First entry in the Great Dudes in History file, man. And before anybody writes in: Dude is not a gender. It’s a way of life. It’s an essence. Ask the Church, they’ll tell you the same thing.

So…Georgia O’Keeffe.

Here’s a woman who looked at the whole art world, decided it was mostly noise, and moved to a chunk of New Mexico desert with almost nobody in it. She lived there for something like forty years. She walked, she collected bones and rocks off the ground like a kid, she painted, she went to bed. That was the program. She made it to ninety-eight.

But the thing that gets me, the really Dude thing, is why she painted flowers so big.

The flowers were a trick

She noticed people didn’t actually look at flowers. They walked right past them. A flower is small, and everybody’s in a hurry, and so the flower may as well not be there at all. She said it plain:

“Nobody sees a flower really. It is so small. We haven’t time.”

So she painted one the size of a wall.

That was the whole gambit. Make it so big that a person in a rush has no choice. You cannot hurry past a six-foot flower. You have to stop. You have to stand in front of it and let it happen to you.

That’s not an art move, man. That’s a spiritual intervention. She was basically grabbing busy people by the collar and going, hey. Look at this. Just for a second. Look at what’s been sitting there the whole time.

And the busy people, being busy people, immediately started arguing about what the flowers really meant.

She never took the bait

The critics decided her flowers were about, you know. Freud stuff. They wrote it up, they published it, they said it at parties, and they kept saying it for decades.

O’Keeffe’s response was to say no, they’re flowers, and then go back to painting. For sixty years. She never got shrill about it, never launched a campaign, never wrote the long angry letter. She just quietly declined to accept the frame and kept doing the work.

That’s a hard thing. Most of us, somebody misreads us once and we’re up at two in the morning drafting a rebuttal in our head. She had an entire profession misreading her on purpose and she treated it roughly the way you’d treat weather. Unpleasant. Not personal. Not something you argue with.

You can’t control what people decide you are. You can control whether you spend your one life litigating it.

The door she painted twenty times

There was a patio door at her place in Abiquiu. A plain wall with a plain door in it. She wanted that wall so badly she bought the whole ruined house to get it, and then she painted it. And painted it. And painted it. Something like twenty different paintings of the same rectangle in the same wall.

Now, if you’re running your life on a hustle calendar, that is an insane use of time. Twenty paintings of a door? Diversify, Georgia. Expand the portfolio.

But she wasn’t trying to finish the door. That’s the part people miss. The door was not a task with a completion date. It was a place she went. Painting it was the point, and painting it again was also the point, and there was no version of the door where she’d get it right and be done and never have to go back.

That’s a practice, man. That’s the same reason a guy rolls the same lane a thousand times. You’re not trying to solve bowling. You’re just bowling.

Going with it, right to the end

In her seventies her eyesight started going. Macular degeneration. For a painter that’s supposed to be the end of the story.

She got somebody to help her with the painting she could still manage, and then she started working in clay, because clay you can do with your hands. She kept going into her nineties. No big speech about resilience. She just quietly moved to the thing that still worked.

That’s the whole Dudeist maneuver right there. You don’t get to pick the current. You do get to decide whether you fight it or float in it. The river’s going where it’s going. Bowl.

What to steal from her

Stop somewhere today for longer than is reasonable. A tree, a rock, your coffee, the dog. Twenty seconds past the point where you’re ready to move on. That’s the flower thing.

When somebody decides you’re something you’re not, let them be wrong. It costs you nothing and it saves you a whole night of sleep.

And whatever your door is, go back to it again. Not to finish it. Just to be there.

She looked at a bleached cow skull in the dirt and saw something worth forty years of attention. Most people saw a dead cow. Same desert.

Take it easy, man.

Before you go

Got something you keep hurrying past? Put it to the man himself. Ask the Dude and he’ll tell you what he’d do with it, which is usually less than you think you need.

And if you’d rather wear the philosophy than read about it, the shop is right this way. Ask the man. Wear the wisdom. Take it easy.

A parody and fan project inspired by Dudeism. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the rights holders of “The Big Lebowski.” The Dude is a state of mind, man.