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Hi, I’m Lyndsey Medford. This is Crumbling Empires, a show about living here and now in the midst of crumbling empires with realism and with hope. I am the author of My Body and Other Crumbling Empires: Lessons for Healing in a World That is Sick, and I produce this podcast as part of my Substack newsletter. So if you’re enjoying the interviews, and you want to keep up with me or my guests or my work. If you want to get more interviews or audio versions of my essays in your inbox, go ahead and sign up for that at lyndseymedford.substack.com.
I screwed up this introduction when I was originally interviewing this week’s guest, who is Heather Caliri, the author of Ordinary Creativity. Let’s get to it.
Lyndsey: Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for writing this book. We’re really excited to have you.
Heather:
I’m so pleased to be here, Lyndsey.
Lyndsey: And I definitely wanted to start our conversation with that title. It feels very, it crosses neatly with the idea of crumbling empires. When you decided on this, like, perhaps rather dramatic title, what were you envisioning and who is your reader and who are you when you’re talking about surviving with joy?
Heather:
Yeah, you know, I think part of my struggle when I was writing this book is I feel like we shoehorn creativity, the idea of creativity, into this very narrow definition. And it means that you are a successful artist. It means that you are a Grammy winner. It means that, or it means that you produce work that is somehow artistic and other people see it and they like it.
And like, that hasn’t been my experience of creativity for a lot of my life. Like in my family, I was not the most creative member of my family and under those terms, but I sort of just was desperate to make stuff. And the other thing is like most of the times that I’ve been creative, it hasn’t led to commercial success, but it has turned my life inside out. It has led to healing. It has led to me feeling more whole and more myself.
And like, honestly, when I think about like, like our culture trains us that the commercial success is what we’re supposed to be aiming for or sort of the artistic recognition or the name recognition.
And in my experience, I have friends who have reached those heights and it is awesome to see them succeeding on those, at those, in those kinds of ways. But for myself, like the memoir I wrote for myself, that I thought was going to get published has never been published, but it led me to all kinds of healing to remaking my life from the inside out in a way that freed me and made me more me and and I’m like, okay the fact that that memoir never got published. Does that mean it was a failure? Like what is that? What like that doesn’t even make any sense. That book helped me survive, right?
And I think yeah what I wanted to get out in this book is, Why is it that writing a memoir or like, you know, when I was in the middle of COVID crocheting every night, like a, like a dervish, it was like, I probably could have carpeted my entire house in the things that I crocheted during COVID. Like that helped me survive, right?
And there’s also this really great quote by disability activist, Neal Marcus. He says, disability is not a brave struggle. It is a work of art. It is ingenuity. And I just thought like, people who are surviving with disabilities, they have to be so freaking ingenious every single day just to get themselves places or to take in an educational environment or whatever to do their jobs with support. Those things require huge amounts of creativity, but we say it doesn’t count as like creative, we ignore that.
So I wanted to dig down into why making stuff and solving problems in new ways, why that makes us human and how being fully human in that ways helps us to actually live our lives wholeheartedly.
Lyndsey: Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s really helpful to hear that there’s the two sides of like, creativity is how we survive and how we survive is creative, right?
I definitely was super excited to read the epigraph from Neil Marcus, disability is an art. And I totally flagged to talk to you about that because that is how I see it. It’s funny, like I, I use the word disabled for myself more and more. Um, yeah. And I, I, I kind of almost forget that when people think of disabled, they think of like sad people, people who can’t do things; because my experience of disability and the disabled community over the course of years has, has become this like, no, y’all like we are figuring things out. We are doing things you never thought of. We are making it work and we are learning what our priorities are and you know, hell or high water, doing, you know, making our lives something that we want to be a part of and that we’re proud of.
What does, can you talk more about that quote and the significance of it to you and your experience with disability?
Heather: Yeah, so I didn’t know that I really dealt with a disability until this year. I was just diagnosed with autism recently, but I kind of came into it sideways because I have dealt with mental illness before and have family members that deal with mental illness and also friends. And we talk about mental illnesses if people are fragile, kind of the same thing. I mean, it’s a kind of—but like that people are so fragile and like not trustworthy. And you know, we like use words, throw words, like crazy around like it’s, you know, just not a, I don’t know, it’s just sort of dismissive and condescending.
But my experience of people who are say trauma survivors or who have been through depression is of their resilience, I mean, sometimes people who deal with mental illness do not find a place of thriving. But those people who, who have been through deep mental illness who come through the other side and learn how to deal with it—They are some of the most resilient wise people I know.
So there’s sort of this dichotomy of like well we think the mentally ill or people to be pitied and who are absolutely not wise; but if you’ve learned how to deal with a mental illness and you’ve learned how to restructure your life so that you can actually be mentally well, even if you continue to have the same diagnosis, like you have become just a kick-ass person, right? Like they, I mean, I see people who don’t deal with mental illness being absolutely foolish all the time.
So this sort of paradigm of like, what does, who is the healthiest person? I’m like, like, I don’t think not having ever had a mental health diagnosis means that you are healthy, right? I don’t think that necessarily. Maybe you’re super wise and kind and resilient, or maybe you’re an asshole. And if you have a mental illness, kind of the same thing, maybe you’re wise and kind, or maybe you’re an asshole. It’s just part of the human condition.
And so I think what I’ve loved in coming into the disability community is it sort of expanded that understanding. What I already knew about just sort of brain difference, I’ve seen applies to a whole host of different things, whether that’s chronic illness, whether that’s chronic pain, whether that’s physical impairments, that people are just human beings. And those human beings that have had to struggle, that have had to reimagine themselves, that have had to figure out how their day-to-day lives work, those are the people who are the wisest.
And often those people deal with labels that the rest of society thinks disqualify them from wisdom or disqualify them for joy. And I think that that’s a problem with our society and not with the people who have actually learned how to survive in our society, right?
Lyndsey: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there’s something there about, as you said at the beginning, creativity being essential to our survival. And I think there’s something—because creativity is essential to our survival and our wholeness, that consciously or unconsciously there’s a reason it gets kind of beaten out of us a lot of the time. Because it’s such a resource to draw on to become more whole and to become more connected.
Heather: Right. Well, I mean, like, so like, for instance, my own sweet children, like my youngest daughter is tremendously creative and constantly dreaming up projects. And honestly, like, like I have mad respect for her skills on many levels, but it causes me no end of inconvenience. When children are coming up with creative ideas, like they are making a mess. They are like, you know, taking all the supplies in the house and commandeering them for some projects that might destroy them, you know, like, it is hugely inconvenient when children, you know, like in school, like if you’re if your kids are being super creative in their classes, that it’s not necessarily going to be seen well by the by the teachers, because it’s disruptive, right? Like they’re not staying with the program, right? And so yes, it absolutely gets gets beaten out of us. Right.
Lyndsey: And then, of course, we, you know, consciously or unconsciously, again, we get that message if we are disabled or mentally ill or in any way don’t fit, we get this message that we are inconvenient. And often our creative ways of surviving are sometimes inadvertently shamed just because they’re not, like, creativity is rarely comfortable. And it doesn’t make the people around us comfortable, I think is what you’re saying too.
The other part of your title of your book is ordinary creativity. And I just really loved I might like print out and frame your meditation on the word ordinary. Can you talk more about that?
Heather: Oh my gosh, Lyndsey, when I looked up the etymology of the word ordinary, it’s like, oh my gosh, it changes everything. So it is related to the word. Yeah, it is related to the word for order and it’s related to words like ordain and primordial. To be ordained is to mean that God purposes something, you know, or to be in God’s purpose.
It is, it gets back to, I’m trying to remember now the etymology, it gets back to the words related to weaving. And it means that something is has like a regular pattern and is repeated. And literally that’s like with threads on a loom, that there is sort of an order there of how you put the threads together. I just thought like we think ordinary means nothing special, right? But it’s sort of like, no, this is the basic fabric of everything.
Because our days are made up of all of these moments woven together that really don’t look like much on the outside. Like nothing that we do, like doing the laundry does not feel so earth shatteringly important, but like we don’t do anything without clean clothes, right? Like, I mean, you could, but you’d stink. So, and, or like, you know, cooking dinner, sometimes that looks like, you know, giving your kids cereal because you have no bandwidth with for anything else, but nobody is going to be able to, you know, get through the rest of the day without you at least providing that amount of care for your kids, right? It might not look awesome. But that is those are the things that our life are made of.
And they’re connected to our sense of purpose to the to the creation of the universe, because everything is built up a very modest building blocks, right? Like everything is built up of these very small things that by themselves don’t look like very much but when combined together make something breathtaking.
And I think that if we denigrate the word ordinary we’re denigrating just the very small moments that make us who we are that give our lives meaning and I’d like to have creativity anchored in that reality because crafting a book or making a painting is also just full of very small things like a sentence, a brushstroke that only at the end kind of comes together and doesn’t really look like that much at the beginning. I mean, if you’ve ever done those things, you know, you feel like an absolute putz when you’re getting started, like every single time.
So if we understand that it is both super humble and also connected to the meaning of everything. I think that gives us a little bit of the feel of what is really happening when we’re creative. Because most of the time it’s not going to look like that much, but in the end, it’s always a kind of miracle, no matter how humble our skills are or the end product is or what our day looks like is. It is important even though it doesn’t look flashy.
Lyndsey: Yeah, I, and survival is that way, right? And we—and I think we sometimes when we’re super overwhelmed, and we feel like, we know that we have to figure out how to survive, we’re waiting for like, the moment of insight or the rescue that’s gonna appear. And actually survival itself is a matter of like, eating some cereal and doing it again tomorrow. And yeah, I just love the way you wove those, the creativity and the survival and the ordinariness together over and over and over throughout this book and in the process made all of those things so much more accessible.
And so many of I do think so many other things you say, like, “We have to learn to incorporate our mistakes and failures into what we’re doing and let them be a part of the process.” This is not something most of us have never ever heard before, but it also, for some reason, when it’s about “Creativity,” it gets couched in, this is a special skill of incredibly talented people. When like, yeah, actually, it’s like a life skill. You can apply to a lot of things.
Heather: Yes.
Lyndsey: Why do we say “Creativity” in this voice and categorize people as creative and not? Why do we do that?
Heather: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think even just studying the history of creativity kind of gave me some insight into that. Like, I think a lot of it is about power, right?
So I found out in the course of researching this book that back in ancient Greece, you know, they had the muses, which were like the the spirits of inspiration and creativity. There was no muse for visual art. There was no muse for sculpture. There were muses for theater, there were muses for poetry, there was muse, I mean, there was like multiple ones, different ones for different kinds of poetry, but they didn’t have any painting muses because the people who were painting were slaves. Like the people who were making sculptures were usually slaves. That was considered manual labor.
And so this idea of like what actually counts as creative is very tied to notions of power, right? Like it’s always has been that way. And in our society, the people who have, like who are visibly creative and who are lauded for their creativity, they have a lot of, they tend to have a lot of money because of that. Like that is what is counted as worthwhile in our society. And so those people, they are considered hugely creative.
But like, back in the Middle Ages, people didn’t put like the architect’s name on the cathedral because there was not one architect. They would have to have multiple architects over the course of the, you know, 100, 200 years that it took to build something. There would be multiple artisans that were coming to finish a cathedral inside and out. And so the idea that this one person was responsible for this one work of art, like that was a weird concept.
You know, people were not lauded until the Renaissance individually for being creative. And people just made stuff because they had to. There was no way to go to Target and buy your blanket. Like you had to make it yourself.
And so this, this habit of making things, I think because of our capitalist economy, I think because our understanding of what counts as success and what counts as meaningful is so tied to money, it has erased the work that most of us do each day in our houses in very modest and quiet ways to make stuff, to solve problems that ordinary people have always done and ordinary people without power have always done. And we just don’t see how that kind of toxic power dynamic works. And so we assume that what we’re doing doesn’t matter, that it doesn’t really count unless someone else tells us that it counts or someone else pays us money for it.
Lyndsey: Yeah, which in my experience of my life becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Like if it, if my potholders that I made on my loom don’t count, then I might as well just go buy some from the Dollar Tree and there’s less creativity in the world now.
Heather: Yeah, yeah, totally. And I mean, to be honest, and I think also like so many of us are having to work so hard just to get by, you know? But there is honor and creativity in making do with what we have under those circumstances.
And the idea that, say, someone who’s struggling with poverty isn’t being creative. It’s like, okay, have you learned what it is to navigate like the welfare system in our country? Yeah. Right? Like, have you learned what it looks like to put together a meal when you’re on food stamps and what that kind of ingenuity that requires and the planning? Like, those are real skills.
Like I would be helpless in that situation unless I had someone to help me, right? It would take me a long time to learn those skills. So the idea that those are not creative skills, like that’s just, that’s trash. It’s not true. But because it doesn’t look fancy and powerful and is related to money and prestige, we think it doesn’t matter. But it’s truly, like all of us are doing those kinds of things.
And it isn’t necessarily only with painting or with yarn or whatever. It’s everyday stuff. It’s problems. Like creativity is just problem solving basically.
Lyndsey: Right. Yeah. I hear so many of the things you’re talking about make me think about my experience of improv theater in college. And I think that taught me a lot of these things about creativity that are harder to get at without an experience. Because improv is collaborative.
It makes something that—it can be recorded, but mostly is never going to exist again in the future. Um, and it’s there for the experience of it, for the people making it and the people, the audience as well, just to have, to share a moment and then disperse, you know? Um, and that is so different from a lot of the other things we think of as art and, um, or as valuable.
And at the same time, I’m so aware that I totally fluked into doing that thing. And that also I was in college and I had, you know, the most resources ever to sit around for hours and hours just experiencing and experience with other people, you know? Yeah. But that has continued to just inform how I understand creativity and by extension the world and spirituality and life ever since then.
And I wish we, I just wish we had more spaces for to try things, I think, is part of what I’m getting at. And I wish we had more spaces to share things without judgment besides just college.
Heather: Yeah. No, and I think our culture is because, because like, skills like singing or dance or whatever have been so commodified and so professionalized. It means that families don’t make music together in their homes, right? Because nobody has is good enough for that to work. Like when my mom talks about, you know, her relatives getting together and people who, you know, had some high school band experience were like playing their horn, you know? It’s like because they didn’t have that much else to do. She grew up in a very small rural town and there wasn’t much else to do besides that.
And I don’t want to like negate the difficulty of that. Like my mom didn’t always like that fact, but at the same time, like the idea of getting to make music, very modest, humble music together with your family, like we would just put on Spotify now, right? And there’s, you know, I don’t want to be nostalgic for the past, like there’s real difficulties there, but also this idea that you have to be so good. You have to have so much skill to not be embarrassed at putting your skills out there.
And it’s like, I wish that we hadn’t raised the bar quite so hard. Like we’ve all seen such, we’ve all grown up people of your, yours and my generation have grown up with such heavily produced forms of creativity that require multiple editors and choreographers and producers in order for them to be ready for public view that we think that that is what is necessary in order to get joy out of something but like, oh my gosh you get together in a room with a bunch of amateur singers and you can have like such a good time right.
Lyndsey: Yeah. Yeah, an irreplaceably good time.
Heather: You and improv comedy, like yes that’s exactly that’s exactly the kind of thing i’m talking about.
Lyndsey: Yeah. I spend a lot of my time just sitting around imagining ways to recapture at least a little bit of that. And you point out in Ordinary Creativity how much community-building itself is also a creative, like an immensely creative act. If creativity is problem solving, like that’s what community building is. I was really inspired by that too.
Heather: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, being autistic, building community is not something that comes naturally to me. And people, you know, like put me in a room with, you know, an X-Acto knife and some paper and I will happily amuse myself. And people are like, oh, you’re so creative. And I’m like, yes, I have these skills, but there are other skills that I really struggle with. Like autism makes it easy for me to focus and build crazy paper models over 12 hours. Like that requires no effort for me, but like, you know, getting a group together for a group dinner, like that’s terrifying. Like, oh my gosh, the people who can do that and who managed to get me there and like happily talking to other people. I’m like, you’re amazing. Like, how do you do that? That’s magical.
So I just, it’s like we overlook the skills that come easily to us. And I’m saying like, maybe we should pay attention to those things that we do without even thinking because they are so, because we are actually gifted in them, you know?
Lyndsey: Yeah, and I think the just feeling allowed, being willing to pay attention to how we perceive those things as creative, gives us the space to incorporate more, create more ordinary creativity into our lives and more dignity to the humble work that we or the people around us are doing.
I wanted to ask you, there’s not like a ton in your book that says this explicitly, but I also felt a really strong undercurrent that creativity as so broadly defined is a spiritual practice for you. And that spirituality is a creative practice. And I wanted to just hear you talk about that aspect that’s this interesting undercurrent here.
And perhaps my guess is that attending to the power structures and forces sort of involved in all of this is a spiritual practice for you too.
Heather: Yeah, you know, I think a lot of it is about paying attention, right? And being present. For me, like the more healthy my spirituality, you know, I’ve been a Christian for a long time, the more healthy my practice of faith has become. It’s about like listening, it’s about being still, it’s about not trying harder to impress or perform for God, but just sensing that God is already present where I am.
And that is a work of our insides, right? Like that is a work of paying attention to a spark of joy or a spark of peace or a spark of yearning. And when I write things or when I make a painting or when I get started on a new scarf, like, it’s kind of the same skill. It’s kind of that same like, what is it that I’m really yearning for here? What is that color that makes, just makes me so excited? Like, I mean, seriously, when I started like crocheting, I’d be like, I see a color of yarn and be like, oh, like, I’d feel like I’m scheming or something? Like this sense of yearning of joy of, of hopefulness almost.
And it’s the freaking exact same feeling. Like that, that sense of like, what is this whole part of me inside of me that I think is God, right? That wholeness, that sense, that that beautiful spirit that I think lives within each of us. How am I connecting to that? And what is the next thing that it’s that that presence is telling me to do? And I think that that can be a spiritual exercise. I think that that can be a way of solving a problem. I think that that can be a way of making something new. But it feels the same to me. And like the healthier I’ve gotten in all those areas, the more I’m like, yeah, this is all one thing, right? This is all one practice. It’s just different manifestations of it.
Lyndsey: Yeah, yeah. And and I just feel it is worth reiterating until everyone is really sick of hearing it. What you’re also saying is it all being one practice is, you know, lending your art supplies to your kid and helping them clean up their mess and letting—I was just I was just letting the dog in and out. Like she just wants to go in and out and in and out of the house every day. And I could, I could just not let her, but I don’t know. That caretaking is life making.
Heather. Yeah. And it’s an art. I actually homeschooled my kids. And a lot of the stuff that I put in this book, I’ve learned from homeschooling them, because, you know, it’s, when you grow up with certain ways of judging success or judging achievement, it’s kind of hard to talk yourself out of them. But when I had my kids at home every day, we were doing sort of this radical leftist, hippie style homeschooling that was like unschooling, especially when they were very little. Like, we just play to learn math. I mean, it was very hippie-dippie.
But what was amazing to me is my children thrived and I kept thinking like, what I’m giving to them, I want that for me. Like what would it look like to have radical permission to learn skills with absolutely no pressure and absolutely no comparison to anybody else? Like what would that actually, what would that feel like to me?
And like, again, like that is the kind of graciousness that God is giving each of us. Like all the pressure that we feel to perform and meet standards, that is not Jesus, right? Like it is so much about, you know, becoming like little children and actually loving our neighbors well and not about presenting a front that people will be impressed by, right?
And so, yes, it was absolutely in caregiving that I realized that the sort of permission I was struggling to learn to give to my children, that that applied to me too. And that could be, you know, with a dog, that you’re like, you just have creaturely needs. Like you need to be going in and out all day and I’m gonna have patience with that. Like, that is the kind of graciousness that God gives to each of us. And we should pay attention to that and honor it.
Lyndsey: I think there’s something with this dog where she is like, she just wants to go outside in the sun and she’s very black and she wants to get really, really hot and then come back in and lay on the cold floor. Like, that’s what she’s doing. And I think of her so much as my mentor in the, this like paying attention to what we love. Like what you’re talking about, just, “I love this yarn and I need to hold this yarn in my hands.” Like that, what you, like you just said, the creatureliness of that. I’m like, I will facilitate this for you. That’s fine.
Heather: And what a wisdom to know like, this is what I wanna do right now. Like I wanna go lay in the sun. Like what, like that pleasure is available to every freaking human being alive. And how often do we not give ourselves the freedom to enjoy that simplicity? It costs nothing. It doesn’t even take very much time. And it’s available to us all the time. And to learn how to actually do that would be a crazy gift to each of us.
Lyndsey: Yeah, exactly. Well you just mentioned hope. And I like to end by asking my guests, how do you define hope? And where are you finding it right now?
Heather: Oh, we’re ending on the easy question, huh?
Lyndsey: Maybe you can start with where you’re finding it and then you’ll know how you define it. I don’t know.
Heather: You know, I was I was in therapy the other day and my therapist was was helping me remember ways I’d been resilient in the past and talking about like, you face this problem and see how you managed to solve it.
Like at that point where, you know, like for instance, when I was home with my kids, that experience for me was quite terrifying in a lot of ways. That was one of the things I was remembering was the terror of it. And she’s like, “but you also said that it filled you with joy.” Like I was talking about the terror and then I said, but it also made me truly full as kind of an afterthought. She’s like, “let’s sit with that for a moment.”
And I think to me, hope is like how I’m trying to live into hope is remembering those things in the past where I was terrified of something that was actually life-giving because it’s sometimes it’s really hard to be that vulnerable, right? To really allow the thing that you’re yearning for to really go after it. That can be really terrifying. But I have seen that it is worth it.
And so for me, like remembering through life experience and just the testimony of people around me, that it is worth it to live that openhearted. It is worth it to go after those things that I’m yearning for. And that hope for me is the radical permission to really do that and to think like, I have hope that when I live that way, even if it doesn’t look successful, even if it’s countercultural, even if it kind of makes me feel like a putz to other people, like, hope is trusting that that is the right move because it is in the past always led me to a better place.
Lyndsey: Awesome. That’s amazing. Your book is amazing— Ordinary Creativity: How to Survive with Joy. I’m just going to keep going back to it. I want listeners to know you talk about The Artist’s Way a few times in your in this book.
And you also say, you know, there was a time in my life when it was great for me and there was a time in my life when it just would have destroyed me to try to do this. Like, it’s a really big undertaking. And I don’t know if you did this on purpose or not, but your little chapters and journaling reflections in Ordinary Creativity feel like the opposite, like the doable thing. If someone has little kids or a disability or this whole topic is really overwhelming to them, that you can pick this up in 10 minutes a day and put it down and come back to it. And I will be doing that more as I’m revisiting it in the future. So thank you so much for writing this, Heather. Thank you for being with us.
Heather: Thank you, Lyndsey. It’s been such a pleasure.
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