Rick Rubin on taking communion with Johnny Cash and why goals can hurt creativity

My mom was an artist. She welded big structures together and found beauty in barbed wire. She worked in clay. She even carved the female form out of giant pieces of styrofoam. She wasn't a big name or anything and probably only sold a couple pieces ever but that wasn't the point. For her, making art was like breathing. She had to do it. It wasn't for anyone else. It was for her.

I did not inherit any of her artistic talent but she modeled for me what a creative life looked like — the kind of joy and solace it could bring a person. I'd go even further to say it was an integral part of her spiritual life.

So when I read Rick Rubin's book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being, I saw her in those pages. And it made me think in a new way about the role creativity plays in my own life.

I go through phases where I need to make stuff. Sometimes I need to sing. Sometimes I need to take a ceramics class or learn a song on the guitar or the piano. But after a while, the urgency fades and the art-making takes a back seat to the responsibilities and rhythms of my regular life.

But as I think about the next chapter of my life,