Living Big. Пэм Гроут

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      In fourth grade, another teacher asks the same questions of the same students. Now, only a third of the students are dancers, singers, painters, writers. By high school, the number who are willing to claim artistic talent is down to a paltry handful. Where did the confidence and enthusiasm go?

      Some well-meaning parent or teacher probably told them they were not painters. Some aptitude test with a fancy title gave an official score that said they had better give up that misguided ambition of being a writer. Try accounting. Some guidance counselor broke the news that only a chosen few have artistic talent.

      Very early on, we turn over the reins to something outside ourselves. The coach tells us if we're good enough to be on the basketball team. The music teacher tells us if we have the talent to sing in the choir. Our teachers give us arbitrary grades that tell us if we're smart enough to make the honor role, bright enough to get into college.

      Our art teachers give us the rules: Grass is green, skies are blue. Why did we listen? How can anybody else know what color your grass is? How can anybody else know what notes you're supposed to sing? They know what's right for them. But they haven't a clue what is right for you.

      Only you know that. And you do know. You don't need another workshop, another book, another psychic reading.

      By stepping forward—even when you're not sure you're ready—you'll find genius, power, and magic. Your way will become clear. Oftentimes, we're foggy about our purpose, not quite sure what we want, and it's only because we've been too timid to stick our necks out.

      When we're bold, when we challenge the status quo—both in ourselves and in others—the answers to all our questions will gallop in on charging stallions.

      Being bold is a simple matter of claiming your inheritance. Saying, “Hey look what I can do!” is simple acknowledgment of who you are.

      I am not great because I am Pam Grout, an author, a tennis player, a 5 foot 10 inch mother from Kansas. I am great because I am a human being, part of a proud and noble tribe that includes Gandhi, Shakespeare, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The same heartbeat that pulsed through Picasso and Thomas Edison pulses through me.

      Any one of us can be anything we're bold enough to claim. It's why we see quadriplegics painting beautiful pictures, brushes clenched between their teeth. It's why we see blind people snow-boarding down mountains. The only thing that holds any of us back is ourselves. Opportunities clamor from every side. But many of us are too fainthearted to see the possibilities.

      When we refuse to be bold, when we forget to say, “I count,” we might as well hand in our keys. Without boldness, life is little but rote recitation.

      When Walt Disney was in grade school, a well-meaning teacher, peering over at the flowers he was scribbling in the margins of his paper, tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Walt, honey, those flowers are nice, but flowers don't have faces.”

      Walt turned around, looked her straight in the eye and pronounced boldly, “Mine do.”

      This is the boldness with which we must live. We must refuse to listen to anything or anybody except the inner urgings of our soul.

      As for Walt Disney, well, his flowers certainly did have faces. In Alice in Wonderland, his eighteenth animated feature, the flowers not only had faces, but they had voices, opinions, and a chorus that entertained Alice with the whimsical song, “All in the Golden Afternoon.”

      People Who Live Big

      SAMUEL MOCKBEE

      If We Build It, They Will Live

      WE HAVE TO CHALLENGE THE STATUS QUO TO ALLOW FOR A BETTER FUTURE.

      —Samuel Mockbee

      Samuel Mockbee had it made. He owned a successful architecture firm. Many of his designs won prestigious awards. He was taking on projects of an international scale. He had enough free time to paint and pursue other hobbies. But something bigger was calling him.

      A fifth-generation Alabaman, he knew firsthand about the long-lingering problems of race and poverty in his state. And while many of us would shrug and say, “Well, it's certainly a crying shame, but what can I really do?” Mockbee took what he could do—design homes—and put it to use.

      A professor at Auburn University, Mockbee not only wanted to put his money and his time where his heart was, but he wanted to make sure his first love—architecture—was being used for a noble purpose.

      He started the Rural Studio to help his students understand what architecture was really about. He believed people should live in harmony with their environment. He believed architecture could address social values as well as technical and aesthetic values.

      The idea for Rural Studio started in 1993, when Mockbee, frustrated by student projects that were built only to be torn down, had a bigger idea. Why not build walls in real homes where people could really use them? Why spend all this time coming up with designs that are only theoretical when we could spend the same amount of time designing things that are useful?

      He and his students headed to Hale County, Alabama, one of the poorest counties in America, where a good 36 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

      Surely, they could use some unique housing ideas. What if we could build them homes and try our hand at innovative architecture at the same time? What if we could build these homes ourselves for people who could not otherwise afford them? What if we could offer them for free?

      Needless to say, a person has to think out of the box to come up with an idea like that. And, in fact, Mockbee and his students have completely torn open the envelope on what's possible in building homes. Rather than follow old forms that say, “Homes are made of wood, brick, or stone,” they came up with innovative designs that used offbeat building materials, such as old tires, hay bales, bottles, and even cast-off license plates.

      Suddenly, people who had lived in substandard housing their entire lives had not only warm, safe homes, but homes that Mockbee likes to call “warm, safe homes with spirit.” A home, Mockbee says, should be a shelter for the soul as well as the body.

      His students do all the work themselves—from the design to the pounding of nails. They literally live for an entire semester in this impoverished county that's an hour from the closest movie theater.

      Mockbee says Rural Studio is a far cry from normal college life, where you attend classes with fellow students a couple times a week. At Rural Studio, they live together, cook together, eat together, and create wonderful homes together. The studio is a converted 1890s farmhouse.

      Over the years, Mockbee's students have built chapels, basketball courts, and several homes, including a wonderful 850-square-foot home from hay bales. Alberta and Shepard Bryant, proud owners of this new home, were living with three grandkids in a leaky shack with no plumbing until Mockbee and his students showed up.

      The students also built a backyard smokehouse out of broken concrete curbing and multicolored glass. Ringing in at a mere $20, the smokehouse where Shepard smokes fish is beautiful, with light coming through the colorful glass. As Mockbee says, “We take something that is very ordinary and make it extraordinary.”

      His goal? “I want to jump into the dark and see where I land.” It is the only way.

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