Ethan Hawke

The other morning I had an imaginative coffee with Ethan Hawke.

I came seeking wisdom about creativity. My inner voice felt elusive lately, hiding behind daily minutia and travel logistics. My mornings were getting sucked into the open-sourced to-do list of my inbox, and I found myself more responsive to other people than to myself. Carving out time to create felt like a selfish act. In searching for advice on these challenges, I entered Ethan's TED video as an active participant.

Now over 50, Ethan has been thinking about these questions for a while. “We are all a little suspect of our own talent,” he said. Leaning forward in his chair, he shared a story he heard in his 20s:

One time William F. Buckley has this television show called “Firing Line,” and Poet Alan Ginsberg went on there and sang a Hare Krishna song while playing the harmonium. And he got back to New York to all his intelligentsia friends, and they told him, “Don’t you know that everybody thinks you’re an idiot, the whole country’s making fun of you?” And he said, “That’s my job. I’m a poet, and I’m going to play the fool. Most people have to go to work all day long, and they come home and they fight with their spouse, and they eat, and they turn on the old boob tube, and someone tries to sell them something, and I just screwed all that up. I just went on and I just sang about Krishna and they are asking, “who’s this stupid poet?” And they can’t fall asleep, right?” And that’s his job as a poet.

Ethan said this story has been very liberating for him, and I found it to be as well.

As a songwriter and recording artist, I’m always writing and releasing songs with the hope that someone moving through their workday might pause for a moment to reflect on the lyric or simply be transported deeper inside themselves by the melody and music. But most of the time, I never know if that is happening. I struggle to know if the music is good enough. To this Ethan said, “It’s not up to us if anything we do is considered good. And if history has taught us anything, the world is an extremely unreliable critic. So, you have to ask yourself: do you think human creativity matters?” 

This question struck the target of my heart’s search. “Yes!” I thought. There are few things I know to be true, but this is one I believe with my whole heart. I believe we are created to create. It’s essential to our humanity.

Getting animated, Ethan shared how the reality is that most people don’t concern themselves with the work of creating or poetry or music. They are just working and living their lives. But when someone they love dies, they have a heartbreak, or they fall in love. At those moments, art isn’t extra; it’s sustenance. Creativity becomes vital; "it’s the way we heal each other."

Closing my eyes, I let this seep into my bones. “It’s the way we heal each other.”

In my work as a performer of songs and midwife of creativity, opening people up to healing is really what it all comes down to. Exploring the question: how can this time spent together bring us a little closer to that inner child, our inner artist, the inner Love? It’s in those spaces we begin to listen, to play, and to see the essence of another human.

Ethan is available for coffee with you, too. The way I got there was letting my imagination transport me from my bedroom into the video he shot for TED. Perhaps that is a little foolish, but Ethan gives us all permission to play the fool.