A Conversation With Liz Gilbert, Part 4: The Wild

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Liz Gilbert speak at the Nourse Theater in San Francisco. It was a conversation guided by Lisa Congdon, a fine print and graphic artist. As I post more quotes and selections from her talk, I'll be tagging them all under Elizabeth Gilbert for easy finding.

I get really upset when I see people stuck.

It makes me anxious when I see people who want to be doing something and they're not doing it. I think part of the kind of physical anxiety I feel is similar to watching an animal in a cage and the door is open. And the animal is pacing in the cage, and you're like, "The door is literally open." And the animal is like, "Get me out of this cage! Get me out of this cage!"

​When they release chimpanzees back into the wild, they open their cages, and the jungle is all around them, and the chimpanzees literally do that - pacing, circling the cage, stuck inside of it. They could just walk out. But they don't know what the wild is, and so they stay in there, freaking out.

The jungle is your natural habit. The cage is an artificial reality. It's like you've been living in captivity, but that's artificial. What's natural is the wild.

I want you to come out here, and come into the jungle where you want to be, and play, and make things, and make noise, and try stuff. Because it kills me to see you in that cage.