I watched this wonderful video on TED Talks this morning and it was music to my ears, a breath of fresh air, a bundle of lovely cliches that say, “I feel good.” Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love and she talks about the frightening reactions she’s been getting from people since the “freakish success” of Eat, Pray, Love.

I wrote yesterday about closing my last show and the end of my streak of acting gigs. It’s a bittersweet ending. And I do feel some fear or some apprehension when I think I might not get that energy back. Finding this video today was an encouraging bit of synchronicity.

In this video Elizabeth Gilbert talks about divine inspiration. She shares a story about a poet who sometimes catches her poems by the tail as they rush through her. She helped me wonder about the “capriciousness of the creative process” and my role in that process. She urges us, as artists, to show up to do our part of the job even when our inspiration seems to have taken the day off. My favorite quote comes when Elizabeth talks about the burdensome expectation that artists should be and are solely responsible for their creativity: “It’s like asking someone to swallow the sun”.

I picked up Eat, Pray Love in the bookstore, but I put it back on the shelf. After watching this, Eat, Pray Love is getting a prime spot on my reading list. The language Elizabeth Gilbert uses to convey the content of this talk are truly beautiful and interesting in and of themselves. She’s a great story teller. Which means she said it better than I could imagine it being said. Bravo!

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Tags: Creativity, Inspiration