I was supposed to go out to LA for a week this month, but the planets didn’t align. I kept my time off though and had myself a beautiful staycation. Might as well call it an artist’s retreat where I didn’t have to go anywhere except anywhere I wanted to in my mind and in this beautiful city.

The Artist Life™ wants you to believe that the only way to be an artist is to not have a day job, be tortured, more or less a monster to everyone around you, etc. I just don’t buy it. I am much more intrigued by artists like William Carlos Williams, who kept up his pediatrician practice because he didn’t want his poetry to be beholden to the whims of publishers, causing him to sacrifice his art because it was his livelihood.

A few weeks ago I looked into my workplace’s sabbatical policy, where one can take up to a year of unpaid leave after working four years at the organization. Alas, health insurance is not included. Our employer-based healthcare system, amongst other evils, forces us to work when we could otherwise take time to enjoy this one precious life.

Given these realities, I have become even more interested in how to sustain a creative practice. I may never get that Porcupine Mountains artist residency, but I can go into any forest with my painting supplies and go off. I may be on more of a WCW path than a more traditional professional artist path and never have large patches of free time ahead of me (but with this economy, who knows), but I can take a week or so off work like I did this month in lieu of LA.

I sketched at the Met and American Museum of Natural History. I worked on new songs. I organized my art closet (a Herculean feat). I researched topics far from my 9-5 searches at the library. I read a lot of poetry. It was inspiring. It was glamorous. It took no judges panel or grant awards to give me permission.

I have grown very curious of people’s reasons, including my own, for why they do not create. It is easy to judge them, to interrogate them, to question other people’s excuses while we justify our own. I work with people who live in poverty, and can see how my core belief that we are all artists is blunted by the brutality of inequity and capitalism. We all should be fighting for a world where it shouldn’t be this hard to create, “bread and roses” means something more than ever.

The question I have been asking is what is something I can do to create today? What is something I can do to help someone else create today? As much as we can create artist’s retreats for ourselves, we cannot retreat from this world. We are always connected.