Mark Nepo

And then when I realized in college that I was a poet and I didn't, I hadn't really written anything much, but I just knew it.

And I was still learning what that meant.

And I was the first in my family to go to college in the history of my family, a family of immigrants.

Jewish immigrants.

And my father, who was a master woodworker, my mother was a bookkeeper, but they were both highly intelligent, grew up out of the Great Depression, were very survival-oriented for my brother and I. And they got a mystical poet for a son, like we didn't really speak the same language.

And I came home as a sophomore, I think, in college, excited to tell them that I was a poet.

And we were around the small kitchen table and we had the classic argument, my father escalating and yelling that, how are you gonna make a living?

And I don't know where it came from in me.

And I just said, without missing a beat, I'm gonna live a making.

And it just frustrated the hell out of him.

And I spent the next several years trying to understand what came through me

from my soul and from the world of spirit was a deep instruction on how to move forward, to stay close to what it means to be alive.

And I would share with you now all these years later that I've discovered, I think over time that the creative process and the introspective process are really the same thing.

I just happened to write it down because that's how I learn.

And one of the reasons that I've been blessed to be prolific is that I've learned that writing is really listening and taking notes more than speaking my beliefs.

And so I've been able to explore a lot because I write about what I need to know, not what I know.

And if I'd written about only what I know, I would have written very little.

And so this raises a whole thing that's a paradox in life.

And that is we all, whether the art is in living, not in what we produce.

And so this starts to move in into the fifth season, my latest book about creativity in the second half of life, because really what I'm