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On my desk in my office, I keep a small clay pot

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that I made in college. It's raku, which is a kind of pottery

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that began in Japan centuries ago as a way of

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making bowls for the Japanese tea ceremony.

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This one is more than 400 years old.

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Each one was pinched or carved out of a ball of clay,

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and it was the imperfections that people cherished.

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Everyday pots like this cup take eight to 10 hours to fire.

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I just took this out of the kiln last week, and the kiln itself

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takes another day or two to cool down, but raku

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is really fast. You do it outside, and you take the kiln

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up to temperature. In 15 minutes, it goes to 1,500 degrees,

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and as soon as you see that the glaze has melted inside,

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you can see that faint sheen, you turn the kiln off,

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and you reach in with these long metal tongs,

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you grab the pot, and in Japan, this red-hot pot

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would be immediately immersed in a solution of green tea,

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and you can imagine what that steam would smell like.

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But here in the United States, we ramp up the drama

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a little bit, and we drop our pots into sawdust,

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which catches on fire, and you take a garbage pail,

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and you put it on top, and smoke starts pouring out.

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I would come home with my clothes reeking of woodsmoke.

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I love raku because it allows me to play with the elements.

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I can shape a pot out of clay and choose a glaze,

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but then I have to let it go to the fire and the smoke,

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and what's wonderful is the surprises that happen,

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like this crackle pattern, because it's really stressful

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on these pots. They go from 1,500 degrees

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to room temperature in the space of just a minute.

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Raku is a wonderful metaphor for the process of creativity.

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I find in so many things that tension between

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what I can control and what I have to let go

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happens all the time, whether I'm creating a new radio show

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or just at home negotiating with my teenage sons.

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When I sat down to write a book about creativity,

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I realized that the steps were reversed.

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I had to let go at the very beginning, and I had to

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immerse myself in the stories of hundreds of artists

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and writers and musicians and filmmakers, and as I listened

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to these stories, I realized that creativity

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grows out of everyday experiences

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more often than you might think, including

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letting go.

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It was supposed to break, but that's okay. (Laughter) (Laughs)

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That's part of the letting go, is sometimes it happens

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and sometimes it doesn't, because creativity also grows

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from the broken places.

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The best way to learn about anything

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is through stories, and so I want to tell you a story

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about work and play and about four aspects of life

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that we need to embrace

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in order for our own creativity to flourish.

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The first embrace is something that we think,

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"Oh, this is very easy," but it's actually getting harder,

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and that's paying attention to the world around us.

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So many artists speak about needing to be open,

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to embrace experience, and that's hard to do when

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you have a lighted rectangle in your pocket that

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takes all of your focus.

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The filmmaker Mira Nair speaks about growing up

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in a small town in India. Its name is Bhubaneswar,

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and here's a picture of one of the temples in her town.

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Mira Nair: In this little town, there were like 2,000 temples.

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We played cricket all the time. We kind of grew up

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in the rubble. The major thing that inspired me,

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that led me on this path, that made me a filmmaker eventually,

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was traveling folk theater that would come through the town

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and I would go off and see these great battles

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of good and evil by two people in a school field

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with no props but with a lot of, you know,

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passion, and hashish as well, and it was amazing.

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You know, the folk tales of Mahabharata and Ramayana,

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the two holy books, the epics that everything comes out of

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in India, they say. After seeing that Jatra, the folk theater,

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I knew I wanted to get on, you know, and perform.

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Julie Burstein: Isn't that a wonderful story?

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You can see the sort of break in the everyday.

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There they are in the school fields, but it's good and evil,

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and passion and hashish. And Mira Nair was a young girl

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with thousands of other people watching this performance,

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but she was ready. She was ready to open up

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to what it sparked in her, and it led her,

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as she said, down this path to become

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an award-winning filmmaker.

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So being open for that experience that might change you

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is the first thing we need to embrace.

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Artists also speak about how some of their most powerful work

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comes out of the parts of life that are most difficult.

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The novelist Richard Ford speaks about

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a childhood challenge that continues to be something

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he wrestles with today. He's severely dyslexic.

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Richard Ford: I was slow to learn to read, went all the way

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through school not really reading more than the minimum,

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and still to this day can't read silently

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much faster than I can read aloud,

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but there were a lot of benefits to being dyslexic for me

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because when I finally did reconcile myself to how slow

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I was going to have to do it, then I think I came very slowly

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into an appreciation of all of those qualities of language

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and of sentences that are not just the cognitive

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aspects of language: the syncopations, the sounds of words,

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what words look like, where paragraphs break,

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where lines break. I mean, I wasn't so badly dyslexic that

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I was disabled from reading. I just had to do it

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really slowly, and as I did, lingering on those sentences

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as I had to linger, I fell heir to language's other qualities,

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which I think has helped me write sentences.

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JB: It's so powerful. Richard Ford, who's won the Pulitzer Prize,

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says that dyslexia helped him write sentences.

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He had to embrace this challenge, and I use that word

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intentionally. He didn't have to overcome dyslexia.

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He had to learn from it. He had to learn to hear the music

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in language.

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Artists also speak about how pushing up against

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the limits of what they can do, sometimes pushing

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into what they can't do, helps them focus

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on finding their own voice.

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The sculptor Richard Serra talks about how,

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as a young artist, he thought he was a painter,

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and he lived in Florence after graduate school.

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While he was there, he traveled to Madrid,

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where he went to the Prado to see this picture

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by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez.

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It's from 1656, and it's called "Las Meninas,"

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and it's the picture of a little princess

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and her ladies-in-waiting, and if you look over

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that little blonde princess's shoulder, you'll see a mirror,

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and reflected in it are her parents, the King and Queen

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of Spain, who would be standing where you might stand

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to look at the picture.

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As he often did, Velázquez put himself in this painting too.

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He's standing on the left with his paintbrush in one hand

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and his palette in the other.

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Richard Serra: I was standing there looking at it,

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and I realized that Velázquez was looking at me,

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and I thought, "Oh. I'm the subject of the painting."

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And I thought, "I'm not going to be able to do that painting."

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I was to the point where I was using a stopwatch

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and painting squares out of randomness,

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and I wasn't getting anywhere. So I went back and dumped

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all my paintings in the Arno, and I thought, I'm going to just start playing around.

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JB: Richard Serra says that so nonchalantly, you might

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have missed it. He went and saw this painting by a guy

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who'd been dead for 300 years, and realized,

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"I can't do that," and so Richard Serra went back

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to his studio in Florence, picked up all of his work

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up to that point, and threw it in a river.

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Richard Serra let go of painting at that moment,

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but he didn't let go of art. He moved to New York City,

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and he put together a list of verbs

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— to roll, to crease, to fold —

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more than a hundred of them, and as he said,

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he just started playing around. He did these things

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to all kinds of material. He would take a huge sheet of lead

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and roll it up and unroll it. He would do the same thing

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to rubber, and when he got to the direction "to lift,"

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he created this, which is in the Museum of Modern Art.

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Richard Serra had to let go of painting

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in order to embark on this playful exploration

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that led him to the work that he's known for today:

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huge curves of steel that require our time and motion

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to experience. In sculpture,

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Richard Serra is able to do what he couldn't do in painting.

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He makes us the subject of his art.

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So experience and challenge

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and limitations are all things we need to embrace

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for creativity to flourish.

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There's a fourth embrace, and it's the hardest.

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It's the embrace of loss,

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the oldest and most constant of human experiences.

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In order to create, we have to stand in that space

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between what we see in the world and what we hope for,

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looking squarely at rejection, at heartbreak,

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at war, at death.

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That's a tough space to stand in.

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The educator Parker Palmer calls it "the tragic gap,"

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tragic not because it's sad but because it's inevitable,

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and my friend Dick Nodel likes to say,

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"You can hold that tension like a violin string

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and make something beautiful."

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That tension resonates in the work of the photographer

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Joel Meyerowitz, who at the beginning of his career was

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known for his street photography, for capturing a moment

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on the street, and also for his beautiful photographs

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of landscapes -- of Tuscany, of Cape Cod,

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of light.

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Joel is a New Yorker, and his studio for many years

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was in Chelsea, with a straight view downtown

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to the World Trade Center, and he photographed

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those buildings in every sort of light.

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You know where this story goes.

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On 9/11, Joel wasn't in New York. He was out of town,

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but he raced back to the city, and raced down to the site

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of the destruction.

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Joel Meyerowitz: And like all the other passersby,

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I stood outside the chain link fence on Chambers

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and Greenwich, and all I could see was the smoke

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and a little bit of rubble, and I raised my camera

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to take a peek, just to see if there was something to see,

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and some cop, a lady cop, hit me on my shoulder,

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and said, "Hey, no pictures!"

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And it was such a blow that it woke me up,

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in the way that it was meant to be, I guess.

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And when I asked her why no pictures, she said,

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"It's a crime scene. No photographs allowed."

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And I asked her, "What would happen if I was a member

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of the press?" And she told me,

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"Oh, look back there," and back a block was the press corps

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tied up in a little penned-in area,

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and I said, "Well, when do they go in?"

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and she said, "Probably never."

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And as I walked away from that, I had this crystallization,

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probably from the blow, because it was an insult in a way.

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I thought, "Oh, if there's no pictures,

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then there'll be no record. We need a record."

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And I thought, "I'm gonna make that record.

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I'll find a way to get in, because I don't want to

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see this history disappear."

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JB: He did. He pulled in every favor he could,

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and got a pass into the World Trade Center site,

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where he photographed for nine months almost every day.

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Looking at these photographs today brings back

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the smell of smoke that lingered on my clothes

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when I went home to my family at night.

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My office was just a few blocks away.

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But some of these photographs are beautiful,

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and we wondered, was it difficult for Joel Meyerowitz

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to make such beauty out of such devastation?

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JM: Well, you know, ugly, I mean, powerful

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and tragic and horrific and everything, but

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it was also as, in nature, an enormous event

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that was transformed after the fact into this residue,

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and like many other ruins

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— you go to the ruins of the Colosseum or the ruins of a cathedral someplace —

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and they take on a new meaning when you watch the weather.

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I mean, there were afternoons I was down there,

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and the light goes pink and there's a mist in the air

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and you're standing in the rubble, and I found myself

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recognizing both the inherent beauty of nature

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and the fact that nature, as time,

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is erasing this wound.

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Time is unstoppable, and it transforms the event.

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It gets further and further away from the day,

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and light and seasons temper it in some way,

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and it's not that I'm a romantic. I'm really a realist.

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The reality is, there's the Woolworth Building

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in a veil of smoke from the site, but it's now like a scrim

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across a theater, and it's turning pink,

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you know, and down below there are hoses spraying,

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and the lights have come on for the evening, and the water

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is turning acid green because the sodium lamps are on,

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and I'm thinking, "My God, who could dream this up?"

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But the fact is, I'm there, it looks like that,

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you have to take a picture.

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JB: You have to take a picture. That sense of urgency,

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of the need to get to work, is so powerful in Joel's story.

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When I saw Joel Meyerowitz recently, I told him how much

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I admired his passionate obstinacy, his determination

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to push through all the bureaucratic red tape to get to work,

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and he laughed, and he said, "I'm stubborn,

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but I think what's more important

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is my passionate optimism."

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The first time I told these stories, a man in the audience

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raised his hand and said, "All these artists talk about

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their work, not their art, which has got me thinking about

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my work and where the creativity is there,

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and I'm not an artist." He's right. We all wrestle

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with experience and challenge, limits and loss.

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Creativity is essential to all of us,

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whether we're scientists or teachers,

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parents or entrepreneurs.

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I want to leave you with another

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image of a Japanese tea bowl. This one

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is at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C.

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It's more than a hundred years old and you can still see

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the fingermarks where the potter pinched it.

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But as you can also see, this one did break

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at some point in its hundred years.

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But the person who put it back together,

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instead of hiding the cracks,

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decided to emphasize them, using gold lacquer to repair it.

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This bowl is more beautiful now, having been broken,

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than it was when it was first made,

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and we can look at those cracks, because

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they tell the story that we all live,

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of the cycle of creation and destruction,

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of control and letting go, of picking up the pieces

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and making something new.

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Thank you. (Applause)