Just who do you think you are?

One of my favorite fall activities is mushroom hunting. I first got into this pursuit when I was living on the coast of Washington, many years ago. When the dark, rainy winter descended, I knew I needed an activity to get me out of the house, keep me connected with nature, and ward off seasonal depression. Mushroom hunting provided exactly that.

My first foray was thrilling. I’ll never forget the smell of the cold, damp forest floor with its thick blanket of leaf litter, and the amazement I felt when my eyes began to pick out shapes and colors and textures I’d never noticed before. What was that slimy, orange thing that looked like jelly, or those round white spheres that let out a cloud of dark green spores when you poked them? Why did the purple, gilled mushrooms grow under deciduous trees, while the spongey, red-capped mushrooms grew under evergreens?

I began to realize that there were mushrooms everywhere. They were all around me, their variety astounding. How had I ignored them for so long? Filled with a beginner’s exuberance, I picked one of each, then hauled home the heavy, soggy bags of fungi and arranged them on the kitchen table. Tired and wet, I took out the mushroom identification book I’d bought—and quickly realized I didn’t have the energy to carefully key out forty different mushrooms from six different families.

Over the next few days, I managed to identify perhaps nine or ten of the mushrooms I had gathered. Although one or two were edible, there seemed to be little point in cooking a single mushroom—and they were decomposing quickly. Sheepishly, I carried the whole lot of them to the backyard and flung them under the trees.

On my next foray, I was determined to do better. I didn’t want to pick any random mushroom that caught my eye, only to toss it out when I got home. Instead, I followed the advice in my mushroom-hunting book to focus on a single, easily recognizable family, foraging with purpose and intention instead of merely hoping that whatever I picked turned out to be edible. This time, the forest spoke to me in a new way. Instead of an indecipherable cacophony of shapes and colors, my eye began to pick out the patterns I’d read about in my field guide. I looked for white, shelf-like fungi growing on the sides of trees and fallen logs—and was ecstatic when I spotted my very first harvest of oyster mushrooms.

That evening, instead of dumping out a slimy mishmash of edible, inedible, and unknown mushrooms onto my kitchen table, I cleaned a few oyster mushrooms, dry-sauteed them in a pan, and tested a bite to see if it would make me ill. When it didn’t, I joyfully cooked the rest—and my career as a mushroom hunter had begun.

When I moved to Hawaii, it meant saying goodbye to many of the mushrooms I’d come to know on the mainland and getting acquainted with a whole new set of fungal friends. However, by then I was familiar with the process of identifying new mushrooms, slowly building out my repertoire from a few safe and easy mushrooms to more “advanced” ones. Before long, I was finding monkey ears, witches’ butter, and jelly fungus on my daily walks, and I learned to recognize the marzipan scent of the almond agarics that grace the forest floor a couple of times each year. I also made friends with experienced foragers who taught me things about the tropical ecosystem that would have taken me years to learn on my own.

Every now and then, a skeptical friend or relative will ask me if I’m really “qualified” to forage for mushrooms. How can you be sure you don’t pick something poisonous? they say. This question always makes me laugh. Sometimes, I’ll ask them a cheeky question in return: How can you be sure you don’t accidentally pick an orange instead of an apple when you go to the grocery store? Most people have no problem distinguishing between an orange and an apple, even though they are both round, medium-sized fruits; to an experienced mushroom hunter, distinguishing between an agaricus and a bolete is just as simple and obvious. We learn the necessary discernment through focused effort and practice; and although it’s certainly possible to get advanced degrees in mycology, this isn’t a prerequisite to safely foraging and cooking a great meal, any more than getting a degree in food science is necessary to safely shop for fruit at the store.

At the same time, I’ve come to understand that often when people ask what makes me qualified to hunt for mushrooms, they’re not really worried about me confusing a Destroying Angel for a chanterelle; instead, they’re expressing their own anxieties and yearnings about their relationship with nature. What gives you the right to tromp around in the forest, filled with joy on a rainy day? Who gave you permission to be part of it, instead of looking in from the outside? And I can only answer: I did. And so can you.

Last month, I had the pleasure of teaching a workshop about self-help and spirituality writing—my second time teaching this class. For four Tuesdays in a row, I met on Zoom with a group of writers who all came bearing the bright and precious seed of an idea for a book. In many cases, they’d been carrying this seed for many years, tending it and keeping it safe until conditions were right for it to sprout. They had gathered stories, done research, and thought deeply about what they wanted to share, and why. In many cases, they also had professional and educational credentials—they were therapists, nurses, teachers, and healers with years of experience to draw on.

Towards the end of the last class, one participant asked a very good question: “How will I know when I’m qualified to write my book?”

There was a noticeable shift in energy in the classroom. I realized that, although only one person had voiced the question, everyone had been thinking about it—and in some cases, worrying about it.

I hesitated, as a number of competing answers piled up in my mind. On the one hand, there is a baseline of knowledge, experience, and technical skill that needs to be reached before one is well-positioned to write a successful book, go on a successful foraging mission, knit a sweater, or undertake just about any other complex task. On that very practical level, the more training and experience you have, the more qualified you will be.

But I also sensed that the student’s question extended beyond practical considerations. What she was really asking—and what made the other students listen with such alertness when she asked it—was how to quiet the voices in her head that whispered, Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are to try to help people with their problems or guide them towards a better life? Who do you think you are to talk about God or Source or the Divine? Who do you think you are to share the life stories that were supposed to stay hidden, in the hopes that they will ease another person’s pain? Who do you think you are to call yourself a writer, a teacher, a healer—or for that matter, an artist, a musician, a dancer, or a creative?

We struggle with these questions no matter how many advanced degrees we've obtained, classes we’ve taught, or years of experience we’ve had with our subject matter. Any time we embark on a creative project, whether it’s writing a self-help book or planning a party, these questions and doubts are bound to show up, whether they are voiced by other people or come from deep within ourselves.

Now that I’ve had a few days to mull it over, I’ve realized that to me, the answers to these questions are felt, rather than thought. When I go into the forest to forage, I feel a sense of pleasure, ease, and competence. My body and mind relax; I trust that my years of experience, and the knowledge I’ve gained through research and training, will guide me in the right direction. I instinctively move towards certain trees, knowing that certain mushrooms are likely to be there; I kneel and smell the ground, and a telltale red color catches my eye. The joy I feel springs from my competence, and I love sharing that joy with friends when I bring them foraging with me.

Is joy a qualification? I believe it is. To be sure, we need the appropriate skills and knowledge to do the task at hand, especially if there are risks involved. But once that baseline has been established, I’ve often found that joy is a sign of increasing mastery. Do you relish your creative task, or do you feel stuck, stymied, and uninspired? Does your mind feel fertile and alive when you contemplate the possibilities, or do you struggle to come up with ideas for where to go next? Although I couldn’t quite articulate it on a moment’s notice, what I wanted to tell the students in my class is this: Beyond possessing the necessary knowledge, you’re qualified to write your book, record your podcast, or embark on any other creative pursuit when you enjoy it.

This autumn, I hope you all have the chance to go out in the woods and delight in the abundance of fungi, whether you have any interest in cooking them or not. And if you find yourself lost in a thicket of Who do you think you are? questions, let your joy be the answer.

Sincerely,

Hilary T. Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

The Importance of First Drafts

Dear readers,

This December marked my five-year anniversary of living off-grid on three acres of tropical rainforest in rural Hawaii. It’s the longest relationship I’ve had with a place since leaving my parents' house at seventeen, and the first time I’ve been solely responsible not only for maintaining a home, but for building one from the ground up—painting every board, laying every stone, and slowly coaxing the magic of running water and electricity out of previously-inscrutable piles of wire, fuses, and PVC pipes.

A few months ago, I decided to build a solid roof over my bed to replace the tent I had been sleeping in ever since I moved onto the land. I hauled in the lumber and hardware, and my next-door neighbor framed in a simple shoebox of a structure with a sturdy metal roof and half-walls on two sides to let in light and air. Over the holidays, I caulked and painted, stapled mosquito screens across the openings in the half-walls, and finally retrieved my grandmother’s painting from a friend’s house and hung it on the wall.

For most of the five years I’ve lived on my land, the infrastructure has been provisional and haphazard—temporary placeholders propping up yet more temporary placeholders. The kitchen sink is held up by two sawhorses, its faucet hooked up to a garden hose. A handful of nails banged into a two-by-four passes for a tool rack; a length of PVC pipe suspended between two hooks serves as a closet; a couple of old wooden boxes stacked one on top of the other functions as a staircase, provided you have good balance.

At the time that I put these things in place, they felt like amazing improvements: no more washing dishes in a five-gallon bucket, or storing clothes in garbage bags. Now, I am slowly replacing these resourceful but flimsy solutions with sturdier successors—overwriting my exuberant but sloppy first draft with something a little more elegant, sure-footed, and pleasant to behold.

Creativity takes many forms, but I’ve found it to be an essential practice to a happy and fulfilling life. And whether you’re building a homestead, choreographing a dance piece, establishing a spiritual practice, or writing a book, chances are you’re going to go through one or several first drafts before arriving at the final expression of your vision. Our early attempts are sometimes exuberant and bursting with beginner’s luck; other times, they’re halting and uncertain, bits and pieces coming together as we feel our way through the dark. We know there’s something juicy in there, and we have a feeling if we just try a little bit of this and a little bit of that, we can slowly summon it into existence. As a writer and editor, I am well-acquainted with first drafts with their endless placeholders and notes-to-self. Need better anecdote to illustrate this point, I’ll write. Or, End-of-chapter exercise will go here.

A first draft often looks like one long to-do list: Fix this! Replace that! See if this works better over there! You call your creative vision into being by sketching out what will be there someday, erecting a crude version of it as you go, while promising to eventually replace those preliminary gestures with the real thing. You dream, ruminate, and gather inspiration from others who have trodden a similar path—and you make endless lists of what you’ll do to make your creation even better.

Every now and then, a little piece of the final version will make itself known to you: a few paragraphs that just happened to come out right the first time, a chord progression you feel confident about, an aspect of your project that just makes sense. These moments of clarity offer a sneak preview of the polished gem to come, and often give us just enough encouragement to keep going through the more difficult aspects of the work. Starting at one of those solid points, you can slowly claim more and more territory, coaxing the rest of your creation into being.

Although the decisions involved in undertaking a creative project seem endless, an infinite fractal of possibilities that can easily overwhelm even a seasoned artist or creative, each new point of clarity helps to narrow those options down. Huge structural decisions give way to modest organizational ones, which in turn yield to subtler aesthetic ones. What was once an unwieldly and impossible jumble of ideas mysteriously transforms into a generous, coherent, and meaningful work of art; a contribution that might help, inspire, or even shelter someone, someday.

The platform on which my tent used to sit, and on which my shoebox now stands, was the first point of clarity in the process of drafting my homestead. When I first arrived on my land, I had no idea how long I would stay here, or what kind of shelter I’d need. All I knew was that I had to get above the thick brown mud that swallowed my boots to the ankle every time I took a step.

My need to be dry was so urgent that I couldn’t afford to spend weeks carefully evaluating where the platform should go. Instead, I picked a spot, cleared a few spindly guava trees that were standing in the way, and banged the thing together. As it so happens, I was lucky: the spot I chose has worked well over the years, the surrounding trees providing both privacy and shade.

Having just one permanent element of my homestead in place gave me an anchor point from which to build the rest. The overwhelming fractal of possibilities resolved itself into a somewhat smaller subset of options; I set about plotting other chapters, and sketching out where other elements of my homestead would go. Any visitor to the land could see that my vision was far from realized, the tarps and sawhorses dragged to more promising locations every month or so; yet every now and then, a new point of clarity would emerge, and like a constellation revealing itself amid the stars, the final shape of my home began to come through.

Now that the tent is gone, I am slowly replacing many of the other original features of my home: that ridiculous sink, those dangerous stairs. As I erase the exuberant, ramshackle, sometimes-bewildering traces of my first draft, I feel grateful for the way these things held space for the better versions to come. These structures didn’t come out perfectly the first time, and they didn’t need to—like the placeholders in a manuscript, their job was to say, Do this thing, but better; and by their mere existence, to give me the confidence that I could.

Few artists know exactly what they’re going to say when they pick up a paintbrush, tune their guitars, or sit down to write a book, but the process of creation teaches them. Following our creative passions challenges us to go beyond what we already know and become more capable than we already are. In our first drafts, we throw our intelligence into a kind of sandbox, saying, Go play, go try things! I trust that you’ll figure it out. Eventually, a handful of words becomes a song; a hazy vision becomes a clearly defined path, and a determined amateur becomes a knowledgeable practitioner.

When I decided to build the shoebox, I wondered if I would feel nostalgic for the tent which so defined my first five years on the land. But now that I’m sleeping under a solid roof, I’ve discovered that I feel no more nostalgic for the tent than for one of the many haphazard and provisional first drafts which have passed across my desk as a writer and editor. The books that emerged out of those drafts were far superior to the drafts themselves; and the shoebox is indisputably superior to the tent.

First drafts aren’t meant to be clung to. Like seedpods, they are meant to break down and fade away when the true flower emerges. We might look back fondly on planting those seeds, but we would never trade the flower to get the seed back again. Once they’ve served their purpose, first drafts disappear; it’s our job to let them go, even as we honor their role in bringing the final version to life.

In this new year, I look forward to keeping authors company as they transform their own first drafts into sturdy, beautiful, and worthy books. May your own seeds of inspiration receive the water they need to bloom—in whatever form your creativity takes—and may you perceive the potential in those first, uncertain gestures towards your vision, no matter how approximate they are.

Sincerely,

Hilary Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing