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The death of her stepfather just 37 days after being diagnosed with cancer woke Patti Digh up and made her examine her own life – really examine it. She wrote, drew, sang, excavated, colored and energized her own life with a new sense of intentionality. She put the “carpe” in Carpe Diem.

Her award winning blog evolved into a beautiful new book, Life Is A Verb: 37 Days To Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally. Her sold out workshops are focused on unmasking personal stories for deeper creativity and fuller living.

We are…inspired.

Just by virtue of being you, what are you teaching?
I think it’s next to impossible for us to tell what we are teaching by being ourselves. Because the lessons I think I’m imparting—to my daughters for example—are probably not the lessons they are getting. We are constantly judging others’ outsides by our insides, so what I put out into the world and what people understand of me are probably two significantly different things.

I hope what I am teaching is that to be fully human, we have to show our vulnerabilities. That to be fully human, we must reveal—to ourselves and others—what we don’t know and can’t know and want to know. I hope I am teaching that this life is a journey and that the only hope we have of making meaning of the journey is in community with others. I hope I am teaching them not to reserve their awe for whales breaching off the coast of Alaska, but to extend that awe to every human being with whom they come in contact.

What’s a repeating lesson in your life?
One repeating lesson is a lesson about lessons—my hope is that at some point in my life I can recognize my way out of patterns rather than repeat my way out of them. One big pattern is my need to save people. I’m officially giving that up as of October 2008. This will serve as the Official Announcement of That Intention.

What books, movies, or CDs have been most helpful or inspiring to you?
For years, I have loved Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott for getting me past perfectionism. Eva Cassidy’s beautiful voice on her CD Songbird and the recognition that she died at age 33 are a reminder to get moving. The way I see the world is very much framed by books like Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse, in which he tells us to play to learn and not to win. Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland help me understand what blocks me from my artistic impulse. And a quirky Dutch map book of human experience called The Atlas of Experience by Louise van Swaaij and Jean Klare is a remarkable, lovely book that I couldn’t live without.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried would have to be on any such list, as would David Mamet’s On Directing Film (which tells me much more about living life than about film). And anything by Parker Palmer.

And the books I desperately wished I had written include Richard Powers’ brilliant novel, The Time of Our Singing, Marilynne Robinson’s quiet novel, Housekeeping, and William Gaddis’ great American novel, The Recognitions.
It will not be a surprise to anyone who reads my blog that I’m a tiny bit fond of the poetry of one Mr. Billy Collins. I’d add the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye and Ted Kooser and Rilke to that list of poet rockstars.

My movie choices would have to include Everything is Illuminated, To Sir with Love, and Cinema Paradiso. Music to write by would have to include Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Tan Dun, Tracy Chapman, and the last offerings of Johnny Cash.

There are so many more…

How do you get things done?
I’d love to tell you that I sit in a meticulous dining room where all the napkins are facing the same direction and make a very ordered list each evening at 8pm for the next day and then awaken to sit in a quiet, perfectly ordered white room methodically crossing things off that list. But the fact is that I am a sister of chaos. I can’t find the napkins and once the list is made it often disappears. Evidently I like disorder and entropy and chaos and find great creative energy in the mess. So while I try for order and peruse the Levenger catalog like it is the graphic novel version of Man’s Search for Meaning, the fact is that I get things done in heat and chaos. One day I’ll just own that and stop even the feeble attempt to make my house (and brain) look like a Pottery Barn catalog.

What do you collect, or have a lot of?
I love bags of all kinds. And boxes. Pretty much any kind of container really thrills me. Let me have a tiny box with a tiny lid or a simple purse with a jellyfish embroidered on it, and I am one happy, happy camper.

So I have purses from all over the world—beautifully embroidered ones from Australia, ones made from recycled cans from South Africa, a simple vegan messenger bag with a purple jellyfish on it from SugarLust in Portland (just found them and love those bags!). Bags, bags, bags. My husband recently asked where our Flip video camera was and it turns out that it was in a bag in a bag in a bag in a bag. No kidding. Don’t know why. It would take years of therapy to find out, and that’s money I could be spending on, well, on more bags or tiny boxes.

What’s your favorite website or blog?
The one I always go to first is Dave Pollard’s How to Save the World. It never fails to enlarge my thinking in a significant way, pointing me to new insights and new knowledge and new ways of gathering data and information and transforming them into knowledge and, more importantly, wisdom. He is one smart man with a heart to match.

My husband’s blog, History of Ideas, has also become a favorite of mine for many of the same reasons. An eclectic brilliant mind at work, he is writing about ephemera in a way that opens up whole new understandings of our shared human history. The man is just plain brilliant and this new expression of his brilliance really blows me away. He also makes me laugh like no other human being on earth ever could.

What would you like to be a master of?
I would like to speak Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese fluently so I could better communicate with three friends whose first languages are Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. Knowing them in their native tongue would be a huge joy for me. They would laugh more fully in their native tongue.

I’d like to knit beautiful scarves but I’ve been working on one rather crooked, very skinny one for about 15 years.

I’d like to master the internal dialogue that says “you are an imposter,” but I wonder if that’s an important internal dialogue at some level, something that keeps us grounded.

Most of what I yearn to master is in the arts. And yet perhaps my role is to support the arts in even the small way I can, and let others master them.

What would you like to revolutionize?
I’d like to revolutionize war. And by revolutionize, I mean end. And by end, I mean teach all of us humans on the planet to have conversations instead of fights. And conversations that aren’t violent or demeaning or reductive, but generous, generative, and expansive instead. I’d like to have a global reading group on James Carse’s book, Finite and Infinite Games, and then start living a worldwide infinite game, one that we all play to learn rather than play to win, one in which the idea isn’t to end the game, but to keep it going. It’s the only hope I can see for our shared future.

I’d like to use the trillions of dollars that feed the war machine to feed every child on the planet. I’d like to have military contractors retool their factories to make paintbrushes instead of bombs. I’d also like to revolutionize the idea of money and return to a barter system in which what I have to offer the world is what you need and vice versa. Money gets in the way of that recognition of being “in service to.”

If a famous photographer…
I would either be at the edge of the ocean at Tybee Island laughing with my two daughters, Emma and Tess, with an errant child or dog or bike from another family blurred in the background, setting us in a larger context. Or I would be sitting on the front steps of the porch to our house with them, all three of us looking intently into the camera lens, our fingers intertwined absentmindedly. Three strong women together, sharing the same eyes and mouths and foreheads. I love those girls with all my soul.

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Visit Patti’s Blog: 37 Days

Buy Patti’s book: Life Is A Verb

Read: Danielle’s book review of Life is a Verb