I’ve just spent a week in Los Angeles working with Greg North, (Zerkle) the director of my play, The Glory Road. I’m back home with a notebook filled with changes.\u00a0 Gramma K, an expert tailor, used to say “It’s easier to make a new one than to alter the original.”\u00a0 But for many reasons, altering is often the chosen route to completion of a creative project.<\/p>\n
The computer isn’t the best thinking place for me anymore.\u00a0 I think\u00a0elsewhere and\u00a0come back to the keyboard\u00a0to type.\u00a0\u00a0 The real work\u00a0happens\u00a0while I’m walking around the village or on the ferry going into the city, or\u00a0cooking\u00a0or folding laundry.\u00a0 But when inspiration continues to avoid me, I have another\u00a0plan.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
I go in search of genius, hoping that\u00a0the trip will start ideas flowing again.\u00a0 In the same way that reading biographies of overcomers opens a new window, so do these field trips.\u00a0 It’s uplifting to walk where genius walked and talked and worked.\u00a0 There’s always the possibility that if I stand where they stood, something might rub off.<\/p>\n
I visit the workplaces of two undeniably brilliant individuals, at the Charles Schulz Museum, an homage to everything Peanuts, and the Luther Burbank Cottage, Mecca for\u00a0garden lovers.\u00a0 Both are in Santa Rosa, California, about an hour\u00a0north of where I live.\u00a0 Tours are a good way to begin, but guides by necessity deal mostly with the overview.\u00a0 They speak of\u00a0awards won, of the subject’s ties to other famous people, of the place where he was born.<\/p>\n
I’m looking for more.\u00a0 I want to see how they endured\u00a0the days that were spectacularly nonproductive.\u00a0 After the tour groups disperse, I look for the minutiae that tethered each of these famous men to earth.\u00a0 Was he an early riser?\u00a0 How many hours a day did he work?\u00a0 What did he eat?\u00a0 Did he have hobbies?\u00a0 Who did he love?\u00a0 Who loved him?<\/p>\n
I want to know, did the realization of his goals offer even a small degree of\u00a0immunity from strife?\u00a0 Or did he bump into his own\u00a0saboteurs; the insecurities and loneliness and even the near-crippling fears many of us encounter on the path to making something.<\/p>\n
When\u00a0we\u00a0look at a creative icon who’s now departed, we’re always looking backward.\u00a0 We see a whole lifetime of output, an entire body of work.\u00a0 I want to know how he handled the chunks of time when things didn’t go right.\u00a0 So I ask about the dry spells.<\/p>\n
Charles Schulz used ice skating and long walks to cheer himself.\u00a0\u00a0He built a rink near his studio and his visits there were a vital part of his routine.\u00a0 Every day he sat at the same table in the snack bar, ate the same food, and watched the skaters.\u00a0 Merchants at the nearby mall report that Schulz was a frequent visitor, not so much a shopper as an ambler.\u00a0 They grew accustomed to the lone figure walking around, deep in thought.<\/p>\n
Luther Burbank grew himself an escape route.\u00a0 He took leave of his greenhouse in Santa Rosa and traveled the bumpy road to his experimental farm in Sebastopol to work and sleep in the modest cabin at the site.\u00a0 He walked and thought and wrote in his notebooks and on his way to developing the Shasta daisy and the Burbank potato, he also documented some of the days when nothing bloomed the way he had planned.<\/p>\n
Charles Schulz said he was driven to make cartoons because it was all he was good at.\u00a0 It was his primary form of self-expression.\u00a0 Charlie Brown, he said, was the manifestation of his own vulnerability.\u00a0 At the museum, my\u00a0favorite spot is the replica of his office.\u00a0 The renowned storyteller’s drawing board shows the physical effects of his labor and I am more heartened by its worn wood than by the rooms filled with acclaim.<\/p>\n
Luther Burbank didn’t consider himself a visionary, but rather a hard-working scientist who kept experimenting until something good came of it.\u00a0 The museum in the carriage house adjacent to Burbank’s cottage is suitably informative, but I return to the tiny room at the rear of the greenhouse and to the desk where he kept his notes.<\/p>\n
Both\u00a0Schulz and Burbank fit my definition of genius.\u00a0 I can feel it when I’m in the places\u00a0they once were.\u00a0 It’s comforting, on\u00a0my own\u00a0tedious workdays, to know that in the midst of\u00a0lives filled with so many accomplishments, each of these men put great store by the one trait they prized above all others – discipline.\u00a0 They kept showing up.\u00a0 I can do that.<\/p>\n