TRANSCRIPT
I was recently asking myself the question: what am I? How do I define myself to the world? To the world’s questions when they ask me, “What are you? What do you do?” I don’t say I’m a psychotherapist. I’m not a psychotherapist anymore and haven’t been for more than 14 years. But that was really the last time in my life that I could answer that question in a very clear, precise, societally understandable way. Now I can’t. It’s been a long time since I haven’t been able to.
But recently, I thought, just from looking at my life, looking at how I live, how I make money even, I’m an artist. And why I find it interesting to say this is it reminds me of how I felt for a long time when I was a psychotherapist. I felt cheesy saying I’m a psychotherapist. It sounded grandiose and weird and arrogant. Or actually, when I was a filmmaker for what, three, four years after I quit being a psychotherapist, and I said I’m a filmmaker—actually, I never said that. It felt too grandiose, even though that’s how I was spending my time, that’s how I was spending my money, and earning my money.
So it sounds, hm, grandiose now to say I’m an artist, but actually, I really mean it. I spend a lot of my time living in an artistic way, in a creative way. I don’t make a lot of money at it. I make very little money at it, actually. But it’s not about the money. In fact, it’s like money isn’t the concern. I do need money to survive, to live in the world, to pay my bills, pay my rent when I need to, pay for hosts sometimes when I’m traveling, pay for a new tent from time to time if my old one doesn’t work anymore when I go camping, pay for train tickets, airplane tickets when I need to do that.
But how I spend my time, how I spend my day, how my mind spends its time living inside of my head, it’s something that I didn’t choose to live this way, to be an artist. It’s something that chose me. I think even more so, it is me. And I think it’s actually bigger than being a psychotherapist when I was one because I really think more than being a therapist, I was an artist. When I was a therapist, I approached psychotherapy from the perspective of an artist, and I didn’t even realize it. I approached it in a very creative way, not in a one-size-fits-all, paint-by-numbers, “this is how you do psychotherapy.” People would say, “What school of psychotherapy do you practice? What school of psychotherapy did you study?” And, well, I could say what did I study? All of them. Anything that I was interested in, even ones that I wasn’t interested in. I was curious in all the schools. What did they have to say? What might I learn from this? But I was never a devotee of any of them. And I was actually against the idea inherently of being a devotee of a school of psychotherapy, even though there were some that I liked more than others for sure, and there were some that I liked a lot less.
What I was a devotee of when I was a therapist was being there for my clients, being there for the people who came and sat down across from me. What do I mean by being there? It’s actually a lot like being here now in front of the camera—being present, being myself, having a clear mind, having my heart be connected to my mind, being open, being calm, working really hard to get a good night’s sleep every night if possible, knowing myself to the best of my ability, devoting myself to this process. Something I know as an artist, even though it still sounds grandiose to say it, but as an artist, is realizing for myself that the art that I’m creating is the highest thing. This representation of some magical creative process, that this is a beautiful end unto itself. And that’s how I treated psychotherapy—that not my clients were an art project, but the process that we shared was an artistic process. And I wanted to give my all to it, and I tried really hard to give my all to it, which is probably why I got so exhausted from it.
It’s probably why a lot of people came back again and again and again, ’cause they got to find that artist within themselves. Or if they had already found that artist within themselves, they found someone who honored that artist, who respected it, who loved it. And I think of so many people in my life who were so threatened by the artist that was me. Even art teachers I had when I was a kid, they said, “This is the way to do art. You must paint this way. You must draw this way. You must create art of this size. You must follow this process.” And what if it wasn’t for me? What if I didn’t want to do that? What if I wanted to do it my own way, or think my own way, or write my own stories my way, or have handwriting that was my own way? And heaven forbid, what if I wanted to approach science in an artistic way?
I ended up majoring in science in college, in university. I studied biology. I have a degree in biology. And, well, I went to this fancy little private liberal arts college that had a very low student-to-teacher ratio, and it was supposed to be a place where the teachers, the professors, gave so much attention to the students in an artistic way. But it didn’t happen to me. The professors basically didn’t like me. I didn’t play by their silly little rules. And I realize now it’s like I was approaching biology, even chemistry, in an artist’s way, in a creative way, thinking outside the box, honoring thinking outside the box. And what I found, what I find, is that threatens people. People live for comfort. They live for rigidity.
Nowadays, I see so much what’s called art out in the world, and now I’m saying this because I don’t think it’s art really. And it’s like I hate it. It’s garbage. It’s silly. It’s weird. It doesn’t make any sense. They’re not making any point. It’s not coming from the soul of the artist. I can feel it. It’s coming from some intellectual or even political place, but not from the spirit of who they really are as a person. And it doesn’t speak to me. I don’t like it. And I think that’s why a lot of people do like it, because it’s not threatening. It doesn’t transmit the message to them: you need to find a self. You need to be who you are. You need to be creative. You need to get out of your box. You need to think bigger. You need to be bigger than your family.
My family, my parents, were terribly threatened by the inner artist that was me. They wanted me to be small and broken and break off all my exterior parts that got bigger than them. Oh, my mom was so relieved when I studied science, when I studied biology in college. “Oh, Daniel, going to get a PhD in biology,” that’s what she would brag about. My dad would brag about it. But they liked it because it meant that I was never going to be bigger than them, that I would never speak out. And that’s what I saw with my fellow biology students. They weren’t approaching it as art. They were approaching it as a series of numbers and a series of tasks, and they would go forward to get jobs where they would follow more tasks and bigger tasks and more important tasks and tasks that had rules defined by people who they didn’t know and didn’t like.
And well, no wonder most of my fellow biology students, now that they have careers, if they’re in biology or medicine, they’re not happy. They don’t like it because guess what? These careers are not set up to be enjoyed and treasured. It’s just following rules to make money, and often lots of money. And what they’re supposed to do is enjoy the compensation, not really be connected with what they’re doing, not think about it.
So I think about now me as an artist. I travel a lot with a lot of my free time, very low budget, lots and lots of hitchhiking still all over the world, living with local people, sharing what I have, sharing myself.
Out in the world, lots of people really respect the artist of me. Not the fancy American people, not my family. My family long since got rid of me yet blamed me for getting rid of them. But I did it to save my soul. I pulled away from them so I could be free and be me.
I think about another artistic project I’ve been doing. I’ve been collecting wild honey from all around the world. I bring it back to America when I return from my travels, and I’ve been putting it in little glass bottles, little glass jars that I find out on the street. Mostly jars of alcohol. People who are alcoholics, often homeless people, they drink the little bottle of alcohol and they throw it out on the street. I walk around, I pick them up, find them, bring them home, wash them out with soap and water, sterilize them with boiling water, fill them with raw honey near to the top, and then put melted beeswax on the top and seal them.
Once I seal them, it’s very, very hard to get that beeswax out, and that’s the point. The idea that I’m doing, I call this a legacy project. These little bottles of sealed wild honey from Africa, from Asia, from Central America. I have one from America when I was a kid from upstate New York. I collected some wild honey that I found in the forest, and I still have it from the 80s, sealed in a little bottle under beeswax. This is going to be around long after I’m gone.
I remember reading that they found honey sealed under beeswax in bottles in Egyptian tombs from 3,000 years ago, and the honey is still good. I read that honey is slightly acidic and it kills bacteria, so no bacteria grows in the honey if it’s sealed properly and it’s sterilized. It never goes bad. This honey that I’m sealing, this artistic project, could still be good in thousands of years.
And why am I doing this? There’s just some magical feeling in me, some idea that I’m saving something beautiful and special from our world that may not exist someday for some future people who may find this, who may open it up and may see the label that I’ve put on it and be excited. To me, this is art. There’s some beautiful passion. There’s no grand reason, there’s no financial incentive. It just honors the magic of life.
[Music]