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Halcyon On and OnI

Sticking point #1: “The creative process is often frustrating, but false starts and dead ends are inevitable.”

I used to believe anxiety and frustration were part and parcel of art making, too. But what if I told you it doesn’t have to be that way?

In the spring of 2011, I signed up to volunteer at Sadhana Forest, a reforestation project and vegan community near Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu, India. Founded by Yorit and Aviram Rozin in 2003, Sadhana Forest draws environmentalists from all over the world, and the Ayurvedic vegan food is just as vibrant and varied as the volunteers who prepare and savor it: fruit salads with papaya, passionfruit, and bananas picked just down the road, breakfast porridge with jaggery, warm flavorful yellow dal and other stews and curries, lime-tossed salads of every color and texture. Mealtimes are social and sacred at the same time, with a moment of grateful silence before someone sounds a chime and everyone happily tucks in. Sadhana means “spiritual practice” in Sanskrit, and it’s a fitting name for a place that will change your life, if you let it.

Before my arrival at Sadhana Forest, it hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t actually joking about being addicted to cheese. I’d reached a point where I felt a vague unease whenever I consumed an omelet or my favorite Cotswold cheddar, and I was excited to be joining a vegan community, but I didn’t experience an epiphany until a long-term volunteer struck up a conversation at dinnertime. Jamey gently asked what was holding me back from going vegan, and I said I worried about what would happen when family or friends invited me over for dinner—that I might alienate or inconvenience them.

“I hear what you’re saying,” he replied, “but do you see how small a concern that is compared to the abuse animals suffer for our food, and what animal agriculture is doing to the planet?”

Sitting cross-legged on the reed-matted floor—having scraped the last delicious morsels off my stainless-steel plate, which I would later clean with ashes and vinegar in a basin behind the main hut—I felt a weird and exciting synergy between Jamey and me, as if I’d asked him a very long time ago to meet me here and ask me these questions.

Every creative knows this feeling, even if they haven’t yet experienced it in this context. It’s the click, that achingly perfect moment when the story or image you’ve been fumbling toward for weeks, months, or even years resolves itself into the Legitimate Work you know in your heart it’s meant to be. Artists live for these moments of revelation, or what psychologists call “peak experiences.” Flashing lights, gears clicking into place.

“Yes,” I said. “You’re absolutely right.”

“This thing is bigger than you,” Jamey was telling me. The animals, the planet, our future: there could be no better motives.

In that moment, I made a commitment, but I didn’t anticipate the magnitude of the change I’d experience over the next few weeks. Up to that point in my career as a novelist, I invariably “suffered” trough periods in between books, and these periods of frustration might last up to two years. I would start a new story and read over the pages with mounting despair. Maybe I had no more novels in me—not good ones, anyway. I was trying to clamber out of one of these troughs at the time of my trip to India, but it had never occurred to me that my diet might have an effect on my creative life.

A few days after I decided to go vegan, I came down with sunstroke. Tossing and turning under a mosquito net in the “healing hut,” I felt depleted and full to bursting at the same time, and whenever I surfaced out of a fever dream I reached for my journal. I was getting ideas for everything: novels and short stories and blog posts and recipes I might invent or reinvent. Best of all, a novel idea I’d been struggling with for years finally resolved itself in two simple words: gothic satire. (I still haven’t gotten around to that one. I’m keeping it in my pocket like a cashew-milk caramel, savoring the anticipation.)

I got well again, and the ideas kept coming; since then I’ve written six more books without so much as a daylong trough. One explanation is psychospiritual: there is no angst in my creative work because I’m no longer consuming the fear and grief of cows whose babies have been taken away from them to provide milk for human consumption. There may be a scientific basis for this too: as pharmacology researchers Hassan Malekinejad and Aysa Rezabakhsh wrote in the Iranian Journal of Public Health in 2015, “The naturally occurring hormones in dairy foods have biological effects in humans and animals, which are ranging from growth-promoting effects that related to sex steroids, to carcinogenic properties that associate to some active metabolites of oestrogens and IGF-1.” (That’s “insulin-like growth factor 1,” a hormone produced in highest levels during puberty.) Scientists have also confirmed a link between cancer and the artificial growth hormones commonly used by the livestock industry, and they can offer a biochemical explanation as to why meat from stressed animals is so often discarded as “PSE” (pale, soft, exudative) or “DFD” (dark, firm, dry). Unfortunately, there’s shockingly little research on the connection between the adrenaline, cortisol, and other stress hormones coursing through a frightened animal’s bloodstream and the chronic anxiety of the human who consumes that animal’s flesh.

Framed in these terms, the dark feelings we take for granted in the creative process seem rather karmic. Just now, I found one of my old blog posts from 2008 with notes on my creative cycle, and I had to laugh out loud when I read, “I have never finished revising one novel and started writing the new one the following week or month (and I’ve always wondered about those writers who say they do).” Talk about proving myself wrong—though, unfortunately, many health professionals aren’t willing to do the same. If you Google information on vegan diets, you’ll find a great many blog articles with an obvious anti-vegan bias written by medical doctors, psychologists, and nutritionists who warn against a plant-based diet because the evidence in favor contradicts years’ worth of training. “Depression is related to inflammation in the body and low levels of serotonin,” says Dr. Ulka Agarwal of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. “Plant-based foods naturally lower inflammation in the body because they are naturally low in fat and high in antioxidants. High vegetable intake increases the amount of B vitamins in the diet, which have been found to affect mood.” My own experience jives with scientific study results correlating a vegan diet with lighter moodII and higher energy levels.

In that blog post from 2008, I write about the three Hindu gods sometimes employed to personify the creative cycleIII: Brahma, “the creator,” is the electric excitement you feel when you’ve found the perfect idea, Vishnu, “the maintainer,” represents the actual work, and Shiva, “the destroyer,” ushers in a period of chaos or inactivity in between projects (or having to scrap the work altogether, Heaven forbid). These three show up very differently for me nowadays: my experience of the Brahma phase isn’t a phase at all; it’s a constant. And as for Vishnu, I go back and forth between days and weekends at the library followed by late-night typing in bed (as I am doing now) and more “reasonable” hours. And Shiva doesn’t destroy, he clarifies—though you might say clarity is a form of destruction. As Bernard Shaw writes in Major Barbara, “You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.”

Visual artist Jolynn Van Asten, who teaches transformational art workshops in Phoenix, Arizona, tells me going vegan has eliminated creative block for her too and that there’s no need to “summon the Muse” anymore: “Now I can access ‘flow’ with just an intention to do so—instantly.” I can’t guarantee that if you go vegan your creative growth will be as dramatic as ours has been—“your mileage may vary” and all—but it’s certainly worth a thirty-day test run, don’t you think? I’ve explored my creative potential as an omnivore, a vegetarian, and a vegan, and I feel too full of joy and purpose ever to go back on option three.

I From the Orbital song.

II In cases of clinical depression, a plant-based diet may work in concert with medication and other therapies.

III I hope the point I’m making here is insightful enough to justify the cultural appropriation.