We were lucky to catch up with Eve Bessier recently and have shared our conversation below.
Eve, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?
Resilience is more than just being able to get up after being knocked down by life. It’s also the quality of maintaining your belief in yourself and in the possibility of better things ahead. My resilience comes from a combination of self-discipline, humor, generosity of spirit and interactions with nature. I try to stay positive and focus on the good in each day, no matter what. It’s important to find the humor in life’s unpredictable scenarios and regularly create humor even in the darkest moments. Sometimes getting silly provides the best wisdom. Humor can be a deflector, but it can also bring things into sharp focus, allowing me to see clearly what needs to happen while maintaining a lightness of being. Appreciating others, whether friends or just the check-out person at the grocery store, helps keep me connected to community and a feeling of generosity that leads to paying it forward. I love the natural world. Trees feed my soul and I make it a point to be outside in nature every day, or at least two or three times a week. The forest restores my energy and my optimism. If you have some sort of natural environment where you can walk, run, sit and just be. That’s a great resource for resilience. Resilience is a daily practice, like meditation. It comes to your rescue when you’ve been diligent about developing your skills on a regular basis. It’s like working out with weights. You train your muscles to be able to handle physical stress. Building resilience is training your mind, heart and spirit to be able to handle all kinds of situations.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I started composing songs, poems and telling stories as a small child. Writing is a central part of my life. I love sharing the joy of creativity through enriched language. I also share that joy through music and vibrant visual art. I’ve been performing vocal jazz and poetry in live settings for over forty years. Being a creative has always been at the core of my life. I hold a Bachelor or Arts in Creative Writing and a Master of Education, and spent a couple of decades working in education for the University of California. I’ve taught writing and voice for twenty plus years, with the intention of supporting the creative empowerment of my students. I am a poet laureate emerita of Davis, California; and also of Silver City, New Mexico. As laureate, I served my communities by hosting literary readings, giving workshops, and bringing poets together to celebrate the power of language. I am recently retired from teaching, but continue to write, publish and perform both solo and with my life partner, Patrick Markham. My writing is widely published in literary journals and includes three full-length collections of poetry, a science fiction novel and a collection of short fiction. I’ve won various literary awards, but my main purpose in writing is to bring beautiful language and meaningful stories to the page. All of my books are available on Amazon.com. You can experience my unique blending of jazz and poetry on my website: www.jazzpoeteve.com. You can find a plethora of my videos on YouTube. My acrylic landscapes are on view at the Otero Artspace in Alamogordo, New Mexico. I am a monthly columnist for Southwest Word Fiesta: www.swwordfiesta.org. Most of my recent writing is in a form I’ve created, which I call the poetic micro essay. I hope you will explore and enjoy my creative work. I am not currently seeking clients, but I am interested in mentoring others and am honored to be included in this publication.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The three qualities that are most impactful in my continuing journey are: being appreciative, receptive and generous. In the entrepreneurial world of the arts, it’s easy to become narcissistic. While there are certainly many artistic people who have made successful careers by being self-serving, I feel that there is no real fulfillment without a spirit of generosity. If you can hone an attitude of being appreciative of others and of the many gifts in your daily life, it will allow you to be receptive to serendipitous events and connections that will lead you to satisfying success beyond your initial expectations. Every day, try to find someone or something to deeply appreciate, allow good things to come to you by being open and nonjudgemental, and be generous to others by listening and being fully present with them. I believe these skills and qualities will serve all aspects of your personal and professional life.
What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Any advice or strategies?
It’s hard to not feel overwhelmed in our current culture. Information and demands are constantly flowing into our cyber lives, on top of the responsibilities of our day-to-day physical lives. When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I rely on my years of meditation practice of slow down in the moment by taking some very conscious breaths, and then I pick one thing that needs attention. I am lucky to not be in a situation that demands constant multi-tasking. I believe multi-tasking is one of the mistakes of common practice. It means we are doing so much at once that our brains can’t bring our best to any of the tasks at hand. When you are just starting out in any venture, it’s easy to take on more than you can handle effectively because you don’t want to lose any opportunities. They say opportunity only knocks once, but I believe that this is not the case. The best and most authentic opportunities will come to you when you are ready to take them on, and any time sooner than that is bound to end up being disappointing. Learn to say no and prioritize your goals. Distraction is such a common state of being, focus on what’s in front of you now. Be aware of how you might be wasting your attention as well. It’s easy to get pulled off task by social media, a new game, or someone else’s emotional state. Learning to recognize and acknowledge when we are allowing distractions to dominate our time is the first step in adjusting our focus and getting our attention back onto our true intentions.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.jazzpoeteve.com
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83PzDMwUb1I
- Soundcloud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83PzDMwUb1I
Image Credits
Eve West Bessier
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