A second wind

NEA chair Dana Gioia helps one New York artist find a new lease on creativity | Makoto Fujimura

Associated Press/Photo by Julia Nason

For years Dana Gioia served as a vice president of General Foods before leaving business to write full-time. He told me, "I would come home too late and very tired, but each night I made myself sit down at my desk and simply copy the last paragraph of the essay I was working on or the last stanza of a poem. Usually, I got my 'second wind.'" With this "second wind" he became one of the most prolific and influential American writers of our time. Many of his co-workers and employees did not even know that he wrote poems until he began winning significant poetry awards (leading to his American Book Award in 2001) and his essays began to appear regularly in the Atlantic Monthly.

I think of what Dana stated when I, too, find myself exhausted by my juggling act of trying to make ends meet, raising a family in this wild city. And yet, no matter how tired I am, when I prepare a panel with freshly spread handmade Japanese Kumohada paper and enter into the daily ritual of painting, I rediscover the joy of creating. The process of creating renews my spirit, and I find myself attuned to the details of life rather than being stressed by being overwhelmed. I find myself listening rather than shouting into the void. Creating art opens my heart to see and listen to the world around me, opening a new vista of experience. This is the gift of the "second wind." Such a state taps into what I now call eternal timefulness.