The Work Knows

Dear Lisa,

One time you expressed interest in letting the work tell you what it wants.
As if you have to listen to the project. Can you let me know a bit more about what this means to you?

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Lisa responds:

The balance between work and creativity is one I’ve long struggled with. Work connotes discipline, structure, and deliverables whereas creativity lives in the more subtle realm of inspiration, faith and deep wisdom.

For art to exist in the world, both are required; you can’t force art and you can’t “woo woo” art.

Lisa Mecham on a solo road trip where she conceived a letter that ended up being included in the debut column of NY Times’ Tiny Modern Love.

I believe every human being has something important to express and we all do that differently. For those of us compelled to create art—to put our feelings into something tangible that others can experience—we’re sometimes loathe to call that process “work” for fear it loses its magic. Or maybe we’re too intent on organizing it as work and it becomes dreadful and tedious.

The acorn thesis in James Hillman’s book The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling resonates with me (so much so that I got an acorn tattooed on my forearm so I can see it every day).

Just like an acorn contains the blueprint of the oak tree and what it is meant to become, so do we. This innate, guiding energy carries our unique potential, which is then shaped through our lived experience.

For each creative project I embark on, I also feel it has its own inner spark and it’s the moments I’ve listened to its call that have been the most fruitful.

Take, for example, this piece I published in the first column of The New York Times’ Tiny Modern Love. I’d seen the announcement the newspaper put out for this and wanted to submit something. I knew what I wanted to write about and I tried and tried to force that idea into 100 words. It was all terrible. I wanted to give up.

Coincidentally I was taking a solo road trip through Southern Utah at the time. One morning, I set out early to catch the sunrise in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Park. As I rounded a corner in my car, my jaw dropped as I saw through the windshield the most incredible expanse of canyons stretched out to infinity. Ripples of bright orange and sandy beige.

I pulled over, got out, and stood at the lip of the deep chasm and was overcome with wonder. Those canyons carved out from wind and water, folded like skin, with pockets of red so surprising, as if all the blood in your body flushed to the surface at once.

Moved by James Hillman’s acorn analogy, Lisa has this tattoo to remind her of it every day

Time stood still. Time had no meaning. What was had been, and would always be. At that moment, I heard a line inside me, a line of words that I rushed back to my car to write down, a line of words that turned into the 100 words I submitted the next day to The New York Times

I lean on that experience in Utah a lot, how it felt to let go of what I thought I wanted and let what it wanted to be come to life. This is what I mean when I say the work knows. The work has wisdom. The work requires us to listen and trust. Each piece of art I create starts as its own acorn and I’m responsible for creating the conditions for it to surface.

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Note from Elliott: I met Lisa through this very newsletter. We have spent a fair bit of time together virtually through the Project Lab co-working sessions. She is courageous in her work and always a breath of fresh air to talk to.

Lisa is currently finishing a book about what happens to a family when mental illness is hidden beneath the veneer of suburban perfection and editing an anthology, Happy After: Women Thriving In Divorce. Her digital archive project, Finding Judy, is preserving and sharing the life of Judith Shahn—a prolific yet unsung artist of the mid-20th century.