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[0:00] Leah Walsh: Hi, and welcome to The Compass, the podcast documenting the struggles of life as an artist.

[0:05] Leah Walsh: I'm Leah Walsh.

[0:06] Leah Walsh: Hi guys. So today I have a mini episode for you because of some scheduling cancellations.

[0:12] Leah Walsh: Over the next couple weeks, I have three wonderful guests coming up: a costume designer, an actor, teacher, and director who I've wanted to have on since the beginning, and a visual artist, an activist who was introduced to me by a dear friend.

[0:24] Leah Walsh: So stay tuned over the next couple weeks. But today I'm going to read a few poems and an excerpt from The Artist's Way with some of my thoughts.

[0:32] Leah Walsh: So if you'd like to join me, continue listening. If that's not what you need today, totally fine. Have a great week and check back next Friday for a brand new episode with a guest.

[0:41] Leah Walsh: I feel like I haven't been sharing much about my personal life lately, and part of it is because I've felt a little stuck and a lot has been up in the air.

[0:49] Leah Walsh: As a lot of you know, I took a full-time day job all the way back in May to give our family some more stability. And while it was a great fit, it never went permanent because of a hiring freeze with the parent company.

[1:03] Leah Walsh: So eight months later, I was still working there through a temp agency, which is not the goal when I made that choice to give up my flexibility. The goal was to have the stability and the benefits and all of that of going full-time.

[1:15] Leah Walsh: And part of me is still just baffled by how this happened because in my mind taking this prescribed route should have been more clear-cut because so much of my artistic life is about not knowing and being flexible and not being able to plan.

[1:33] Leah Walsh: And this vote of stability should have gone down the first scene route, should have gone as planned. Um, but I guess that's life. But from an artist perspective, it seemed like it should have worked out.

[1:45] Leah Walsh: So I left at the end of January, which is a decision that I'm really glad about because they couldn't give me what I wanted, so I needed to leave. And it's been really nice to have a couple weeks to myself to be able to sleep, to be able to do some things that I wanted to do, focus on uh creative things that are important to me.

[2:05] Leah Walsh: And I'm working on finding the next day job, so wish me luck. My husband Frankie is in LA for six weeks for pilot season, so fingers crossed for him as well.

[2:15] Leah Walsh: And it's just an interesting time because we're doing that dance of supporting each other from afar, which I'm sure many of you can relate to, supporting each other during these moments of uncertainty and hope and staying positive when really all we want to do is to be together because that's so much more fun.

[2:33] Leah Walsh: But it's a time of anxiety and also this great, great possibility because anything could happen. So that's where I've been.

[2:41] Leah Walsh: And then yesterday was Valentine's Day when I'm recording this, and the school shooting in Florida happened at a high school, was where some friends of ours went to when they were kids, leaving 17 people dead.

[3:29] Leah Walsh: Columbine happened in 1999 when I was in high school, and mass shootings have only become more and more frequent since our adolescence, as well as 9-11 happening the very first week of my first year of college, and there hasn't been a time in my adult life where we haven't been at war with somebody.

[3:49] Leah Walsh: So I'm sure every generation has these events, these changes that are unique to their time, but what does it do to you when this is all you know as an adult?

[4:02] Leah Walsh: So I'd like to read two poems today that have to do with grief, and then an excerpt from The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron from the chapter Recovering a Sense of Power, entitled Anger. Thank you for listening.

[4:26] Leah Walsh: Amsterdam by Megan Fernandez. Sometimes the mythologies of a city are true. Like when I see a blonde man bob for red apples in the street, selling records side by side with a black cat wound in a cushion, deep in a dream.

[4:43] Leah Walsh: Josh says he does not want to go see Anne Frank. That this kind of tourism depresses him. The one where the demonstration of grief is like a voyeuristic tug at suffering that is not yours to possess.

[4:56] Leah Walsh: How do you eat after that? He seems sad today. How do you stay alive? When he was young, he visited Auschwitz and told me not to go because it had a gift shop, and that made him angry, and nobody knows how to grieve in public, how to make public space for loss, unless you can make money off of it.

[5:16] Leah Walsh: But really, but really there's something else in his anger. The child abandoned, the residue of a young girl's life turned into a petting zoo that he cannot take.

[5:27] Leah Walsh: I have become like my mother, where I don't need to sleep in a new city anymore, immune to time shifts. I just wander and buy fruit and almonds and a good loaf of bread and today some fresh juice, skipping museums, though I want to go back to see Anne Frank's house this time, because this time I am a woman, and last time I was a girl, and when you are a girl, all you see is another girl, and when you are a woman, all you see is history careening towards a girl who you cannot protect.

[5:56] Leah Walsh: In my Amsterdam apartment, I find a ceramic plate with its rim edge folded in five places where a violet petal has been painted at its compression. In it I pour some olive oil and a little bit of salt and sit on the white couch overlooking the new neon green blooms gathering on a branch outside the large window, directly facing an apartment of a bookish couple, the kind who forget they have bodies and think they are better than those who are bodily, which is most everyone else, in the world.

[6:25] Leah Walsh: But the girl in the couple is lying and misses the small animal inside her crying for her breakfast. What she needs is food, not yates. What she needs is your fingers.

[6:37] Leah Walsh: The apartment has tulips and pink depression glass and cacti of all heights, like reptilian skyscrapers. I am thinking of Harlem in Amsterdam. Sometimes I go there to hide.

[6:46] Leah Walsh: I go there to eat at a bistro owned by a lady named Faye. Faye is older with light eyes, and her whole family works this place, and her grandson is behind the bar, and he's just seventeen and a soccer player, and this week got into Dartmouth, and I ask her if she thinks we'll be happy, being a black kid at Dartmouth.

[7:06] Leah Walsh: But Faye is Queen Faye and knows better than to answer questions about race at dinner time, especially in front of all these nice people. In Amsterdam, the cold sunlight of April grows the dandelions in the gutter.

[7:18] Leah Walsh: And when you get to 263 to Sand Anne Frank's house, only from the outside. The building is not as tall as you remember, and you wonder what the ceilings were like for a young girl, and you imagine her face.

[7:30] Leah Walsh: I imagine her face and think maybe something bad happened to Josh when he was a kid, and you see her face in the window. Her face lit up in a story, her face in love and in fear.

[7:41] Leah Walsh: And you are in Amsterdam, when the American president bombs Syria. You say, American president, as if you were not an American, and as if he is not your president.

[7:53] Leah Walsh: You promise that he would not make his way into any poem, but here he is bombing Syria, and here is he is in your poem, and here is her face spreading all over Europe, and here is your face, Anne, spreading all over Europe, and here is your face, your face, your face.

[8:19] Leah Walsh: Kave Akbar, K-A-V-E-H A-K-B-A-R. Orchids are sprouting from the floorboards. Orchids are gushing out of the faucets.

[8:30] Leah Walsh: The cat mews orchids from his mouth. His whiskers are also orchids. The grass is sprouting orchids.

[8:35] Leah Walsh: It is becoming mostly orchids. The trees are filled with orchids, the tire swing is twirling with orchids.

[8:45] Leah Walsh: The sunlight on the wet cement is a white orchid. The car's tires leave a trail of orchids.

[8:51] Leah Walsh: A bouquet of orchids lifts from its tailpipe. Teenagers are texting each other pictures of orchids on their phones, which are also orchids.

[9:00] Leah Walsh: Old men in orchid penny loafers furiously trade orchids. Mothers fill bottles with warm orchids to feed their infants who are orchids themselves.

[9:09] Leah Walsh: Their coups are a kind of orchid. The clouds are all orchids. They are reigning orchids.

[9:16] Leah Walsh: The walls are all orchids. The teapot is an orchid. The blank easel is an orchid, and this cold is an orchid.

[9:23] Leah Walsh: Oh Lydia, we miss you terribly. This is from The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron.

[9:36] Leah Walsh: The chapter is recovering a sense of power. This section is called anger. Anger is fuel.

[9:43] Leah Walsh: We feel it and we want to do something. Hit someone, break something, throw a fit, smash a fist into the wall, tell those bastards.

[9:51] Leah Walsh: But we are nice people, and what we do with our anger is stuff it, deny it, bury it, block it, hide it, lie about it, medicate it, muffle it, ignore it.

[10:01] Leah Walsh: We do everything but listen to it. Anger is meant to be listened to. Anger is a voice, a shout, a plea, a demand.

[10:03] Leah Walsh: Anger is meant to be respected. Why? Because anger is a map. Anger shows us what our boundaries are.

[10:16] Leah Walsh: Anger shows us where we want to go. It lets us see where we've been and lets us know when we haven't liked it.

[10:23] Leah Walsh: Anger points the way, not just the finger. In the recovery of a blocked artist, anger is a sign of health.

[10:31] Leah Walsh: Anger is meant to be acted upon. It is not meant to be acted out. Anger points the direction.

[10:38] Leah Walsh: We are meant to use anger as fuel to take the actions we need to move where our anger points us. With a little thought, we can usually translate the message that our anger is sending us.

[10:48] Leah Walsh: Blast him, I could make a better film than that. This anger says, you want to make movies, you need to learn how.

[11:06] Leah Walsh: Start writing. That's my strategy, he's using. This is incredible. I've been ripped off.

[11:11] Leah Walsh: I knew I should have pulled that material together and copyrighted it. This anger says, it's time to take your own ideas seriously enough to treat them well.

[11:22] Leah Walsh: When we feel anger, we are often very angry that we feel anger. Damn anger. It tells us we can't get away with our old life any longer.

[11:31] Leah Walsh: It tells us that old life is dying. It tells us we are being reborn, and birthing hurts. The hurt makes us angry.

[11:40] Leah Walsh: Anger is the firestorm that signals the death of our old life. Anger is the fuel that propels us into our new one.

[11:48] Leah Walsh: Anger is a tool, not a master. Anger is meant to be tapped into and drawn upon. Used properly, anger is useful.

[11:57] Leah Walsh: Sloth, apathy, and despair are the enemy. Anger is not. Anger is our friend, not a nice friend, not a gentle friend, but a very, very loyal friend.

[12:08] Leah Walsh: It will always tell us when we have been betrayed. It will always tell us when we have betrayed ourselves.

[12:10] Leah Walsh: It will always tell us that it's time to act in our own best interests. Anger is not the action itself. It is action's invitation.

[12:39] Leah Walsh: Thank you for listening to The Compass Podcast. If you find these conversations valuable to your life as an artist and would like to support the ongoing production of The Compass, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash The Compass Podcast.

[12:53] Leah Walsh: Pledges start at as little as one dollar a month. You'll get access to bonus content, and anything you can give would be greatly appreciated.

[13:01] Leah Walsh: Also, if you have a moment, please rate or review in iTunes. Every little bit helps other listeners to find the podcast.

[13:11] Leah Walsh: The Compass cover art is by Kim Miller, music by Brandon Spiet, audio assistance from Nick Choxie, and a special thanks to Frankie J. Alvarez. See you next time.