Do you differentiate between your work and play, your avocation and your job?
Robert Penn Warren asked, “What is a man but his passion?” If you make your life’s work out of your passion, then there doesn’t need to be a distinction between vocation and avocation, or between business and poetry, or between any other apparently dissimilar pursuits. If you succeed, they become distinctions without a difference. Why rank your engagements with life by income potential, except for the IRS?
Nor does there need to be a distinction between work and play. As many know, if you love your work the work is play. Frost said this well in his poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time”:
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future’s sakes.
We do not need to think of poems as our bids for immortality. Think of a poem rather as a leaving or secretion. Like a seashell, a poem is something secreted by the animal to meet a need. It is a durable part of the animal. After the soft parts are gone, this part is left to join the wrack of beach debris, most likely to be pounded back to sand, only very occasionally to be found, taken home and placed on the mantle, esteemed an enrichment to someone else’s life. But not made by the animal for that purpose. (What does the whelk, lifting secretion to an art form, think about?)
What do your creations mean to you?