At age 27 I was living in a small town in Iowa, where I worked as a cook in a pizza parlor. In the evening, I would walk with my dog, and as people passed by; they would look down at my dog and say, “Hi Zoie,” and then look up at me and say, “Hi Pizza Girl.” It became so common that it forced me to recognize, “I sure don’t want to be Pizza Girl at 30.”

But I didn’t know what I wanted to do. The point wasn’t to find a career it was to find my connection to “something” bigger than myself. When I first heard Joseph Campbell say, “Follow your bliss,” I realized I didn’t even know what my “bliss” was. So I locked myself up in my tiny rented room and made lists of things I “liked.” They were simple silly lists. For instance, usually the first thing on a list was; “drinking coffee,” since that was the first thing I did in the morning, and I liked it. Somewhere on the lists I wrote “clay figures,” because I remembered feeling “thrilled” when I saw a tiny picture in the back of a magazine of a delicately sculptured porcelain female figure. So I bought a ball of clay for 5 bucks and sat in my room and made little people. The figures I made were very simple, crude, and quite funny, and they were mostly driven by “story.”

About 5 years later I met Toc Fetch, and together we began to do what we call direct-observation work. Direct-observation of an inspiration is a careful love of it without mental interpretation. This approach was greatly influenced