Anne Truitt Zelenka

Today I’m thinking about this excerpt from Frances Mayes’ Bella Tuscany:

I feel as well a growing distrust of spending too much of one’s life deifying work. Finding that running balance among ambition, solitude, stimulation, adventure — how to do this? …

The last few years have pulled me too much in the exterior direction. After devoting five years to chairing my department at the university, I resigned from the hot seat and went back to teaching. I saw how a few months later hardly anyone remembered what I thought of as vast changes, how instantaneously time slid over my absence. I was left with the private satisfaction of a job well done. Considering time, stress, and pure hassle, private satisfaction did not seem like enough….

What is replenishing? What is depleting? What takes? What gives? What wrings you out and truly, what rinses you with happiness? What comes from my own labor and creativity, regardless of what anyone else thinks of it, stays close to the natural joy we all were born with and carry always.