I always have to have a purpose in life.
And the purpose I have is to make the best pot I possibly can make.
When the bowl that was my heart was broken, laughter fell out.
You sense things, you feel things.
The trouble is if you only feel it and you don't put it to work, then it becomes a disease almost.
You know, too many people get together and then they try to change the person.
Well, they've already liked the person the way they were.
Why did they try to change him afterwards?
And the one thing they really stress is do it.
You can always correct a mistake.
You can never correct nothing.
I invite you to join us during this next hour on a journey to meet five of the most creative people on this planet.
Five people that have been an inspiration and a role model to countless people who have gotten to know them.
I know they have been for me over the past 20 years.
And knowing them led me to keep wondering if it was possible somehow to bring them all together
so that more people could experience them in one place.
And so the idea for this film was born.
Beatrice Wood is one of the most known ceramicists anywhere.
And at 101, a living example of what this film is about.
She's just recovered from a very serious illness.
And because she doesn't have the strength to pot quite yet,
is painting and working on three manuscripts.
James Hubble, not a good student in school, has found his own way
and is a brilliant philosopher, incredible artist, and one of the major talents of our time.
Otto and Vivica Heino, also potters, well-respected, very honored,
and are examples of what's possible between two people in a relationship,
when you really hear each other, when you really understand each other.
And Al Struckis, a high school dropout of a poverty background,
who educated himself and at 62 began work on what has turned out to be one of the most unique homes in the world
when he did not have the money to begin it, he didn't have the money to finish it,
and yet somehow he just started and it all took place.
For those of you who are just beginning, I hope this turns out to be the seeds of your own transformation,
your own ability to act on your dreams, to give the gift that's within you.
For those of you that are farther down the road, I hope these become friends for you along the road.
Though Beatrice Wood, one of the best-known potters in the world,
did not take her first pottery class until her mid-forties in a Hollywood high school pottery class,
she has a rich history of creativity.
Beginning with acting, then painting, Beatrice worked in modern art as collected by many prominent individuals.
Beatrice is the last living artist associated with the Dada movement.
Beatrice is also a playwright and had her first major play produced when she was 98 years old.
The creations of Beatrice Wood reflect her wonderful sense of humor combined with a rich timeless style.
Her magnificent luster glazes set her apart from other master artists.
The work of Beatrice Wood is collected throughout the world.
The footage for the first segment was provided by Wild Wolf Productions from their award-winning documentary,
Beatrice Wood, Mama of Dada.
I was a good little girl, and at the beginning of the century,
it was natural for little girls who had any education to be good, and I was in great revolt.
I think I was naturally in revolt against many things,
particularly the conventionality with which I was brought up.
I remember people as I was a little girl say she doesn't belong to the family.
I just had my own way of thinking.
We all start out with our own way of thinking, as Beatrice did,
and we need to hold onto that throughout our lives.
It's our identity. It's who we are, regardless of what society says,
regardless of what our family says, regardless of what anyone says.
I began reading Madame Bovary, Oscar Wilde, Whistler, Little Women, the Bible.
It just taught me that there was another way to life than the way my family brought me up.
It's the feelings we have about something that are infinitely more important than what we do.
We need to be much more connected to the process and not so connected to the outcome.
The only time, evidently, that I do a good drawing
is when I'm not trying to represent a person but project the feeling that I get.
We spend so much of our lives trying to avoid pain and suffering,
and yet it's often in the pain and in the suffering that we connect most to our creativity,
that we become closest to who we are, that we do the most growing in life.
A great artist can only be great if he's suffered
because I think it's getting away from our agony
that makes us want to produce, to create, to say something.
We become very self-absorbed in our life
because we do work usually in solitude.
What we're all looking for is the ability to wake up in the morning
and be happy about waking up and be happy about our life.
And for many of us, we never get to have that.
And the reason we don't have it is because we're not doing what we love.
When we take the time to find the thing we love and to take the risk and to do it,
we wind up living long, fulfilling lives.
It's very exciting when I have to open a glazed kiln
and I generally wake up early in the morning to go in and just open a wee bit and peek.
One can't really see, but I peek anyway.
And I say, women who have diamonds,
it can't touch the joy and excitement of opening a kiln.
Part of the wonder of life is our creativity
and our ability to be compassionate and caring toward other people when we allow it.
Another one of the wonders of life is the river of life,
something that we're going to be hearing many times in this video
and our wonderful gift of being able to be part of that.
I'm very interested in being alive, very willing to die,
but I'm curious and interested in life.
I'm interested in people and I'm interested in my work,
and I have many wonderful friends,
and I don't know what interests me most about life.
I always say there are three things that I think are important in the world,
honesty, the knowledge of oneself, compassion,
because unless we have a concern for other people, we're monsters.
It's impossible to put this into words,
but there's something great about the great river of life,
the very thing of being alive,
and the genius of the human race when you think of it,
and what man has accomplished.
But this has all been on the technical side,
and actually we bypassed wisdom.
People are beginning to be more willing now to look within to the wisdom that's in all of us.
We live in a very interesting time.
There's more unconsciousness on the planet on a broader scale than there's ever been,
and there's more consciousness on the planet on a broader scale than there's ever been.
And yet the magic is the wisdom that's within all of us.
That's the miracle.
That's what we need to be more connected to.
When we can take the technology that we have
and add the wisdom to it that's within all of us, we'll be fine.
I feel this is a great privilege and blessing to live the way I do now
in beauty near wonderful mountains with many friends
and freedom to do what I wish,
which happens to be pottery and chasing men that they don't know it.
Vivica and Otto Heino have been together for over 44 years,
and their relationship is a model of what is possible between two people
when they respect and accept each other as they are.
Together they have won countless awards for their pottery throughout their lives.
Included are the gold medal of the 1960 Cannes Festival,
the first place award for the New York Ceramic Society,
and most recently both Otto and Vivica were made honorary members
of the International Academy of Ceramics in Switzerland.
Amazingly, this award was presented to them without them applying,
which is the usual case.
Only a very few potters in the whole United States have ever been so honored.
When you look back over your life, Otto, what makes you the most proud?
The most proud to have a piece in the museum.
And I set out to accomplish it a long time, but I didn't tell anybody.
I said I wanted to accomplish something that would make a strong pot
that the next generation can see that there was a good potter.
He knew how to make it, he knew how to glaze it,
and knew how to fire it, and had a good form.
And the future can see it?
The future can see it, yep.
And you actually made that happen?
Because I get letters now from people that have seen the pot in the museum.
A high school kid said it looks beautiful.
And that really makes you feel good?
Yeah, it makes you feel good, gives you a lift.
Absolutely.
Gives you a lift in life.
Otto shows here, he's just a regular man, like all of us are regular people.
And he had the sense of purpose.
It's what we are able to do.
If he can, we can.
In 1959, I sent my pot over to Cannes, France, and it won the Medal of Honor.
Wow.
And then I went on from there.
How did you feel when you won?
Oh, I felt great.
I felt great for two or three years.
Yes, it was wonderful.
I love this little place where Vivica shares what was important to her
about Otto and why she was drawn to him,
that everybody else's feelings were shallow,
and he had some kind of depth when he said he wanted peace of mind,
which shows up in who he is and shows up in their relationship.
I had my car fixed, and I went to see about it.
I'd avoided a cat, and I got into the edge of the, and I rolled over.
Wow.
And the man came and got me, and he was very good.
He made me drive it to the place to have it fixed.
And I went to see if somebody had loaned me a card,
and this man and his wife were having very interesting people.
And Otto was there and some others,
and everybody was talking about what they'd do if they had $15,000.
Now, this was 1940, 44, 46.
And everybody said they'd get a race horse or somebody wanted a yacht
or somebody wanted something else, and Otto sat there,
and he didn't say anything at all.
And I turned to him, and I said, what do you want?
And he looked at me, and he didn't say anything for a few minutes,
and I thought, did he hear me?
And he said, I think I want peace of mind.
And boy, that was the thing I realized, and that's exactly what he's happened.
And that's what you were drawn to the most about him?
Yeah, because everyone was so superficial in what they wanted,
and he said, I just want peace of mind.
What comes next is a lovely story about Vivica's early life.
I think I was six or seven.
My mother took me to Rochester to see a Southerner Highlander man.
He was demonstrating pottery, and I probably had my chin on the wheel.
And he threw a pot, and then he said, do you want to see the inside?
And when he cut it down, he made a little bird first,
and it impressed me so because he was kicking and the wheel was silent,
and I always remembered that.
So I went back and I thought, well, I can do it.
We had electric, we had a beautiful Victrola,
and so I took the sand and put it on a nice green felt and tried to do something.
Of course, the sand just went everywhere.
My mother came in and she said, I think maybe you'd better wait for your father.
So when he came home, he explained that you didn't put sand with furniture,
and they had to send it out and get it fixed.
I think what we just watched is really important,
as Vivica shares a story about her childhood and her love of pottery
really beginning in its infancy when she makes the sand
and it flies all over the living room.
But the thing that's really important to note is that her parents didn't shame her.
Her mother told her to talk to her father,
and her father said, we'd better not do that with furniture.
So she gets to hold on to this little piece as something that's of her
that she doesn't really actualize for 30 more years, probably.
And so many of us have experienced the same kind of thing
where we were shamed horribly or punished or beaten or heaven knows what.
And then not only don't we ever get to find that little kernel of who we were again,
but we may have an aversion to it for the rest of our lives.
I had Monday off, and I met a woman who was a woman artist.
They had asked me to join because I was painting.
And I said, what are you doing?
She said, I'm having a wonderful time taking pottery at art school.
And I went over and I took the class at one time.
I always thought there was something wrong with me,
that I didn't want to weave all the time or I didn't want to do jewelry.
If I wanted something, I did it.
But once I started with the pottery class, I never changed.
We all seem to think that we have to know exactly what we want to be,
and if we find ourselves doing something for a few months or a few years
and then changing it, we think there's something wrong with us
instead of realizing that maybe we haven't exactly found it right.
Maybe we have to make a slight turn or maybe a big turn.
But it isn't that something's wrong with us.
You know, the comparison between the pottery and the person is so similar.
I mean, that's what we are too.
We put on roles and it doesn't work.
What we have to do is it has to come out of us.
It's the same as the clay, isn't it?
I think so because we both like nature and we both take care of the garden.
Otto has a definite routine for my, I guess, early days.
He always sweeps, then he feeds the peacocks,
and then we go in and then we usually have breakfast.
We'll just have tea early in the morning.
Otto says something so important here.
We have two strong people in a relationship,
and his secret is that they listen to each other.
And so many of us in a relationship, especially when there's two strong people,
we try to control each other, and of course we have disaster.
And all we have to really do is really listen, really hear each other,
which isn't waiting for the other person to finish a sentence and then making our point.
It's really valuing and hearing this other person even when you disagree with them.
So when you have something that's going on between the two of you, you talk about it.
You don't just put it under the rug.
No, you explain it.
And how did you learn that?
Well, it just happened. It just happened that way.
Because two strong people, you just have to stand or sit and listen.
So part of it is learning listening to each other.
I think that's the whole problem with all these divorces.
People don't sit and talk it out.
I think one of the big mistakes we make is that we think that the only people
that are creative or can be considered creative are people that are obviously artists,
potters, painters, poets, sculptors, architects.
And the truth is that the creative process comes through all of us when we're doing what we love
and we're connected to that part of us that's got a gift to give and we're giving that gift.
When you think of the potters around the country,
there are so many potters who were architects first or they were a businessman or something,
and then when they got in it, they found themselves.
We have to have no conceived ideals about what creativity is or what our time span is
or when we're supposed to do something.
I think there's an awful lot of people who don't really find themselves until way later in their lives.
And I always like to use the analogy of an oak tree and a eucalyptus.
An oak tree doesn't look very good when it's age 30, but at 350 it looks terrific.
And a eucalyptus is outstanding at age 30, and at 350 it isn't on the planet anymore.
And all the way through history, we have people who really found themselves later in life,
even as we look at President Lincoln, who was an utter failure at almost everything he tried
until he ran for president.
That was the right thing for him, and I guess he did pretty well.
It's always a challenge to work on the wheel because the more you throw on it, the more efficient you get.
It's like playing an instrument.
First you learn the scale and you get like a beginner, you don't get too sure of yourself,
but after a while you play the notes, then you put yourself into the notes.
The same with the clay.
So you have to get to that place.
You have to get to that point.
And I think a lot of people quit before then.
Before that, they get discouraged.
I've seen you pull up one of your big pots, and how do you get that relationship
so that it comes the way you want it to come?
Well, it's a steadiness coming up, you hold your breath.
Some people don't hold their breath so they lose control of it.
I hold my breath until I get up to the top, then I breathe again.
Wow.
See, that's what I do.
That's your secret?
That's a secret.
You have to hold your breath.
I think we have to hold our breath a lot in life.
Al Strakas has been a collector of pottery and a wide variety of art for over 30 years.
His Bruce Goff designed home has been featured in almost every architectural magazine in the world,
and stands as one of the most unique and wondrous homes anywhere.
Even more amazing, Al created all of this on a very modest income and with his own hands.
Al has always had an incredible eye and consistently recognized talent long before prices soared.
He has been a major influence on many people's lives, including my own,
helping them to become more attuned to beauty and to art.
I think we live in a golden age.
I like to say that.
We hear about all this destruction, we listen on TV, we listen on radio.
But where in the history of man, ever, as an ordinary working man,
had access to the greatest art and libraries, greatest museums, greatest literature,
we forget that we are truly living in this golden age.
We really are.
Does this sound like the story of a man who was a high school dropout,
who was diagnosed with a serious heart condition at the age of 12,
and who comes from a family of poverty and violence?
Well, it is.
We have a tremendous amount to learn from this man.
He educated himself all the way through.
He became the miracle that was him.
He's an example of what we can do to become the miracle that's within all of us.
I had an aunt and an uncle who committed suicide because they were alcoholics,
and I lived right next door to a speakeasy.
So I saw a lot of violence.
We lived in these tenement houses, and in between a tenement house we had a yard.
I think it was about 10 or 12 foot wide.
And most people had tin cans and rubbish in their yards.
So my view from my back porch, I was not looking into a forest.
I was looking into gas-container drums and railroad tracks.
But I could always look down and see this garden.
No matter what our surrounding, no matter where we live, no matter what our circumstances,
we can all have beauty around us if we pay attention to it.
We have to value it.
And when we do, beauty can change our lives in ways we can't even fathom
and become the underpinning of who we become as it did with Al.
I was a high school dropout because I hated school
because every time I got a bad grade, my father would strap me with a big wide strap.
So to me, school was punishment.
My escape, why I did this, I couldn't even tell you, was running to the library.
But I think the biggest thing I did other than that was I started working with my hands,
making model airplanes and model boats.
This is something I never got criticism from my parents from because they didn't know a damn thing about it.
It was something that was totally me.
And I started working with my hands.
And the fact that I built this house, most of it with my own hands, really has paid off.
We see here with Al, as with everyone in this video,
that what he is drawn to by nature as a child turns out to be very important in who he becomes as an adult.
He doesn't really allow himself to have what turns out to be one of the world's most unique houses
until he finally gets to the point in his life where he resolves his history
and stops blaming everyone around him for his problems,
and he takes responsibility for his actions, and then his life changes.
And this is what happens for all of us when we make that shift.
I blame my wife. I blamed a lot of my job.
I made a lot of darn excuses, and I think when I made it in my mind to finally build it,
it was like saying, I'm going to do it, regardless of the cost, and I'm going to do it regardless.
It's one of the last things I want to do, and I brought up a family, and I'm married.
So you really couldn't do it until you stopped blaming.
That's right. I think the blaming part,
and I also think becoming active in religious science has helped me
because the basic teaching there is not to blame, take total responsibility for your own actions,
and stop pointing the finger at someone else.
And it seems when I stop that process, automatically doors open.
I know this has been very true for me in my own life.
When I was 18, I entered adulthood, and I was absolutely clueless as to how to handle things,
how to run my life, how to be a grown-up.
I was married and divorced in the same year. I made the minimum wage until I was 27 years old.
And it was only after all of that that I finally started to take a look
at maybe the possibility that I was doing something, that there was something that I was creating
that was making a mess out of my life.
I had some very difficult choices to face.
There were some difficult things that had happened to me as a child,
and I had to come to the place that I couldn't blame anyone else for where I was now,
even though those things had happened.
It was when I finally made that bridge, when I finally took that responsibility that my life changed.
Then I started to grow, and miracles happened.
And that's possible for all of us, regardless of what we've been through,
regardless of what's happened to us.
Don't ever blame anyone else for what's happened in your life,
that you are responsible for everything that you do,
regardless of what your parents were or how you've been hurt.
And that was a very difficult concept for me. It took a long time.
I still have a lot of this in me, but I've overcome a lot of it.
When Sal was able to stop blaming everyone else in his life for what was happening to him,
and was able to take responsibility, that's when amazing things began to happen to him.
He still didn't have a lot of money. He never did.
But he met Bruce Garth and wound up having this wonderful, unique home.
This is a lesson for all of us.
If I was going to tell anybody anything, the most important thing is go to the top and go to the best.
You can always go down, but you can't always go up, because it's very difficult,
because people on a lower rung discourage you.
People on top will always encourage you.
It's interesting how we're often afraid to approach the very best in a field.
And the truth really is that the best people in a field are usually the most secure,
and they don't need to pull us down. They're more interested in encouraging us and pulling us down.
And the people who present themselves as experts who tend to pull us down
are really the ones who are not very secure within themselves.
I think one of the most remarkable things that's happened to me,
people have come into my life that I never knew existed, some of the most creative, open-minded people,
people like Jim Hubble and Beatrice Wood and Hynos and Sam Maloof and other great creative people.
And I think it's then that I started to realize that there's more to life
than just eating and sleeping.
One of the most extraordinary things about what Al has created is that he created it way later in life.
So many of us stop living after a certain point, or we stop trying,
or we retire and do nothing with our lives.
We have the potential to be active in growing all of our lives.
And for many of us, we don't really come into our own until way later in life.
And we need to honor that and use it and make that be part of us and make it be okay.
There was a lot of fear.
But when I worked at Rocketdyne, I showed them the drawings that Bruce Scalf first gave me,
and they were so way out.
I don't think anyone thought it would ever be done.
What Al's talking about here happens so often.
We need to set the intention for something.
We don't have to have a clue how to do it.
We don't have to have the money to do it.
But when we set the intention, amazing things happen.
Somehow the answers come. Somehow the money comes.
Somehow we wind up having the thing.
That's all we have to do. We don't have to know how.
When I needed help, it showed up.
It's only happened this once.
But on a trip back east with my company, Rockwell, I bought a $50 pot.
It was about nine inches high.
I liked it.
My wife at that time thought I was crazy, so I bought her a very conventional pot at the same time.
It was also $50, so she wouldn't criticize me.
And anyway, it was about 20 years, well, 20, 24 years later.
I needed money for the carpeting in this house.
You finished the house?
Yeah, and I read an article in one of the art magazines that this Hans Kopper,
his pottery was going for high prices.
So I took it over to Christie's,
and they said, well, the best place to sell it was probably in London.
So this little nine-inch pot was sent to London, and it was auctioned off.
I got $15,000 for the $50 pot.
You finished your carpet?
I finished my carpet in Thailand.
Meeting James Hubbell and seeing the wonder he has created on his land is an amazing experience,
an experience which often changes people's perception of what is possible in their own lives.
His wonderful organic architecture has been featured in many architectural magazines,
and he has created several exciting public buildings and artwork of every description,
including stained glass doors and windows, incredible metal sculpture,
wonderful symbolic and realistic painting, and poetry as beautiful as any that's ever been created.
Despite his success, James remains a quiet, open, available, and humble man
with deep wisdom to offer and a philosophy of life that matches the beauty of his art.
Portions of the footage in this segment was provided by KPBS-TV in San Diego
from their award-winning documentary, The Art and Vision of James Hubbell.
James Hubbell and his wife Ann bought this beautiful piece of land during the first part of their marriage
when Ann was a schoolteacher and James was at the very beginning of his career as an artist.
As I grew up, I'd been to 13 schools in the first 12 years of school,
and I realized when Ann and I moved here and started to build something
that I needed something that was really permanent,
that in a way using the adobe and the rock was a way of saying, well, I'm here.
And the buildings that I have been doing now, particularly the last studio,
they're much more open to the sky, and what I would hope to do would be
to connect both the earth and heaven together into the building itself.
What we see next is a wonderful example that it's not so much what happens to us in our lives
that create the outcome of who we are, but how we perceive what happens to us.
That's the determining factor.
When I was young or going through school, I didn't get good grades.
If I got a C, that was quite an achievement.
There was a point when I realized that it was really the teacher that had the problem
and that I could go on and live my life without having to be successful in their eyes.
And that freed me up a great deal.
What James talks about here next is a paradox that often it's harder to find who we are internally
when we are successful in the outside world.
We have a way of being in this society that says that our measure of success
is on what other people think and what other people approve of.
And it turns out that that's not a very good way to find who we are internally.
One of the problems I think that so many people have is that they're successful in school
and that all their life they try to go back to that point where both the teachers
and the parents approve of what they're doing.
So many times we turn to drugs or we give up because something happens to us.
We tend to be an athlete and we injure our knee or some other trauma happens to us
that won't allow us to go in the direction we want it to go.
And it's really amazing what we can accomplish and maybe even what we were supposed to accomplish
when we focus on what we can do and not focus on what we can't do.
If you can approach life as an adventure and not looking at it as a series of obstacles,
all of these things that happen are very exciting and they take you to very new places.
When we go on and do what we're capable of as we are, it doesn't necessarily make the pain go away.
But what we have is a choice.
We can either have the pain only or we can go ahead and do the things that we're good at
and we have a rich fulfilling life and the pain.
And it's often the pain anyway that leads to the most growth.
We had two young men work here. They were from junior college.
They were fairly young and they'd worked about two or three weeks here
and we were having lunch with them and they said to me,
Mr. Hubbell, we don't know how you can do what you do.
Our parents are so mixed up it's going to take us at least 20 years
to figure out who we are so we can do anything.
And I tell them that, okay, you're mixed up but what you do is you go and do what you want to do.
You go to work and you use what you've got and the thing that you think is neurotic
or you think is wrong turns out to be a tool that you can use to build on.
The lesson here is that we're not supposed to wait to get well in order to live our lives.
We need to take who we are as we are and use it,
using the things that we already know about ourselves, using the things that we enjoy
and living as fulfilling a life as we possibly can with the things that are wrong.
It doesn't necessarily take away the pain, but with the pain you get a fulfilling life.
Otherwise, we just have the pain.
We have a young lady that works for us and she's very talented
and she is tremendously sensitive and she will have these terrible falling out of love things.
And she suffers so beautifully and I tell her that this is a real gift.
It's really the basis of being an artist because you sense things, you feel things.
The trouble is if you only feel it and you don't put it to work,
then it becomes a disease almost.
And so, you know, if she can take the pain she feels and begin to express it
in the work in her life, then it's a gift. Otherwise, it's not.
What we need to understand is that being torn to a soul level can be a gift as well as a curse.
We're often torn to a soul level by life, by childhood trauma, by events that happen to us.
And the truth is that once we're there, once we're at that soul level,
then we have access to the creative part of who we are.
We have access to our spiritual self. We have access to the child energy.
These are very important parts of us.
I mean, everybody has their own gift and their own talent.
You know, like you could have a person that basically can't do hardly anything.
Maybe their big gift in life is to pet a cat, you know.
And we all can give something back in the world.
And we all can do something that's special with who we are.
One of the greatest sadnesses is that so many people never do find out what's in them.
They never even look and they never even know what they could have been, what was available to them.
The sadness really, I think, is that they don't trust themselves enough to do it.
I think people often know what they need to do, but they just don't allow it.
They don't think that they're important enough or their ideas are important enough,
and they don't allow themselves to do it.
The truth is that we have to be able to trust ourselves and we have to be able to let go.
When life goes a different way than we thought it was going to go, we can't hold on.
It's like being like a river so that when things come into you, both good and bad, you don't stop them there.
You don't say, okay, stay here, I'm going to be miserable.
You know, somebody's died and you want to hold it.
What you have to do is let it out, let it flow through you so that it can produce something that makes the world better.
And the good things too, you can't hold on to them.
The little prince, do you know the book?
The part where the fox teaches the boy about when he dies, the little fox.
Well, what the boy has to learn is that in order to care for something, you have to be willing to have it pass through you.
It's not, nothing can stay in the river in one place.
It becomes stagnant.
The river has to keep flowing.
One of the reasons that I like to use so many different materials and I'll use them very close together
is because as a young person I couldn't understand the difference between matter and spirit.
To me they were both expressions of the same thing.
If you think about, if you don't separate things into categories, you know, like wood is here and sky is there,
then it's very easy to let them move from one material to the other and from spiritual ideas to physical ideas.
And so like putting tile and wood or tile and stone together is a very natural thing to do.
And I think it's that feeling about things being unseparated that allows one to do that.
The other thing about this is that we often put things in a sort of hierarchical places,
like people will say like the rose is more evolved than a rock, but yet they do very different things.
And each one is its own, is right for itself.
And so I don't believe in that kind of categorizing.
I think that every tree is a perfect tree and every person is perfect in their own self.
That there isn't any sort of hierarchical value system to things like that.
What's so amazing here is that it turns out that not only is it really okay for us to be different,
but it's actually imperative to have people that are willing to be different.
Without it our society can't even survive well.
One of the words that I find really interesting and also the people is the word eccentric,
which means out of center.
It's like as individuals or as a culture where we are going in one direction in our life.
And like the culture might be viewed as a large ship that's traveling and very difficult for it to change its direction.
The eccentric is the individual out in a little rowboat paddling like mad to go somewhere different.
Sometimes those eccentrics or those people find places that the big ship should be going and will help it from going over the edge.
So I think it's important that we value in our culture not only the eccentric in others,
but the eccentricity in ourselves because that's leading us to a new place.
To be an artist is a gift and not to act on the dreams that you have is almost immoral.
In keeping with the spirit of this film, Beatrice, after an incredible bout with a major illness,
recovers enough to be included in person just in time to be a part of this production.
First of all, I just want to say to you what an utter wonderous joy it is to me
that you have recovered enough from such an incredible illness to be part of this.
It's rather remarkable that I've come back and every day I see an improvement.
Now, where age is concerned, I'm very fortunate.
I go with the scientists who say there's no such thing as space or age.
And I never think, my God, I'm 100, never think of that.
I always think, oh, I'm going to write this. I'm going to make this on the bowl.
Oh, and here comes a wonderful young man. So I have a wonderful time.
And age doesn't bother me at all.
In fact, it gives me a freedom to say a lot of things that I couldn't say if I were younger.
So I enjoy being old.
When you were so sick, and I know you were in the hospital for two months, you had two surgeries,
what kind of things did you say to yourself?
What kind of messages did you give to yourself so that you could come through?
I just relaxed. And my mind was clear.
I just lay there and said, oh, it's too bad. I can't get into my workroom.
But for a long time, I've been ready to die. We all have to die.
And because I've read a great deal, I don't think death is the end.
And I don't know if I can put this into words.
But one day when I was at my weakest, I had a choice, a breathing.
And I felt I was right up to getting into death.
And I was at a very strange experience of consciousness.
As if I had choice of breathing.
And if I had taken one breath of a certain kind, I would have gone into death.
And somehow, very gently, I breathed and stayed alive.
Now, words cannot describe that.
But it was a very telling and strange experience.
And even though I knew that I might die and don't fear death, and though I was very weak,
this thing of wanting to be alive still pulled at me.
So it seems that we have more choice than we think we do.
But we have choice with this every minute, and that's what we don't realize.
I think it's very important that we pursue the thing that attracts us, regardless of what result comes.
Now, I am not naturally a craftsman.
I got into pottery. It's very interesting.
I was probably the worst student at USC when I started.
But I've had very good teachers.
Glenn Lukens at USC and the Nazis who came from Germany, great daughters.
They did a great deal to help me.
And my colleagues who live here in Ojai, the Hanos, have helped me a great deal.
But it's working. It does it. I work. I'm a worker.
And I can only say to young people who are interested, because pottery is very fascinating,
work at it. Go to museums. Expose your eyes to beauty.
So our exposure to beauty and our willingness to accept discipline is very important.
That's a very sensitive subject, because by nature I'm very slothful, absent-minded.
And I have learned that one has to be accurate, which is truth.
If one's accurate, the heavens open. One's life completely changes.
For instance, I had an agent when I was doing pottery years ago.
She went away on a trip, and I delivered the pottery myself to Bullock's Wilshire.
And the buyer said, Where's your invoice? And I said, Invoice? What's an invoice?
She said, A list. I said, Madam, I'm an artist. I don't make lists.
She said, Sit down. How do you expect to get paid?
Cut me in two was a revolution in my life, and since then my invoices have been perfect.
It opened up a door of a completely new way to live.
And as I progress towards heaven from day to day, I realize the importance of accuracy, of truth.
Now we talked about this last summer, but you had written me a letter at your 100th birthday
where you said that those of us who have creative outlets are the lucky ones.
And I wish that I could reorder the world, that we could all do what we're best suited for.
So many people are round holes in square spaces.
And if you're in your right hole, you will work, you will accomplish something.
But most of us are in the wrong hole.
You see, gosh, I just long to be president and change the world.
I know so many things. But of course, you know, the answer isn't very nice.
We can only change ourselves, and that's very difficult, and I don't care to work at it.
So to somebody who's bright, but maybe working in a field that's not of their heart, what would you tell them?
If we keep at something that pulls us, something will open.
In your life, I don't think I've ever heard you talk about the impact of nature or your connection to nature.
Well, I can only answer that, that I choose to live away from cities.
I love my house facing mountains.
I love the mountains facing me, and I'm not a very nice person because I'm very jealous.
I don't like other people to look at the mountains. They're mine.
And I love trees.
I loved when we're in a car and we pass trees, even the barren trees, their branches make such beautiful lines.
I just love nature.
You know, the title of this film is You Are the Miracle.
Right, I'm a miracle, and I'll tell you why.
I was brought up to be helpless with the governors, very strict.
I never spoke to boys till I was 19, and through work, through discipline,
I am still at 100.
It's a running a business, all through work and discipline.
Self-discipline is vital.
Now, life presents most of us with hardships. They're a blessing.
If I had a child and he or she had great trouble, I would know that through that they would learn.
And I can say my early years were very, very difficult.
No money, but I've learned something.
That's all I can say. And I've learned that truth, accuracy, is vital.
You've heard about the importance of basic discipline in our lives,
the incredible impact that beauty and nature can have upon our lives,
the reality that challenges can be doors to go someplace else and not things to block us when we pay attention,
that it's not about being perfect, and it's certainly, certainly not about having perfect childhoods.
And when we set the intention to do anything we love,
regardless of whether we know anything about where it's going, amazing things happen.
So I challenge you to take what fits for you in this film, to use it in your own life,
to motivate you toward your own transformation, that you may act on your own dreams,
that you may create your own miracle, and to remember something that James once shared with me,
that when you're facing a dilemma, a difficult decision, and you don't know which way to go,
to say yes, the outcome is usually more interesting,
and remember most of all that we really are all the miracle.
Music