All that is

What Patti Smith’s “Just Kids” taught me about spaciousness

Greetings! 

Welcome to my first official Substack newsletter. Bear with me as I continue to work out any kinks in transitioning over from Mailchimp. You will receive mailings as you did before but, for now, randomly instead of every two weeks. Not sure what my schedule will be, but I wanted to get things rolling with what’s been on my mind and in my heart lately. 

I’m in the last trimester of the Ayurveda course that I’ve been in since spring 2022, which I’ve written about frequently in previous newsletters. It’s the right time to walk away, for now, though I know I will maintain a relationship with my teacher, Ivy Ingram, our community and the 10 practices that we study. I was glad to land again this week on the first one, Choose the Spacious Way. It’s such a foundational concept and the bedrock of our Inner Wisdom Circle. It holds all of the other practices, and us, very solidly yet gently.

Ivy notes that space, or ether, is one of the five elements recognized in Ayurveda (along with air, water, fire and earth). It is the element that holds all the others, as in outer space — “the container that holds everything that is manifest,” she says. Mind. Blown. There are many ways to think of space closer to home, such as in our physical environment or how we manage time. I love thinking of space in the bigger, quantum picture, though, as if this kind of space is empty and full at the same time. I appreciate its qualities of being forgiving, full of potential and nonresistant to what is — aspects that help me “become accommodating to the facts as they exist,” in Ivy’s words. This is a pathway to more ease, or sukha (“good space”), and peace, sattva, not to mention contentment, santosha.

Interestingly, given that the woman who inspired this post was at least a few decades ago primarily known as a singer, ether is associated in yoga with the throat chakra — therefore, sound and communication, voice and self-expression. On a more … etheric … level, as Anodea Judith writes in her book “Wheels of Life: A User’s Guide to the Chakra System”:

Ether can be equated with the all-encompassing and unifying field of subtle vibrations found throughout the universe. Any vibration, be it a sound wave or a dancing particle, is in contact with other vibrations, and all vibrations can and do affect each other.

Dancing particles! Ripple effects!

Anyway, speaking of vibrations, you probably know the joke about how to make God laugh, right? Make a plan. I had plans for January that included nailing down this whole Substack thing and rolling out a shiny, everything-in-its-place platform. Instead I caught a nasty case of covid in between two trips out of state, mere days after getting my first vaccine in a year and a half. Oh well! I’m now recovered enough to start writing to you, and want to share a bit about a gift that unfolded in the space of unexpected and certainly unwanted illness. 

I dived into Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids,” having been reminded of it by my friend Cheryl, a voracious and discerning reader whose literary tips are always on point. Patti Smith — a poet and visual artist in addition to being hailed as the godmother of punk — wasn’t someone I followed in the 1970s or ’80s, but she’s becoming a creative heroine to me as I learn more about her. “Just Kids,” which won the National Book Award, richly chronicles her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, who became known for his stylized, sensual photographs. I’ve been aware of the book since it was published — egad — 14 years ago this month, but, as with many things that draw a lot of early buzz, I didn’t put it on my list. Until now, when the timing felt right and I had the space for it.

Reading is quite a leisurely activity, and, since while I was coviding I didn’t have the energy to be upright or use brain cells in any other way, “Just Kids” served as high-quality nourishment. Smith’s writing is heartfelt, beautiful and so detailed — I wonder if she had old journals from those bygone years in New York City, or a great memory, or both. In an interview from last year, she talks about her motivations as an artist to do “something great,” never mind the trappings of celebrity, and says:

I never had any huge successes, I don’t have any gold records, I don’t have anything that normally would count as fame.

She says her biggest success has been “Just Kids,” which has sold more than a million copies. It took her 10 years to write it, doing so at Mapplethorpe’s request.

It’s so refreshing and actually shocking to hear her say she didn’t have any previous huge successes, because I’ve heard many musicians point to her as a foundational inspiration, and I can see many descendants reflected in her work. She has built space for so many artists, as her influences and mentors did for her, largely just by being unapologetically herself.  

In “Just Kids,” she writes a lot about how she and Mapplethorpe influenced each other, especially in moments of self-doubt when she “wondered if anything I did mattered”:

I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.

A light, life-charged.

This is a beautiful example of the yogic principle of brahmacharya, one translation of which is the wise use of energy — specifically in connection with the holy, God (or god)-connected force of creativity.

In another video interview, she talks about not shrinking from early detractors and “plowing through” with whatever she was doing. Asked about confidence, she says, “By doing something you like and you believe in, it gives you internal strength.” Speaking in 2017, she says she prizes communication and connection over perfection, which brought up “one of the most difficult experiences” of her performing life — flubbing a performance in honor of Bob Dylan when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature the year before. 

Cheryl also reminded me of this moment, which I had watched at the time. Smith was several lines into Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” a seven-minute song she’d been singing since she was a teenager, she says in the interview, when she froze — “humiliated and ashamed.” Her next move? In front of live and global audiences? “I just had to tell the truth,” she says. In the moment, in front of the Stockholm crowd, she asked to start over. 

“I apologize. Sorry, I’m so nervous.” 

A few months later she wrote in the New Yorker: 

Unaccustomed to such an overwhelming case of nerves, I was unable to continue. I hadn’t forgotten the words that were now a part of me. I was simply unable to draw them out. This strange phenomenon did not diminish or pass but stayed cruelly with me. I was obliged to stop and ask pardon and then attempt again while in this state and sang with all my being, yet still stumbling. It was not lost on me that the narrative of the song begins with the words “I stumbled alongside of twelve misty mountains,” and ends with the line “And I’ll know my song well before I start singing.” As I took my seat, I felt the humiliating sting of failure, but also the strange realization that I had somehow entered and truly lived the world of the lyrics.

The Nobel crowd applauded when she asked for a do-over. 

Applauded. 

I love so much that she didn’t just keep plowing through, in that sense, as if nothing had happened, or scurry offstage. She acted as if she had all the time in the world, and she cared very much about giving Dylan, whom she mentions in “Just Kids” multiple times, his due. About a pivotal performance in 1975 a few months before she and her band recorded her groundbreaking album “Horses,” she writes:

I could feel another presence as surely as the rabbit senses the hound. He was there. I suddenly understood the nature of the electric air. Bob Dylan had entered the club. This knowledge had a strange effect on me. Instead of humbled, I felt a power, perhaps his; but I also felt my own worth and the worth of my band. It seemed for me a night of initiation, where I had to become fully myself in the presence of the one I had modeled myself after.

I love this sense of kinetic collaboration she describes, which is a big theme of her book. I don’t know what Smith’s relationship was with Dylan after that episode, but how full circle was the Nobel moment? In the 2017 interview, she says that she could feel the Stockholm crowd behind her — “C’mon, you can do it!” — and that she learned a great lesson from the experience. The next day, she says, the Nobel laureates said they “felt a kinship” with her vulnerability and were impressed by her willingness to show her flawed self — because they’d all stumbled, too — of course, as we all do now and then. They had seen in her a “metaphor for their own struggles,” she wrote in the New Yorker. 

What an amazing dropping of the veil of pretense, of any notions of perfection. What’s left? Pure humanity, the realness we all share. In the Nobel video, I can feel a tremendous space open up after Smith pauses, like a deep exhalation, while she regroups and supportive applause fills the performance hall. It’s quite a moment. As Ivy says about choosing the spacious way, we have power over more than we think, and in times of stress, we can often reorient ourselves to the moment at hand — and maybe a way forward. This is usually easier said than done, naturally. We can also lend a supportive hand or ear, when appropriate and welcome, to anyone we see struggling.

In our lesson on spaciousness from the Ayurvedic point of view, we learn about several types of stress. One arises when we’re faced with situations we didn’t ask for or can’t (so much) control, like getting covid. Another comes from going against our inner wisdom, as when we violate ourselves with poor choices. Yet another is called eustress — when we meet obstacles and frustrations while learning and trying new things along a healthy path (such as, hello, Substack). Sounds like Patti Smith was familiar with this flavor. 

In “Just Kids,” she shares a huge lesson she learned from playwright Sam Shepard, with whom she had a brief romantic relationship and an enduring friendship. She acted in a few plays and wrote one with him in the early 1970s. When they were talking about a section that called for poetic improvisation, she “got cold feet”:

“I can’t do this,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say anything,” he said. “You can’t make a mistake when you improvise.”

“What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?”

“You can’t,” he said. “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another.”

In this simple exchange, Sam taught me the secret of improvisation, one that I have accessed my whole life. 

She certainly improvised four decades later in Stockholm. 

The more I relaxed into being really ill with covid — not that I had much choice, with a terrible headache, vomiting, chills and the shakes followed by a feverish flush, congestion, a painful cough and extreme lethargy — I let go of any stress of getting “behind” on my to-do list, a holdover from being sick as a child and missing school. (As an adult, I had a job that asked us to distinguish between being too sick to go into the office and being okay enough to work from home. Um, sick is sick, people. That was one of many last straws in that job.) After a few days during which I felt like I was risking bedsores, I was able to work at my editing job, but that was about it. 

And by the way, nothing that we do for pleasure should be accompanied by guilt (as long as no harm is caused). Can’t we just read and savor a jewel of a book just because? And not only when we’re sick and can’t do much else? Artists don’t necessarily make art to be commercially successful, as Smith noted; we just want to connect — to the purest parts of ourselves, and to those parts in others. Anything that feeds that impulse is good medicine. (The week before I got sick, I read the stellar “H is for Hawk” (2014) by Helen Macdonald — also tardy to that party, but another dear and literary friend recommended it. Thanks, Gretel. My people know! Another one of Ivy’s maxims: Keep good company.)

I definitely felt a connection to “Just Kids,” or maybe just inspiration, as with Smith’s naked humility in the Nobel experience. I’ve certainly had some public fumbles, including while teaching yoga. Smith is able to hold and share all that is, or a lot of it. At the end of the New Yorker article, she reflects on preparing to perform “Horses” with her band on her then-upcoming 70th birthday:

All the things I have seen and experienced and remember will be within me, and the remorse I had felt so heavily will joyfully meld with all other moments.

Space for all that is.

Thank you,

Patti Smith

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