Undaunted Joy #48

Rick Rubin and the Creative Way of Being

Growing up in Los Angeles, for better or worse, I was influenced by Hip Hop. I have been known to say, my philosophy of life is Jesus but if I am honest, it’s a little Transcendentalism and Gangsta Rap too.

There are figures from the Hip Hop world that stand out above the rest; Tupac, Dre, JayZ, Eminem and producer Rick Rubin. Rubin produced many of those listed as well as Nine Inch Nails, Johnny Cash and Adele. Maybe you have seen him before, with his long grey beard, on awards shows or music documentaries. He is usually shown in the background, shining the light on the artist, delighting in them like a proud Grizzly papa.

This past week I listened to Rick Rubin discuss creativity on Bari Weiss’ Honestly podcast. He said we are all capable of creativity, not just those who consider themselves artists.

“To create is to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before. It could be a conversation, the solution to a problem, a note to a friend, the re-arrangement of furniture, a new route home to avoid a traffic jam,” he wrote in his new book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being.

The discussion compelled me to purchase his new book. I naively thought it would be some sort of memoir but this book is more of a Zen treatise on what it is to live a creative life. Each chapter is sparse but wisdom-ful. I am reading it slowly and finding myself shifting and re-shifting ever so slightly in the way I move through life as a result.

“The ability to look deeply

is the root of creativity.

to look past the ordinary and mundane

and to get to what otherwise might be invisible.”

Rick, you are preaching to the choir and she’s singing.

But it was halfway through that podcast with Weiss that I had to stop, pull the car over and replay what he said and really, really listen.

“Everything we make, we are making, as an offering to God.

If you are making an offering to God, you are not taking any short cuts…

I want to do the best I can do in a universal way for something I can’t understand. There are no metrics for what I’m taking about.”

Rubin gets very emotional saying this. He actually stops and says he wants to start crying and that it is something he just recently realized about art but also something he knew all along….

that making art is an offering to God.

I believe this in every pore of my skin but it took Rubin saying it, getting emotional enough to make my ears perk up, to realize I have not been creating with this in mind for the past few months.  

So I shift. Reshift. Remind. Refocus.

This is Yours. Not mine.