Here is an artist who learned to navigate his Disquiet and help others travel theirs.Naomi Wolf’s father believes everyone has an innate artistry

By Tee Hun Ching, books for the soul:

WHEN American author and feminist thinker Naomi Wolf decided to build a treehouse for her daughter Rosa, her father Leonard paid frequent visits to their house in upstate New York.Over those six months, they talked as they worked, discussing Leonard’s favorite poems and the lessons they held.

Now in his 80s, the well-regarded poet and teacher believes creative freedom is the key to happiness.

After each conversation, Wolf found herself wanting to share those insights.

‘I let his lifelong advice and example sink in and started to give the heart, including my own, the respect I had for many years reserved only for the head.’

In her book The Treehouse, published last year, Wolf, 45, distils her father’s wisdom into 12 basic lessons. These include ‘Be still and listen’, ‘Identify your heart’s desire’, ‘Your only wage will be joy’ and ‘Mistakes are part of the draft’.

LEONARD Wolf, my father, is a wild old visionary poet. He believes that the heart’s creative wisdom has a more important message than anything else, and that our task in life is to realise that message.

My Dad is a teacher, and has taught in every kind of setting, for almost 60 years.He changes people’s lives because he believes that everyone is here on earth as an artist, to tell his particular story or sing her irreplaceable song; to leave behind a unique creative signature.

He believes that your passion for this, your feelings about this, must take priority over every other reasoned demand: status, benefits, sensible practices.

Leonard feels that your medium may be words or music or paint; it could also be the guiding of an organization, the baking of a certain kind of cake, the edging of a garden, the envisioning of a new kind of computer network.

What matters to my father is not whether the creative work is valued in the marketplace; what matters to him is whether or not it is yours.

He wants to know you have put your emotion into it, driven your artist’s discipline into it, seen it through to completion and signed your name to it.

If you do, he believes, your work comes alive and gives life to those around you. And it gives life, he is sure, to you.

He believes that each of us arrived with this unique creative DNA inside us. If we are not doing that thing which is our innate mission then, he feels, no matter how much money or status we might have, our lives will feel drained of their true colour.

All my life, I have seen how his faith in this possibility - that an artist inheres in everyone - actually does change people’s lives: The students he has taught are changed, but so are the lives of people who are simply passing through.

His faith in ordinary people’s innate artistry gives him a kind of magic touch.

When people spend time around my Dad, they are always quitting their sensible jobs with good benefits to become school teachers, or agitators, or lutenists.

I have seen students of his leave high-paying jobs that were making them miserable, or high-status social positions that had been scripted by their families, and follow their hearts to become, say, dirt-poor teachers of children in the mountain villages of the Andes.

I’ve seen the snapshots they send back to him, of themselves with their tattered, clowning kids, their faces suffused with joy. They have found their poetry.

The book: The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See

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Tags: Life, Resources, The Disquiet, profiles of men working the Disquiet, working with the Disquiet, 12 lessons, Be still and listen, creative freedom, heart s desire, joy, leonard wolf, naomi wolf

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