Story Frame 84 – Epilogue: The Right Place

Wherever you are is always the right place. There is never a need to fix anything, to hitch up the bootstraps of the soul and start at some higher place.

Start right where you are.

Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

Do you remember that young woman, the one who was sitting alone and shivering in the cold on a park bench in the middle of Washington DC?

When we began these adventures, it was the week before Christmas, she was six months pregnant, and she was crying because she had just lost her job in a career she loved. She had absolutely no idea what lay ahead and if you’d told her the adventures that would unfold over the coming years, it’s likely she would not have believed you.

She had not yet heard of Julia Cameron, it would be another four years before The Artist’s Way would be published.

Nevertheless, she started from the right place, which was right there, in that moment, on that park bench. After she’d had a good cry, she wiped her eyes with her reddened hands and pulled herself together.

In the coming days, she perused the employment section of the Washington Post, looking for architecture firms hiring project architects. Not that she was trained as an architect. She wasn’t. But having worked – albeit it tangentially – in corporate interior design, she thought it sounded like interesting field to work in.

She called a few firms successful enough to be hiring staff, getting past the receptionist each time by asking for the principal’s name mentioned in the ad. When she was put through, she immediately explained to the principal she was not an architect. However, she had worked in commercial design and perhaps she could help them on the business development side?

To her surprise, she got several interviews this way, which resulted in two jobs each of which paid enough to get her through the next several years, but just barely. She and her husband Steve had just had their second baby, Leif, when their finances took a drastic turn for the worse as Steve’s work collapsed and they had to sell the little Money Pit house they had so lovingly renovated.

They rented a house not far away but still struggled financially.

And it was in that house, late in the evening one night when, happy to have seen Baryshnikov’s Nutcracker on television, she picked up the phoned and offered her local PBS station $20 she really did not have.

And that phone call set off more than thirty years of adventures in the world of filmmaking storytellers.

None of it has been easy. But in retrospect, that is what has made it better.

Kristin Fellows is a published writer, world traveler, and a former documentary film consultant.

More about Kristin @ kristinfellowswriter.com