You can read the transcript of the talk if you want, and you can find out more about Julie Berstein at the TED.com Speakers site or at her website: JulieBurstein.com.
For those of you in the Indian Epics class, you will really like the part where she quotes the filmmaker Mira Nair: In this little town, there were like 2,000 temples. We played cricket all the time. We kind of grew up in the rubble. The major thing that inspired me, that led me on this path, that made me a filmmaker eventually, was traveling folk theater that would come through the town and I would go off and see these great battles of good and evil by two people in a school field with no props but with a lot of, you know, passion, and hashish as well, and it was amazing. You know, the folk tales of Mahabharata and Ramayana, the two holy books, the epics that everything comes out of in India, they say. After seeing that Jatra, the folk theater, I knew I wanted to get on, you know, and perform.
Here are four quotes that quickly characterize each of the lessons:
1. Being open for that experience that might change you is the first thing we need to embrace
2. Artists also speak about how some of their most powerful work comes out of the parts of life that are most difficult.
3. Artists also speak about how pushing up against the limits of what they can do, sometimes pushing into what they can't do, helps them focus on finding their own voice.
4. There's a fourth embrace, and it's the hardest. It's the embrace of lossHere's a photograph of raku ware in the kiln that Julie Burstein describes at the beginning of her talk:
