be. And so there's this really important function in being someone who creates both in the sense of you are processing the things that are happening right now, right? Creation is about taking all that is around you, digesting it, mulling it over, and then, and then giving it new form, new shape. And whether that's painting or writing a story or acting or something, it is taking the experiences you've had, taking what you know of the world, rejiggering it in some way that makes sense to you, putting your point of view on it and, and, and re offering it to the world. And for a lot of people who their brains don't work this way, it is a gift to them to have something like, I feel this way when I read long form articles, especially about either climate change or something I don't understand or like legal, like supreme court stuff. And I'm like, I don't understand what this means and someone will explain it in a way that I understand that is a gift to me. That they made sense of something. And I feel like that's what artists do. They make , they make a gift of something that's really hard. And really, whether it's big emotions or big things that are happening or how we relate to each other, and you, you return that in a way that has been mashed up and spit back out. It sounds like a terrible, terrible thing. But I think of that like people need help digesting the world around them and digesting stories and digesting the news. And so if you're able to digest something and return it in a way that makes it more edible for them, sorry, <laugh> the girl's metaphor, but the good way of thinking about it is the mama , uh, what is it? The birds will like chew up food and like feed their babies. I don't mean to be patronizing cause I don't think we are in that way to audience members, but I do think there are a lot of people who don't. Um , which is all my brain does all day long is process the world and think about it deeply. Like I could not stop myself if I tried. I have tried, it doesn't work. And other people are legitimately like , oh, I never thought about that. And I'm like, that's all I do is think about this, right? So I'm always surprised that other people don't spend as much time and that's amazing for them and that sounds really freeing and way easier of a world. But they're also really grateful that my brain, the wor way works the way that it does. So I wanna offer that as like your processing of the world and also your imagining of what the world could be, the storytelling you make about where we're headed and where we could be headed and the future you envision and, and you know, a more just , um, kind world. Not that it's, it means writing all fairy tales where everything always works out, but, but there is a way in which we can shape the stories that we tell and we can shape how people navigate being a human, which is the hardest thing of all, right? And that will never change. It'll always be hard to human. It just will. It is, it is what we signed up for and we all need help figuring out , um, how to walk that path. And so giving people options and possibility on how to walk that path is a gift. And so I wanna come back to this idea that both in your processing of the world as it is the output, the creation of that is helpful to the world. And also the stories that you tell, the content that you create, the ways in which you think about anything helps people figure out how to lay a foundation for where they're headed. So it's really important stuff. And I think for me, you know, I have this, again, I think it's very much a boogeyman where like there's my brain just wants to go into lizard brain. It wants to go to very simple black or white. You're an actor, you're not saving the world, therefore this is pointless, right? Versus I'm an actor and I'm also an activist and I'm also a writer and I'm also doing x, y , z to figure out how we can change how the world is. And my acting is also a narrative shift. It's talking about different ways of being in humanity and community, whether that's a cop show or, you know , um, a story about the future. It doesn't have to be just like, here's the utopia that I'm writing about. Every story we tell has all of these threads and it can be the most entertaining story. And in it, I mean Ted Lasso is a perfect example of this. Ted Lasso blew up in the first year of the plague I think. And uh, it's about soccer, football as everyone but the US calls it. And it's a very male based show. And yet it is incredibly feminist in all of these little brilliant ways. And it ends up being about trauma, about relationships with men, about relationships with fathers. It ends up being about therapy. So many people saw that show and started considering going to mental health professionals that never had before. That was a huge culture shift. That was a huge gift at just the right time. People really were experiencing mental health, maybe had never before and needed it, right? So I'm not saying it has to be, this was a show about football and it had all these incredible themes and, and moments in it that were just threaded throughout. Um, that then helped so many people find peace and, and resources and ways to human to go forward. And those people are gonna be more resourced in order to help face bigger problems and in order to help solve bigger problems. So everything , um, everything ripples out there ripple effects to all of this work. And the last thing I'll say, because , um, I've also thought about this, that There's, there's a book that I've read that I absolutely think is brilliant called Station 11 , um, by this Canadian author. And uh , it was made into an H B O series in year two of the plague. I did not watch the series cuz it came out during the plague. And the whole premise of the book is that a plague wipes out 95% of the population. It's the start of the book, but the book ends up being about 15 years after the plague wipes out so many people and how it follows a traveling troop of Shakespearean actors who are going from settlement to settlement of who is leftover in the population and the population are rebuilding and performing Shakespeare's place . And to me it reads so much about how theater will always endure in the most dire of places theater. The need to tell stories and need to act them out will always happen. And there's this other brilliant example. I'd seen this play in New York City probably 10 years ago. Um, ugh , one of the great joys of New York City theater. It was not, it was an off-Broadway theater house. So not a big splashy like Broadway kind of Disney piece, but this really incredible , um, I have to look up the name of it. But anyway, the premise of it was, it starts off and they're this group of people around a campfire campfire and they are retelling the story of a , um, oh my goodness, I'm gonna forget of a Simpsons cartoon episode that they saw 10 years ago before the world ended. And that is what they do sitting around the campfire night. And the whole thing then goes into, you know, how they survive in their community. But it keeps coming back to this is their main activity. They sit around the campfire and they retell the story of a Simpsons episode. And that's where also I just think this, the human spirit will always need. You know, we will always draw on caves. We will always dance for the gods. We will always adorn ourselves in order to have community. It is, it is in our fabric. It is how we process being alive. It is how we connect to our divinity. It is how we connect to each other and create community. And so it will never be, it will never be divided from the experience of going through a world even as it's burning, even as as flooding, even as all of these hardships come at us and will continue to come at us. It is a place of resourcing to create. It is a place of resourcing to receive creations. I've really been enjoying curling up with a good book lately. Like I've forgotten how good company a book is, right? Like these are the things that help, they resource me. I feel grounded, I feel quiet. I feel calm when I read. And that is a gift to me. So I again, don't feel like I have an answer because I know that I'm still fighting with my own boogeyman of the world is on fire. What is the point of anything else? But that's a lot of also my anxiety brain talking and my depression brain talking and my overwhelmed brain. And so I wanted to come here in full transparency of the work I'm doing for myself, which is to really train myself to , um, see the reasons why the work that I do matters. And I hope that message reaches you today because whether it's just creating for yourself, sitting with a guitar or writing poetry that no one will ever read , um, or it's creating something that you wanna show your family or people in a gallery, you know, artwork or something like that. It, it all matters cuz it resources you, it resources the people that you share it with and it, those have ripple effects. Being more resourced person in the world has ripple effects. Having a family that's more resourced has ripple effects. Having a community that's more resourced has ripple effects. And so all of that is a gift to this world. Thank you for joining me this week. I really appreciate you.