creative practice is a punishment-free zone

and you are a clown fish in a sea anemone

Prologue

Two quotes from the Wikipedia entry for Clownfish:

The magnificent¹ sea anemone can provide extra protection as clownfish can hide inside its soft body.

Nighttime is spent resting deep among the tentacles.

A photo of two anemonefish (clownfish) hiding in the soft body of a sea anemone:

photo by Neville Wooton, CC BY 2.0 License

1. Playground

One day, when my younger son was about three years old, I got a call from one of his preschool teachers. She wanted me to know about an incident. That day, as his class was walking single-file inside from their playground time, my son and his friend turned around and bolted. They reclaimed the playground for just moments before they were retrieved and scolded. The teacher suggested I talk to him about appropriate behavior.

I took her request seriously. I didn’t want my kid to make a habit of breaking rules and causing chaos, and so I told him about the phone call. I described to him what I hoped his behavior would look like the next day, how he would line up so nicely with the other kids and follow them inside. “And I will be so proud of you for listening, I said.”

My son had been listening patiently through my whole lecture, an anomaly I should have noticed. “But Mommy,” he said, half-whispering, “aren’t you so proud of me for not listening?”

It continues to blow my mind that he said that—not that he broke the rules and felt gleeful about it, but that he could articulate this attitude as an ethos.

I think that, in a sense, he was declaring himself a punishment-free zone. My son, as I’ve come to understand him, is in no way immune to the effects of punishment. Attempts to control him affect him profoundly. It’s just that the punishment will yield only further pain, resistance, and chaos, not compliance. ²

Loving him has required me to not just understand but embody this ethos. Not hypothetically. Radically. I succeed and I fail, but the effort has changed me. Here are two cards I wrote last summer:

I suppose this second card is asking: what if your creative practice was like a good parent or a loving home?

2. Anemone

“Creative practice is a punishment-free zone” has become one of the principles of Joyful Practice. I think of these principles not as strict directives (because strict = punishing), but invitations and antidotes, ways of thinking about creative practice that might counteract some bullshit we’ve absorbed along the way.

Sarah and I have a list of them, and each principle will get a page (or a few?) in The Joyful Practice Handbook. When I told Sarah that I wanted to start the page for punishment-free zone, the image that came to mind instantly was an image of clownfish in a sea anemone.

The reason felt obvious. Clownfish belong in sea anemones. They feel at home there. The anemone tentacles are soft and alive. They’re wondrous. Yes. That is how I want the work to feel.

But then I looked up sea anemones and I was worried that I got it all wrong.

Sea anemones eat fish! They sting them and stun them and trap them. Sea anemones have poisonous venom. Sea anemones aren’t plants, they’re animals.

I considered rethinking the metaphor, but I’m stubborn and I like a complication.

Clownfish, unlike other fish, are immune to anemone venom, and this is because, “they have exceptionally low levels of sialic acid in their skin mucous.” This apparently makes them a little like the anemone itself, both the clownfish and the anemone protected by an adaptive layer which allows them to exist in symbiosis. Clownfish thrive in anemones. Anemones thrive when clownfish inhabit them—they grow faster and farther.

And so I ask,

What if your art exists in symbiosis with what stings you?

What if your art exists in symbiosis with the very thing that wants to eat you alive?

What if art is the place you get to transform the venomous tentacle into a soft body that will hold you?

What if your art is a place that’s gentle enough for you to hold the hardest truth?

1. Please note that in this case “magnificent” refers to a particular species of sea anemone, the Radianthus magnifica.

2. If you’re reading this and wondering if I’ve heard of the PDA profile of autism, Yes, and Hello, fellow traveler.