Elizabeth Gilbert: Big Magic

April 29, 2014

Elizabeth Gilbert speaks with Tami Simon about the magic of creative living. Elizabeth is a novelist, essayist, and author most widely known for her bestselling memoir Eat Pray Love, and has recently released her latest novel, The Signature of All Things, which O, The Oprah Magazine calls “the novel of a lifetime.” In this episode, Elizabeth challenges the myth of the tortured artist, offering her insights for allowing creativity to be a joyous and pleasurable pursuit. She also reveals how ideas can seem like living beings who choose and are chosen to collaborate with you, and what her current growth edge is. (44 minutes)

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Meet Your Host: Tami Simon

Founded Sounds True in 1985 as a multimedia publishing house with a mission to disseminate spiritual wisdom. She hosts a popular weekly podcast called Insights at the Edge, where she has interviewed many of today's leading teachers. Tami lives with her wife, Julie M. Kramer, and their two spoodles, Rasberry and Bula, in Boulder, Colorado.

Photo © Jason Elias

Also By Author

Elizabeth Gilbert: Big Magic

Elizabeth Gilbert speaks with Tami Simon about the magic of creative living. Elizabeth is a novelist, essayist, and author most widely known for her bestselling memoir Eat Pray Love, and has recently released her latest novel, The Signature of All Things, which O, The Oprah Magazine calls “the novel of a lifetime.” In this episode, Elizabeth challenges the myth of the tortured artist, offering her insights for allowing creativity to be a joyous and pleasurable pursuit. She also reveals how ideas can seem like living beings who choose and are chosen to collaborate with you, and what her current growth edge is. (44 minutes)

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It’s true that the Internet gave me my career, my marriage. It made visible the threads of similarity across a quickly dividing globe. It showed me life-saving examples of people who survived what I needed to survive and it broke my heart open at the things no one should have to.

I like to misquote Carl Jung when he said something almost like “a paradox is our most valuable spiritual tool.” I’m not interested in finding the elusive, singular hack that will make screen time less alluring forever. I’m not interested in a lifetime of cycling through eras of detox and excess. Vacillating between the high of a new regimen and the crash of shame when social media works once again, exactly as it was designed.

I’m a therapist. I know that hacks can be tools, or bandaids. A self-help, step-by-step, sales pitch plan can feel like salvation, but it’s not the medicine of being in an evolving conversation with yourself. I am more interested in making art. I’m more interested in learning to tolerate the tension between social media’s danger and its magic. I’m more interested in learning to like myself, unsolved.

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So I wrote us this book. It’s a place to start that conversation with yourself about what is really happening between you and your screen; who profits from the ways it harms you, and how to protect the parts of it that are genuinely good, because parts of it are.

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