“If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you:  I came to live out loud.”

– Emile Zola

What a great epitaph that would be:  ”She Lived Out Loud.”

One of my little quirks is the enjoyment I find in looking each day to see what famous, brilliant, creative, or notorious people were born on that date.  Today I met Emile Zola, and he had several things to say that resonate deeply with me.  I love his statement about living out loud, and maybe that is because I spent so many years of my live telling the little voice inside of me to, “hush!”

If you pay attention to people and care about their thoughts and feelings, it doesn’t take long to learn how to back-pedal from a profound or creative idea in order not to rock the boat.  Like many of you, I’m sure, I spent a good part of my life worrying that I was “too.”  You read too much into things.  You’re too quick — slow down and give someone else a chance.  You’re too weird to hang out with us.  I learned to take the gifts that were my birthright and bury them under a pile of conventionality and a learned desire to fit in and be accepted as one of the group — whatever group that might be on any given day.  There is such irony in that desire to fit in; because each person who struggles to find identity as a member of a group must bury her true identity under a large layer of disguises and conventions and agreed-upon values that only serve to cover the beautiful person that exists beneath it all.

Zola said it well:

“If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.”

What a wonderful metaphor to hear in this season of growth and renewal.  I thought about planting seeds in my garden — of the way that I take these tiny pieces of potential and place them under the earth, hoping that they will grow and bloom and bear fruit.  I thought of the way that I plant so many different varieties of seeds and then cover them all with the same rich soil and water them with the same water and mulch them with the same leaves from last Fall’s trees.  The seeds lie under the surface of the garden; and for a time, when I look at the surface, I see a uniform plot of soil neatly covered with mulch.  There is satisfaction in seeing this calm, level soil that has no rocks or blemishes to mar its peaceful appearance.  Underground, however, a great deal of activity is taking place.  The seeds I have buried are exerting their energy on the soil around them and above them.  It is their nature — their truth — to become plants; and as time passes and their truth burst into being, they must push aside the soil and the mulch and reach for the sun.

It is hard work for a seed to germinate and make its way to the surface of the soil where we can see its beauty as a plant and admire its productivity and enjoy its fruits.  The same is true for us.  We are born with the passion that is our gift; we must work at growing the result of our own seed’s germination so that its fruits can delight and enhance the people who take them in.

Zola says:  ”There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman.  One is born a poet.  One becomes a craftsman.”

Once the seed of our truth — the poet — begins to germinate and press through the soil that surrounds it, there is no turning back.  We must grow our passion and become the craftsman who produces the beauty intrinsic to our soul.  Then, and only then, can we say, “I came to live out loud.”