Andrea Gibson on Searing Honesty, Pure Love & Surrender to Awe

0:00To live a good life, to be connected, to love, to celebrate, to feel deeply and to continuously be becoming, to welcome the becoming and the shift that, you know, hopefully in

0:16Andrea Gibson: our last breaths here where I want to in my last breath think, but there's more I wanted to become. And then hopefully the others, you know, it's like running death like a stop sign and you just keep on going and keep, keep becoming.

0:33So every once in a while, you meet someone in life that just leaves you profoundly changed. And such was the case with poet and spoken word artist Andrea Gibson. I had the opportunity to record a conversation with them back in 2020 that just really cracked my heart and mind open. And as I've deepened into their work over the years, I've been captivated, I've been wowed, I've been inspired by the way they lived their life. And I'm using the past tense because as I record this on the morning of July 14th, this transcendent poet, performer, and soul who showed us how to feel deeply and love fiercely died.

1:09Andrea was a legendary spoken word artist, poet laureate of Colorado, and the author of seven books, including the acclaimed You Better Be Lightning. With a unique blend of just raw vulnerability and embodied compassion, Andrea shattered rigid boundaries, giving voice to the depth of the human experience. And so many times I'd be reading or listening to their words and just find myself in tears of joy or sorrow or awakening and recognition. When we learned of Andrew's passing on July 14th, at just 49 years old, it felt like the world lost just a blazing comet, a radiating light with truth and every revolution.

1:49And while their physical form may be gone, their spirit and words and performances remain. Undying sparks igniting others to just live authentically and appreciate life's beauty amidst the chaos. And during our chat, you'll hear Andrea's piercing insights on creativity, identity, and the courage really required to express one's whole self. And don't miss the section of this conversation where they powerfully performed their acclaimed poems, Homesick and A Year of No Grudges. The vulnerable lyrical delivery is just sure to leave you deeply moved, as it did me. And while Andrea's departure fills us with a deep sorrow, we choose to honor their legacy by living with the same unapologetic zest and deep love they embodied.

2:36In revisiting this conversation, may we all rededicate ourselves to seeking awe in the ordinary, to cherishing each fleeting moment and even more so each fleeting human, and to greeting the world with Andrea's radically open heart. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is a tribute to the magnificent life of Andrea Gibson on Good Life Project.

3:10Thank you.

3:40In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. member FDIC.

3:54Good Life Project is sponsored by Nature Raised Farms. So if there's one thing I have learned after 14 years of deep conversations about living well, it's this. At some point, you get tired of overthinking things that shouldn't require a decision tree. And somehow, the chickenologist never got that memo. Too many labels, too many claims, too many things to squint at before you can just make dinner. That's the problem Nature Raised Farms set out to fix. It's no antibiotics ever, free from gluten, dairy, and soy, no seed oils, nothing artificial, good source of fiber. So whether it's a fast lunch between calls or a Sunday dinner with people you love, you're not trading taste for trust.

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5:53Andrea Gibson: Are you serious? Where did you read that? This is why I don't ever look myself up online. That's true, though. It's true. You got to give me a little context here. Yeah, I was doing, I had just gotten into spoken word and also veganism at the same time. And I was part of this performance with a group called Vox Feminista, which was this radical political artistic group of activists we put on shows. And I dressed up as a cow and read, I think it was like a 10 minute poem about the plight of cows in the dairy industry. Actually, I remember I was so moved by it at the time. I think it was the only time maybe I ever full out cried in the middle of one of my own poems.

6:38Andrea Gibson: And I was dressed as a cow. So it was quite awkward. I can't believe that's up on the Internet. Good to know. Well, you know, our crack research staff here, we find just about everything. I mean, that's I'm just picturing it now. on stage performing in a cap outfit, crying in front of people. But that must have also been really early in your career. Yeah. I mean, I don't think it was a career at that point. I had no idea that somebody could make a career out of spoken word for sure. I think I knew one person who was doing it at the time. So it was a dream so big, I don't think I had stepped into daring to dream it yet.

7:25But yeah, at the very beginning, I discovered spoken word in 1999, I think. And it was still, you know, a lot of people had never heard of it. And so it was definitely right at the beginning.

7:38Andrea Gibson: So I started it off right by being a cow. I should return back there someday. Right. You're going to have to do sort of like a 20th year anniversary.

7:53so you have over the last couple of decades built this amazing presence and body of work and i want to dive into a whole bunch of that and then invite you to share some of it as well but taking a step back in time i mean you grew up in from what i know a pretty tiny town in maine i grew up in callus maine said uh spelled like the calais in france that said like the thing on the bottom of your foot and it's fitting. It was a really, really small town in the middle of the woods, right on the Canadian border. So almost as East as you can get in the United States and almost as North. Really conservative little town, which I didn't even think of it as conservative at the time because I didn't know what a world that wasn't conservative looked like.

8:36But it was lovely in many ways and hard as a queer kid in a lot of ways, you know, closeted queer kid. but there was a lot beautiful about it. I spent most of my childhood just running through the woods and it certainly provided a lot of beauty in that way. Yeah. It sounds like you were almost living sort of like this dualist presence, ordinary kid running through the woods, small town, classic main upbringing. And as you shared, closeted queer kid. Did you have a sense of that even at the young stage? Because I know also part of your upbringing is I guess your folks were Baptist and then you ended up going to college at St.

9:18Joseph's, which I think is a Catholic college or a faith-based college? Yeah, it's a Catholic college, which really disappointed my Baptist grandmother at the time. But I was a basketball player and it was one of the best basketball schools in the state and one I had always hoped to go to when I was younger. And so, yeah, I was really excited to go there. So lots of lots of Jesus in my early life. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like also, I mean, if you're growing up in that tradition and you have a sense of being different from both sexuality and a gender standpoint, that that could be a tough environment.

9:55Yeah, well, you know, I think I knew my gender long before I even knew my sexuality. I always looked like this as a kid. And I, I always wanted my hair short and wanted to wear boys clothes. And that didn't even feel very complex for me until I got to, I think later on in middle school and high school when it, you know, I started getting bullied some for it. But, yeah, it was a lot of not really being sure of who I was, but being sure in some ways. And then having all these dreams that I didn't know why they were my dreams. Like I thought, OK, I'm not going to get married, but I'm going to live in a loft in New York City.

10:34I always thought I'm going to live in a loft in New York City. But I didn't know why I didn't want to get married. When I first started saying I don't want to get married, I didn't know it was because I didn't know it was an option to marry a woman. So marriage was sort of off the table just because I assumed it would have to be with a man. Yeah. I know a lot of the, I guess the early writing for you also was really, well, I don't want to make an assumption because I know once you started really focusing on that in college and creative writing and then poetry, and then you're out in the world, it seems like a lot of the focus of that writing weaves in these things of exploring identity and gender and sexuality and faith all together and often the tension that you have among them.

11:21But I know you were writing a lot earlier than that in your life. I'm curious whether those different themes were expressing themselves in your writing earlier on too. I remember writing a lot about masks. Even up through college, when I still wasn't out in my writing in college. But I only for some of those years knew what those masks were representing. I remember being in fifth and sixth grade, writing a lot about hiding and masks, but I still wasn't certain what I was hiding. My early writing, I remember my mother just being devastated by how sad everything was. She just so she wanted me to write something happy so badly.

12:00And I also was I drew and painted a lot through a large part of my life. And she always was trying to steer me away from my brain.

12:08Andrea Gibson: She wanted she wanted me. She thought writing was, you know, sad. She's like, you're I remember when I was little, she always called me her deep thinker. and wish that I wasn't her deep thinker because she, I think, was watching that thinking be sort of pained in my body. Oh, that's so interesting. So she saw there was a process going on and you were feeling certain things, but it's almost like her approach was, well, the problem is less the genesis and more the expression is what's causing the pain. And maybe if you stopped expressing it, the suffering would stop. You know, I don't even know if it was exactly that.

12:48Andrea Gibson: She just also, I was such a, I had so many things that I was interested in and I loved being in my body. Like I loved climbing trees and sports of every kind. And I think that she saw me happier in those places. And what's wild now is that I do almost all of my writing running around. So I hardly ever sit in front of the computer. I'm just pacing, jumping. There's a bed in this room I'm in right now, our guest room where I often write, jumping on the bed, whispering to the walls, like, I don't know, dancing with the chair. So I sort of in my later life have intermingled those things. I always wonder how people write when they're sitting still.

13:32It's just, it's never worked for me. That's so interesting. You say that I learn when I'm standing or acting or moving. and I've tried to actually write while doing the same thing, almost like speaking it out and then transcribing it and then seeing. And I can't get the same thing, but I know when I have to learn really intensively, like I have a past life as a lawyer. And when I studied for the bar, I would just hold an outline in my hand and pace outside for hours while I was like thinking it through and reviewing and trying to synthesize because I just found my brain worked on a whole different way when my physical body was in movement.

14:09Yeah. One of my housemates is a second grade teacher. And I think it took her a few years to learn that she had to let a number of her students stand up and move around while she was teaching a lesson or they wouldn't get it. So it's sort of sweet in a way that we all learn and we're all so different. And I love the idea of, I don't know, taking things in through our bodies, our brains are, you know, from our temples to our toes. So, yeah, it's and I'm kind of fascinated, actually, that your friend was aware enough to really realize that some of the students needed to to physicalize the experience to be able to integrate it.

14:53Andrea Gibson: Oh, yeah, she's an amazing teacher. We actually met because we were both teaching in a Montessori kindergarten together. And, you know, I was there just because I love the kids so much. They were actually so much my inspiration for writing for so many years that when I stopped teaching to do poetry full time, I didn't write for a year because they were so much my muse. But I remember watching her just, you know, and she was very young at the time. We've been friends for a long time, but she was just 20 and watching the skill of learning how to teach individuals. And she was just a master at it.

15:31Yeah, that's so cool. It makes me wonder, given the time that we're in now where so much of school and education has gone remote, and a lot of people are lamenting the loss of, you know, in-person interaction and the ability to teach in that way. I almost wonder if those kids who actually need to create a non-traditional learning environment or situation or physicalize it are giving themselves the freedoms to do that now that they're doing it in their own environment. I wonder if that might be a really interesting benefit that comes out of it.

16:04Andrea Gibson: Yeah, I could see it. I could see that being the case. You know, one thing that I've noticed, because this is the first time in my life I've done, you know, sort of anything on Zooms, I watched, you know, the Zoom shows of other people. And you know how you can turn off your screen so they can't see you, but you're still watching. And I realized in my own enjoyment of, you know, music or a lecture or talk or something I'm watching online, I'm almost, yeah, always moving or doing something weird. And I don't think before this time, I would have known that that's how I best take in things, you know, how I listen the best.

16:40Andrea Gibson: The first time I started doing online concerts when the pandemic began, I was getting a flood of calls from my manager during the thing is saying, you have to stop moving. We can't hear anything but the desk shaking, the desk shaking, the floor rattling. So I'm trying to be very as still as possible right now while we're recording. Right. But I mean, how, how is that for you? Cause I know, I would imagine, I wonder if that changes the nature of what comes out in a meaningful way. I know when I'm interviewed, when I'm on the other side of the mic, I went out and I purchased a broadcast quality headset with a 10 foot cord.

17:22and I almost always say like no video and it was because I know I have to be moving and walking around and granted that's not on video but I know about myself that because I know that if I do the exact same thing but I'm sitting constrained in a chair it's somehow it feels like it comes out different I wonder if you feel that what actually comes out of you is different when you're sort of constrained by a chair versus when you're moving oh yeah I think I definitely do and you know I was listening to one of your podcasts the other day by Gay Hendricks. And his wife, Katie Hendricks, does a lot of teaching about working with your emotions through your body.

18:00And I've seen, I've been at a few of her talks. And I think that has also presenced me more to the ways that I'm moving, what that is encouraging me to feel or allowing me to feel. And there's so much, you know, it's sort of restricting, be still in some ways. And I think even if, you know,

18:22Andrea Gibson: one of my friends, they just have one finger, they're constantly moving, you know, it doesn't have to be your whole body, but I think for sure. And then noticing where, where particular emotions live in our body, you know, the anger in our jaw, you know, fear in our belly, sadness in our chest often. And so if I think that I'm writing something, and it's furious, and I'm moving around, but I feel that the words are more living in my chest, you know, listening to that and sort of taking a side route back to, or a more direct route to the sadness instead of staying with the anger for a bit. Because, you know, typically the feeling that we're feeling, usually there's a feeling underneath it that is the more true feeling that we're not.

19:08Yeah. I love the visual also of sort of different feelings settling into different parts of your body and almost like moving those parts of your body to get access to and release them.

19:19Andrea Gibson: And the stories that live in different parts of our bodies, you know? Yeah. I have this finger that I broke in a basketball game when I was 18 and it's still sort of as achy sometimes. And I can feel it and be right back on this court in Bangor, Maine, where I just have to say it. We won the state championship. I can't not say it. All right. Well, you got to own it. I mean, hard one, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got to own it. Stephen King was in the audience. You know, it was Maine. He's a Basque. It was a big night.

19:57And it's all memorialized in that little finger.

20:00Andrea Gibson: Yeah, it is. Forever.

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22:30so you end up coming out of college and so writing is already a big piece of you creative writing poetry is starting to blossom but i know in the early days and i'm curious whether it's still a part of you the idea of then going from okay i'm gonna write things because i have all these things spinning in my head that i need to get out and synthesize but going from there to stepping on stage is a whole different proposition. I mean, it is for anyone, I think. And for me, it was absolutely terrifying because I had been known or I had identified myself my whole life as somebody that was more afraid of public speaking than anyone I knew.

23:12I would rather somebody wrap a boa constrictor around my neck than talk in public. And that's still true, which is strange to say. But yeah, to graduate college, I had to read one poem to my class. And my teacher actually allowed me to get drunk to do it because I could not do it.

23:32Andrea Gibson: I hope I don't get him in trouble, but I could not do it without that. But then when I moved to Colorado, I went to my first poetry slam. And I remember walking into the room that night. And the first time, As soon as this guy, he's actually a friend of mine now named Ian, started reading his poem, he was probably 20 seconds into it. And I just knew I had to do that. And I knew it was going to terrify me the entire time that it probably would never stop terrifying me. But I was so in love with the art form. I was just so in love with the energy of the room, the connection. I think the thing that drew me the most was how much it felt like the audience was reading the poem for him because the energy was so electric.

24:16It almost felt like this crowd of people were just pulling it out of him. And I just fell in love with the whole thing. And so the next week I went back to the slam and I read for the first time and everybody was having a hard time staying in the room because it was so hard to watch me shake that much, I think. But to this day, if I see somebody performing and reading a poem and shaking and the paper's just rattling in their hands, it's just one of the most beautiful things to watch because it's the image of watching somebody do something they're terrified of, but they love it too much not to.

24:55Yeah. What was the feeling like for you of that first moment? And beyond the physical reaction, do you have any recollection? I mean, was it a blur to you? Was it this thing where it's just sort of like it passed? Or do you have any memories of what it actually felt like to be there in that moment for the first time, not only sharing your words, but also knowing that people were witnessing you physically shaking in front of them? You know, I was so proud of myself, but not in the way that we typically use the word proud. I felt this sort of solid love for myself, having nothing to do with the poetry, but with knowing I had done something that I never, ever thought I could do.

25:41And not only that, but that it was embarrassing in some ways. And then the joy was so much bigger than the shame that I could almost feel it in my body, you know, dissolving. And I knew I wasn't going to stop doing it, that it would be a giant part of my life. What was the shame about?

26:01Andrea Gibson: Shaking. Mostly it was watching my friends worry about me, you know, like watching your friends, there's something about that, you know, it's, they should come up with a word for that emotion. But when you're watching your loved ones worry about you, that is, I mean, I'm feeling into it now. And it feels like this, it's a sadness sort of mixed with love and gratitude. But it's also, it's a hard thing to hold in certain moments. Yeah, I know. You've actually recently wrote a short sentence or two that really landed with me. You wrote the worst thing that ever happened to me, it was not the worst thing that ever happened to me.

26:41Hating myself for it was, which kind of speaks to this to a certain extent.

26:45Andrea Gibson: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, that certainly wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to me that night. But yeah, it's like, you know, the traumas in our lives, we carry them as this, you know, my therapist actually, who I never ever managed to go through a day without quoting, but my therapist, you know, talks about shame as kind of this gift we're trying to give ourselves. Because by feeling shame, we're trying to tell ourselves that if we had done something different, that thing wouldn't have happened. And that's why we say it's our fault. And that's why we keep hating ourselves for it is because then we have some, you know, sense of control and power over nothing ever happening to us.

27:29If only I had not done this, you know, done this thing, this was my fault, and it will never happen again because I have control. So shame is also a sort of a sweetness we're trying to offer ourselves, but there are lots of better routes, I think. Yeah, that's such an interesting frame. It's almost like it's a grasping to certainty. Like it's telling ourselves that we have some level of not just responsibility, but control over it. Yeah, I think more than anything, we want control. and I think, I don't know if it's cultural or not, but I think that we're growing to want control more than we want a joy and love.

28:10It's kind of heartbreaking. I don't disagree with that. And I feel like given the sort of like nature of just the world we live in these days that we're feeling that more than ever. Like the more groundless things get around us, I feel like the more we seek certainty and control. But I mean, fundamentally, you know, you stepping to a mic is you saying, I am surrendering a certain amount of control because there is just, you can prep all you want. You can spend vast amounts of hours writing and then practicing. And I don't know if you, if you do that, but the moment that you step onto a stage in front of a microphone with a live audience plan is over.

28:52Andrea Gibson: Yeah, it is. And it's also exciting that it's over. Because, you know, it's never stopped being less terrifying for me. I try to tell people that they don't believe me. But really, it's never stopped being terrifying. And one thing that I've since the pandemic started and all my tours got canceled, I didn't realize before this time how closely connected our joy is to our fear. That fear had some sort of aliveness in it or a lot of aliveness in it for me. And also, I think that there's a close connection sometimes between excitement and fear. It's hard to tell the difference. Again, my therapist would say that the only difference between fear and excitement is that fear is excitement without the breath.

29:41So if you breathe through the fear, then you can turn it into excitement. The idea of fear and excitement being really closely tethered also is fascinating to me. I kind of look at it as physiologically, they create a nearly identical response in the body. they're both anticipatory emotions, but one is anticipating dread and the other is anticipating possibility. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great way to look at it. It reminds me of, um, I was seeing this, this panic attack specialist for my panic attacks and he was talking about something like that. Yeah. And it's interesting also, um, so this has never left you the anxiety around getting on stage.

30:23And yet, as we sit here having this conversation, you are a multi-time, I think, four-time Denver Grand Slam winner, winner of the Women of the World Poetry Slam. You're in before times, basically traveling nonstop and stepping on stages all over the place. So what's interesting to me is that this feeling that you have every time you do it has never gone away. Maybe it's diminished or you've learned how to harness it a bit, but it's never gone away. And yet it also hasn't stopped you from both developing to a point where you're stunning at your craft and it doesn't overtake the joy that you feel.

31:06I mean, sometimes it does, but it also, you know, it adds so much presence because in the beginning, you know, it wasn't quite the beginning, I think about five years in, I realized that when I was shaking and for the first 10 years that I was performing, everywhere I went, somebody would comment on how every poem

31:28Andrea Gibson: I read, I was gasping for air, you know, because I was so nervous. And still, when I perform, people expect me to, I don't think I do that anymore. But I think people are still so the gasping has gone away a little bit, but sometimes it's there. But those I figured out that if in those moments where I'm really terrified, I search for I search for the other feelings in my body and really let them be, it really moves me through it and gets me back to a place of joy. So often when I'm feeling terrified, I'll really notice that there's, there's a lot of sadness. And if I let myself in the middle of the poem feel the sadness, then something kind of breaks open, like saying yes to it.

32:14But also that fear on stage creates these authentic moments where I just never know what's going to happen. And I never go on stage feeling like I know what's going to happen. And I think almost any show I've ever done, people have commented that their favorite parts are the moments between the poems, when I'm just sort of stumbling around up there, and commenting on whatever lightning bolt is running through my body at that moment. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing to be able to sort of like, I don't even want to, I was going to say push through it, but it's really not pushing through it. It's working with it.

32:52Yeah. And then also, welcoming it. Welcoming it actually is a tool I've, you know, because I I struggle with panic attacks. And that has been the biggest healing thing for panic attacks for me, is that when the fear comes on, what I say to the fear is make this bigger, like, give me all the fear you can give me. And there is something about the lack of resistance that just chills out the fear. If I'm welcoming you, if I'm saying, come on, then the fear is like, oh, okay. And then I noticed it's kind of that wall in my body that breaks down and was, you know, holding in the fear. I don't know if that makes sense, but surrendering essentially.

33:36Yeah. Has that actually happened while you were on stage in the middle of performing or is it usually before? So typically, you know, I've had a few panic attacks on stage. I'll have, I'm learning the difference between anxiety attacks and panic attacks. I have a lot of anxiety attacks on stage and sometimes it, It can come on by something that's happening in the audience or something that has historically happened in the audience. Like one time I was doing a show in Denver and in the middle of a poem, this man started charging down the center aisle screaming faggot at me. And now at a show, if ever somebody gets up in their seat in the middle of a poem, I'll start to have an anxiety attack and have to work with it a bit.

34:20So typically it's some sort of something in my memory that's registering a past thing. And sometimes it could actually be the poem itself. Like my mind, when I'm reading the poem, it's like I'm watching a movie of my life. And it's always new, even though the poem is the same. But I'll just start watching all of what I'm talking about happen again. And if it's a hard thing that I'm writing about, then that can also bring it on. Yeah, that's so interesting. So on the one hand, I think a lot of people would look at the process of writing a poem about something that was maybe hard for you in your life, as almost cathartic and helping on a processing level.

35:00But then the performance of that poem, because of the way that you perform is to essentially step back into it and almost relive it in a multisensory way, can itself become reacquainting with that same state. Yeah, and it's sort of rare for me for that to happen. Like typically, it is, I would say 95 % of the time or 98 % of the time, it is healing. It feels like medicine to speak, actually speak something out of my body. It does feel like releasing this sort of stored up dark energy most of the time. And then some moments, typically, I think if I'm not listening to myself well enough right before I read the poem on whether or not that's a good day for me to read it.

35:46But I rarely follow my set list just because, you know, I'll come up with a tentative one, but then I'll keep looking down at it to see if I can read that particular poem authentically and also in a way that will be supportive of my own wellness before I read it. Yeah, that's so interesting. So it's almost like you have all the set pieces in your mind, but you never actually, it's almost like you're choosing the set in real time as you're performing based on both what's happening interactively between you and those there and also just what's happening with you internally and how you feel like you'd be with that.

36:23Yeah, because spoken word, you know, I love the art form. And also, I really hate it. If, if the poet is not feeling what they're saying. And so it's, it's always important to me to be able to read something, perform something that feels honest that day. And sometimes I get really bothered by the confines of that authenticity because sometimes that means I read a poem that I don't respect the writing of as much, you know, and there's this other poem where the writing's way better.

36:55Andrea Gibson: And there's this writer I love in the audience and I have to read the good, you know, and I just can't do it because if I don't read it authentically, it will suck. yeah i'm curious about this um i know with a lot of bands you go to see a band who's been around for a long time or a singer or songwriter who's been around for a long time who has you know they have their favorites you know the audience favorites that every single time the audience wants to hear it i don't know whether it's the same with spoken word but if it is like and you're not feeling it that night like what do you do yeah no it's really sad if i'm not feeling it And there will be a lot of, you know, I'll try.

37:32Andrea Gibson: I'll actually take a moment on stage if somebody hollers at a poem and see if I could do it. And, you know, sometimes I can and sometimes I can't. And then, you know, some of it is, you know, some of it is just like, gosh, maybe the poem is about somebody I'm currently in an argument with. And, you know, it happens more commonly because so much of my writing is about social justice and my politics and have changed so much. They change constantly. And so I get a lot of requests for poems that I no longer identify with the politics of that piece, or there is something in that piece that I feel is hurtful, or I've been told is hurtful.

38:13And I mean, most of the time in my life, if somebody has called me out on a poem being hurtful, I can think of one instance where I disagreed. Almost always somebody has just learned something faster than me and has been kind enough to teach it. So I get a lot of requests for poems that I no longer resonate with the message of. Yeah, when that happens, where you've come to a point where you understand, okay, so now with hindsight and with a lot more growth and learning and conversation, I understand why it doesn't feel right to perform anymore. Do you ever share that reframing or that process with people who are asking about it?

38:57Or do you just sort of like pass it by? Yeah, I almost always discuss why on the mic. Like, for example, I have this very old poem that's one of my first spoken word poems that I ever did that I believe is the language I use in the poem is racist. And I didn't know that at the time that I was writing it, but I know it now. And also I paint my parents in a light that I am no longer comfortable with. It's one of the only poems I've ever written where I wrote mad and I stayed mad and I let that poem be in the world. and it's just not how I view the human experience anymore in regards to these people are bad, these people are good.

39:39And so I'll just break all that down on stage typically. Yeah, that's amazing. So it's sort of like you turn it into a learning experience for everybody as well. And also, I mean, it's really powerful modeling, I feel like for people who are up and coming and almost feel like, well, you know, like you are a creative person in the world, if you're an artist, a performer, that your body of work is your body of work and it should stand to be public regardless of what harm we understand it may cause now with the benefit of really changing and evolving and deeper understanding. And I think it's fascinating modeling to say, well, no, actually, we need to grow with the times and certain things are not appropriate to be out there anymore because when they are, they continue to do harm.

40:26And I never intended harm. And now that I know it was doing harm, I have to do something about it. And maybe we can all look at the work that we're doing in that way.

40:35Andrea Gibson: Yeah. And I've come to call it a blessing of being in the public eye a little bit, where if you do something that hurts someone, you're not going to go without knowing it. Somebody will tell you, there are far smarter people than me reading my poems and I learn a lot from them. And so, yeah, that's a gift, I guess, to know that if you do something wrong, somebody is going to tell you. Yeah. And especially because so much of your work really is focused around gender norms, social reform, LGBTQ issues, compassion. And so you are speaking to the points of intersection in our life where we feel it the most.

41:24And these days, sadly, tend to be most polarized as a society. And I feel like a lot of, I'm curious about this. I feel like when I hear you perform, I hear the words, but underneath the words, what I feel is a call for compassion and a recognition of shared humanity, almost across any of what the words are. Thank you for saying that. I've always felt like, I've said for a number of years that the words and spoken word are not the most important thing. I don't know if that's what you're saying, but it seems like it's the energy of with which you're approaching something. And so I think I've failed a lot with my words.

42:08And hopefully even in those failures showed up in some way with my heart. And hopefully that can be heard by folks. Yeah. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

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44:52You have made a really interesting decision also. I don't know when it was. I know it was at least a chunk of yours back to take pure spoken word and start to blend music with it. often live music that's being performed at the same time. I'm wondering whether when you started doing that, there was any pushback. I'm wondering whether in the culture of spoken word, there's sort of an ethos that says it's got to be based on the purity of the words and one person and a microphone versus, you know, having this fuller experience, sonic experience around it. Yeah, there was pushback from lots of people.

45:33I think a lot of spoken word artists hated it. For myself, I think that there were times that I also was constantly arguing with it.

45:42Andrea Gibson: You know, if I go and hear a poet, this is not going to, you know, do much good for my career to say this on here. But if I go and hear a poet, I want to hear them without music, you know, but I, it is what I have the most fun with. And, you know, when I started touring clubs and stuff, you know, the owners of the place, they had no idea what they were booking, like they thought they were booking comedy or, you know, they just weren't used to having a poet. And so I was often they'd insist that, you know, there'd be a musical opener. So I started making tons of friends who were musicians. And I just love to make art with other people and collaborate.

46:22And and that's how it got started. I'm like, oh, if we're both going to be on the stage, let's do something together. But yeah, there's a piece I may share today that I would not have written that piece if I thought that it was going to live on its own. It was written to live with music. And I've just loved making art with other people. But sure, yeah, I don't think everybody loves it. And then I think some other people prefer it because they get, I don't know, maybe they're just not big poetry fans. I'm not sure. But it also, if you do it right, and I've done it wrong a lot, but if you do it right, it can really add to the emotion of the piece.

47:00Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating to me. I have always thought about those little decisions when you decide to add something into something which some people would consider. And you're like, well, this is the pure form of the art. And when you add this in, you know, does it amplify it? Does it give something new and better? Or does it in some way bastardize it? In a very past life, I was actually a yoga teacher. And I was one of sort of like the early people in New York City who started bringing music into my classes. And while some people got it and enjoyed it, other people were like, wow, this is the whole quote, a hybrid yoga teaching thing is completely bastardizing what it's about.

47:43And I would say to them, well, yes, and if you hold the view that it's got to be only about pure silence and the words, I can understand that and I respect that. And at the same time, if you look at every healing tradition in the history of humankind, they all involve both incantation and rhythm and some other form of music. And it's pretty modern that we've separated them. So it's, it's so easy. Like I'm fascinated by this lens of how people, and also who are the arbiters of what is like right or wrong or the best way to do it. Yeah. That's interesting. You bring that up because my partner is a writer and also yoga teacher.

48:22And, uh, she has, she plays music in her class and she puts so much thought into what she's going to play in there. And I will, I will sit down with her yoga playlist and write to them all day long. And, um, and I've done both yoga within, without, uh, you know, music and for me, they're different experiences and, but also beautiful in their own way. And lately I've been preferring yoga with music. Yeah, I agree. I think they're just different. You know, I'll, I'll go to, I love sometimes, you know, like the same with meditation, I'll meditate just in pure silence sometimes, but then sometimes I just kind of want something layered into it.

49:01And it just, it's different. It gives me something different. So there are two pieces that you're going to share with us, I believe. If you could set up the first one, tell me a little bit about it. And then I'd love to talk about a little bit more and then we can maybe do the same for the second. Sure. Yeah. So this is a poem titled Homesick, a plea for our planet. And the music with the piece is done by Gregory Alan Isakov, who lives by me here in Colorado, who I've toured with in the past. And when all tours got canceled, Gregory went back to being a farmer, which he has been throughout his musician life as well.

49:40So this was a sweet collaboration, and I'm going to play it for you. In the fifth grade, I won the science fair with a project on climate change that featured a papier-mâché ozone layer with a giant hole through which a papier-mâché sun burned the skin of a Barbie in a bikini on a lawn chair, glaciers melting like ice cubes in her lemonade. It was 1987, in a town that could have invented red hats, but the school principal gave me a gold ribbon and not a single bit of attitude about my radical political stance because neither he nor I knew it was a political stance. Science had not yet been fully framed as leftist propaganda, the president did not have a Twitter feed, starving the world of facts.

50:25I spent that summer, as I had every summer before, racing to the forest behind my house down the path. My father called the old logging road to a meadow thick with raspberry bushes whose thorns were my very first heroes, because they did nothing with their life but protect what was sweet. Sundays, I went to church, but struggled to call it prayer if it didn't leave grass stains on my knees. Couldn't call it truth if it didn't come with a dare to crawl into the cave by the creek and stay there until somebody counted all the way to 100. As a kid, I thought 100 was the biggest number there was. My mother absolutely blew my mind the day she said 101.

51:06100 and what? Billionaires never grow out of doing that same math with years. Can't conceive of counting past their own lifespans. Believe the world ends the day they do. Why are the keys to our future in the hands of those who have the longest commutes from their heads to their hearts, whose greed is the smog that keeps us from seeing our own nature and the sweetness we are here to protect? Do you know sometimes when gathering nectar, bees fall asleep in flowers? Do you know fish are so sensitive, snowflakes sound like fireworks when they land on the water? Do you know whales will follow their injured friends to shore, often taking their own lives, so to not let their loved ones be alone when they die?

51:50None of this is poetry. It is just the earth being who she is, in spite of us putting barcodes on the sea, in spite of us acting like Edison invented daylight. Dawn presses her blushing face to my window, asks me if I know the records in my record collection look like the insides of trees. Yes, I say, there is nothing you have ever grown that isn't music. You are the bamboo in Coltrane's saxophone reed, the mulberries that fed the silkworms that made the slippers for the ballet, the pine that built the loom that wove the hemp for Frida Kahlo's canvas, the roses that dyed her paint, hoping her brush could bleed for her body.

52:33Who more than the earth has bled for us? How do we not mold our hearts after the first spruce tree who raised her hand and begged to be cut into piano keys so the elephants could keep their tusks. The earth is the right side of history, is the canyon my friend ran to when no one else he knew would echo his chosen name back to him, is the wind that wailed through 1956 Alabama into the poplar tree carved itself into Dr. King's pulpit, is the volcano that poured the mercury into the thermometer held under the tongue of Italy, though she knew our fever was why her canals were finally running clear.

53:14She took our temperature, told us we were too hot, even after weed spent decades claiming she was not. Our hands held to her burning forehead, we insisted she was fine, while wildfires turned redwoods to toothpicks, readying the teeth of the apocalypse. She sent a smoke signal all the way from California to New York City. ash fell from the sky do you know the mountains of california used to look like they'd been set on fire because they were so covered in monarch butterflies do you know monarch butterflies migrate 3 000 miles using only the fuel they stored as caterpillars in the cocoon we need so much less than we take we owe so much more than we give squirrels plant thousands of trees every year just from forgetting where they left their acorns if we aim to be just half as good As one of the Earth's mistakes, we could turn so much around.

54:11Our living would be seed. The future would have roots. We would cast nothing from the garden of itself. And we would make the thorns proud.

54:37I want to stand up and applause.

54:40Andrea Gibson: That would be nice. I hope I get to see some applause sometime in the next two years. Applause is such a sweet communal thing. I love it. Yeah. And I mean, how oddly poetic that the reason that you can is because just things are happening in our planet, which are changing things, which are keeping us separate, which are isolating us. But bigger picture, when you write a piece like that, which is deeply compelling, deeply moving, very focused in the messages that it's sending. I'm curious whether you are intentional about being completely honest, letting it flow through you, writing something that feels real and raw and pure to yourself.

55:23And at the same time, wanting to invite the greatest number of people into the conversation so that, because this is, a poem like that is also a call to action. And the more people you can have feel it and respond to it beyond being personally moved, the more likely they are to act on it. Yeah, I think that's the value of art that, you know, I don't think people's minds change very quickly, but people's hearts can change in an instant. And I think that's something that I love about spoken word, but all art, it can change your heart in an instant and then your mind catches up over time. But I don't think I've had a poem that I've written so directly in a long time.

56:08There have been a lot of, I've done a lot of, for lack of a better word, like dancing in my poems lately, where you'll hear what the next poem I share. It's nothing so, like you said, directed. And with this, I really wrote it hoping that it would do something, like hoping that folks who hadn't previously had a relationship with the earth could see how the earth is everywhere. You know, I have a lot of friends who live in the city and they have a far different relationship with the earth or even thoughts about the earth than I do. And I was writing that, you know, wanting to reach them because those folks are, you know, some of the greatest activists I know doing so much and, you know, sort of writing in the direction of their hearts.

56:57Yeah, I think it also brings up one of the things that is truly unique about poetry in the context of poetry that has a bigger message that is speaking to issues of the day. And that is that when you're also effectively building a case with a poem and inviting people to do something about it. when you contrast doing that through powerfully written verse versus laying out graphs and charts and statistics, it lands, it's almost like, you know, when you start to quantify the arguments, I think for some people, the rational brains is okay. I get it. But for a lot of people, they A, get defensive and then B, start to say, okay, so here are specific things that I can find counter evidence to refute.

57:49But when you deliver the same thing in verse, and it speaks to senses and emotion and story, it's like it bypasses all of that. And it just lands so deeply in a person's soul that the impulse to just immediately controvert it, in some way, I feel like it bypasses that. I wonder if you feel something similar. I do. And I think that's a lot of my draw to the art form. And I remember learning this lesson a lot. At the beginning of the Iraq war, I had a friend in the war. And I remember reading all these statistics and then trying to write poems that, you know, to do something that were full of statistics.

58:34And the statistics were heart-wrenching and overwhelming and disgusting. But I learned in that process a lot of years ago now that to tell the story of one person would often reach people more. You tell the story of, you know, there was this soldier who had come back from Iraq and he had been wearing the dog tags of, for lack of the word, like of soldiers that he was fighting against. and his family had thought he was wearing his own dog tags, but he had been wearing the dog tags of someone he had killed and ended up killing himself. And that story, I remember thinking, God, we could say numbers forever.

59:19And there is so much there that is, I can't talk about it right now without getting upset. So yeah, you can't argue with the story of somebody's life. You can't argue that, you know, bees fall asleep in flowers. Ever since I read that fact, it doesn't leave me.

59:42Andrea Gibson: I'm just, the sweetness is overwhelming. Yeah. You brought a second piece today as well. And this is another, very different, but equally powerful. He set it up for us. Yeah, I will. And I recorded this in my basement at the beginning of the pandemic. And the music for this piece is done by an artist named Chris Perica, who is a close friend of mine. And I wrote this actually about a dear friend of mine named Buddy Wakefield, who is one of my favorite poets on earth. And he's one of my best friends. But he really made me angry one day. I got in this. I was so mad. I don't know if I've ever been more angry at a friend.

1:00:27And in the middle of that anger, I decided to start writing, which I never do. I got this advice in college that you should never write unless you have some distance from a thing so you can see it clearly. But I began writing with the intention of shifting my anger to a place of gratitude. And I got about a few lines into this poem and just loved him so much. I could not believe how quickly my anger shifted to appreciation. So it's called A Year of No Grudges.

1:01:06I think almost everyone tries hard to do good and just finds out too late. They should have tried softer. I've never in my whole life been level-headed, but the older I get, the more level-hearted. And I think we make gods who look like us for a reason. I think in spite of it all, we trust we can be believed in. When I don't believe in myself, I try to remember I have walked on water like 700 times in Maine in the dead of winter. Where I come from, you can drive a pickup truck from one side of the lake to the other, and people have an unusually large amount of missing teeth and fingers, but you can still sell them whitening strips and wedding rings like crazy, because where I come from, beauty is in the eye of anyone who sees what's missing, but can't stop pointing to what's still there.

1:01:57If there is no definition for love yet, I think that's a good one. I'm writing this on a day you did me wrong. I'm just a half a second outside the furnace of my rage and I'm trying to focus the steeple of my attention on all the teeth you still have instead of the ones I know you'd happily knock out yourself if it would keep you from biting anyone again. And that's how mistakes work if you're loving the right kind of people and you are the right kind of people You've walked on water so many times. You know grace is slippery. There's literally nothing anyone is more likely to fall from. Some sound advice I give myself like twice a second.

1:02:35Wear knee pads on the way to your ego, Andrea. Being right is boring. Rightness comforts only the tiniest parts of us. And when it comes to hearts, I want always to be a size queen. Because that's how I found you. Lifting the spirits of everyone around you like hot air balloons. just from the way you burned to be a better person today than you'd been the day before. Burning to be better is my favorite quality on anyone, and you are on fire, like a gay men's choir singing the halftime show of a football game. I have been dancing in the end zone since the day you taught me how to break every promise I have made to my pain, taught me my wounds will never ever be bigger than I am.

1:03:17And thank goodness for you, champion of the unkillable yes, dandelion refusing to be picked for the bouquet. Five minutes into our first conversation, you knew I could take a punch better than I could take a compliment. And you talked to me about that once, and bam, I was angel gossip. There were God rumors flying around my suddenly unheavied head. I love you because you never had a mirror face, because the truth is nothing you could ever try to fake. So sometimes you look like a human scribble, like a three-year-old has colored you in, like you've got too many feelings to stay inside the lines of your own skin.

1:03:58But that, friend, that is the masterpiece. I love you because we both showed up to kindness tryouts with notes from the school nurse that said we were too hurt to participate, but we learned how wrong we were. And weren't those the best days when we learned how wrong we were and so got to grow into our goodness, throwing the peach pits of our old selves into the garden to grow sweetness, sugar? I'd pick you to be the captain of my chosen family tree. I'd pick you to throw the party when I leave this world, knowing I'm going to run death like a stop sign and keep going. I'd pick you to finish all my half-written poems, even though you're terrible at writing poetry.

1:04:46I'd pick you to finish this one especially. This list of compliments. You'd be a hypocrite not to take, so take it. Before I remember, I'm mad at you, asshole. Buttwad. Only human. on the whole planet who knows what I mean when I say God. I mean everyone down here who understands that when I get to heaven, I will refuse to call it heaven if who put me through hell isn't there.

1:05:59What goes through you when you hear yourself perform that? Because kind of watching your face as you were listening.

1:06:08Andrea Gibson: Yeah. I was actually feeling, what was I feeling? I was, I was feeling sad, really. But I was also, it was one of those sad, you know, I often have a hard time deciphering in my body between sadness and love. They intermingle too much for me. But I was feeling sad about, you know, the grudges that are so easy to hold. And I wrote it before the pandemic, but when I decided to share it, you know, thinking that this pandemic might last a year, it probably will be longer. But the idea of this being a year of no grudges, like if you're holding a grudge against somebody right now, it's a really good time to let it go, not just for their sake, but it's such a burden to carry.

1:06:54Like bitterness is so painful. But what was hitting me and listening to it was just how easy it was. It was so simple to move from that anger, which I didn't think I was going to let go for months, in just a matter of minutes to appreciation. And yeah, I've heard somebody said once, like the only thing we have control over in this life is where we put our attention. And to just shift my attention in that moment was really lovely. And it released me from, you know, anger is not fun to carry. And yeah, I love that dude so much.

1:07:30Andrea Gibson: And one of my favorite lines of it is you're terrible at writing poetry, just because he's just such an exceptional poet. So sneaking in a quick little dig.

1:07:44Yeah, I mean, I go back to what I shared earlier, which is I'm listening to the words, But what I'm hearing is just a feeling, is a mood, is a vibe. And the message I get, but it kind of just comes in. I know you have said elsewhere, maybe more than a poet, I'm kind of a public feeler. I just get up there and feel everything all over the place.

1:08:08Andrea Gibson: Yeah, yeah. I wish not so much sometimes. It'd be nice to have a few days without so many feelings. That was like a diagnosis a psychiatrist gave me once. Like the problem is you feel too much. And I'm like, yes, I know that. But I also don't know if I want to get rid of it. Yeah. I mean, and that actually is a curiosity. Do you feel like along with feeling so much and so deeply, you know, that without that, there's no work, there's no creativity, there's no, you know, and I guess maybe the deeper question, what I'm really trying to ask. is because I've seen so many artists, so many people who are in this sort of generative space where something comes out of the depths of their soul and turns into beautiful painting, words, music, attach themselves to the notion that not just feeling but suffering must always be there for them to do work at the level that they want to be able to offer.

1:09:16And I wonder how that all lines with you. Yeah, I've thought about that so much. Firstly, I think there's a difference between feeling, you know, harder feelings like grief and terror. There's a difference between that and suffering. To me, those are two different things. You can feel sad, but the suffering comes, I think, with having a ton of desire to get rid of that sadness. For me, at least, that's where a lot of the pain comes in. If I just let the sadness be, it typically moves out of my body more quickly. So allowing it to exist helps it move. But as far as the narrative, I think it's something that has permeated a spoken word a lot is that you can't write a good poem unless you're suffering and unless you're in pain.

1:10:09And I don't I don't believe that at all. And I wish for artists like no poems ever, no, no, no art ever. If it means you get to, you know, have your life full of love and joy and gratitude. So I'd like to do away with that narrative, honestly, because I've seen it impact young people who almost feel like they don't have permission to be joyful if their sadness created so much art. I don't actually think the pain is where art comes from. I think it comes from honesty. And we may have not created enough space to celebrate art that is blissful. you know, or that it's almost like turning a sock inside out, that sadness, the second is like, it goes inside out.

1:10:59And I can't really explain. I know that image might not make sense. But as soon as something becomes art, then it's, it's important to recognize that sometimes it almost immediately turns to you could turn immediately grief to joy. Yeah, I have so many different thoughts about this. But I don't know if everybody knows, but in the spoken word, And, you know, there are a lot, it's a very young art form. And in my opinion, I would love to see more happy poems, more celebratory poems, and more people wanting to hear those types of poems just because it's such, you know, it's our life too. And I don't want artists to ever feel like they have to, you know, live their entire lives.

1:11:42So miserable. Yeah. And I think that is probably a pretty common experience in spoken word, but just across nearly every art form. And I agree with you. I think we all have to experience life. And some of that involves hard things and tough things. And some of that involves pain. Yeah. But we don't have to invite it. And I also, I love the frame that you brought, which is that the suffering comes from an almost maniacal attempt to rid ourselves of it rather than acknowledging that this is a part of it all. And I didn't ask for it, but it's here. So now what do I do with this? How do I be with it in a way that's in some way I can find meaning in it?

1:12:30And if it goes away and if there are things I can do to help, great. But and if not, then at least I can understand it and transmute it into something positive.

1:12:39Andrea Gibson: Yeah. And I also don't ever want to deny like or say don't feel grief. We all like to be human is to grieve and to is, you know, to love is to grieve and to be joyful is to, you know, be sad when the joy goes. So all of it exists. there just tends to be sometimes I think that a lot of what's fueling art is the grief and I just want to give artists permission to or faith that joy can do it too you know just because I do know I mean when I feel into and it's not just artists it's activists as well like my activist community it just is like hearts are so heavy right now everywhere all over the world and And to offer yourself, to be reminding yourself that you deserve joy and to nurture that and to take time to do that and that it also will create its own beautiful things.

1:13:41I love that. And it feels a good place for us to come full circle as well. So sitting here in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life. Oh, to be connected. to love, to celebrate, to feel deeply and to continuously be becoming, to welcome the becoming and the shift that, you know, hopefully in our last breaths here where I want to in my last breath

1:14:11Andrea Gibson: think, but there's more I wanted to become. And then hopefully the others, you know, it's like running death, like a stop sign and you just keep on going and keep, keep becoming. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode's safe bet, you'll also love the conversation we had with Ocean Vuong about navigating struggle and making peace with your story. You'll find a link to Ocean's episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young.

1:14:49Christopher Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you're still listening here. Do me a personal favor, a second favor. Share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share it with more, that's awesome too. But just one person even. Then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered. To reconnect and explore ideas that really matter. Because that's how we all come alive together.

1:15:24Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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