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The Artist's Way ~ Week 12: Recovering a Sense of Faith

This journey ends, another begins; time to review where I've been. When I joined this group, it was with the intention of also working with Danny Gregory's The Creative License, which I've done only slightly. But you know, I'm feeling OK about that, in the context of all that I have managed to do over the past three months; and I know I will get back to it.

I've wrestled with my meanest demon -- the why do they like me/ why do they like my work/ I don't deserve it demon. I know that this nasty little thing will keep dancing around the edges, but I know it better now; I see it. I've also acquired some peace around the issues of faith and religion. Not the resolution Cameron might prefer, but one that works for me.

As my life filled up, I became less focused on this project, and a quick review of the AW Bloggers list shows me I am not alone in this. I wonder if this is just human nature -- we begin something with high expectations, and then fade; or the season, which in this northern hemisphere is calling us outside; or part of the process itself, which is designed to bring new things into our lives, and new attention to what is already there.

In looking through old notebooks -- just one of the activities this process inspired  -- I came across this dream, from October 01991 -- about four years after I began writing:

I am gagging, stomach heaving, trying to throw up. A child tells me: This is how whales are born! I must have swallowed a whale sperm/ embryo, which grows inside me until it's ready for the next phase -- to be thrown up into the sea. Most people who carry the whale (the child tells me) don't survive the birth; they either die immediately or bleed to death slowly afterwards.

My note to this entry says: This dream was in the middle of the night. I woke to escape it. I thought: The whale is the writing. I thought: I will survive it.

On January 14, 02006, just a week into this project, I had the dragon dream, which I think is the same dream, only more hopeful. Spirals.

I did have some problems with the book, mostly around issues of class, which I wrote about when I became too annoyed to take what I liked and leave the rest -- but I'm glad I took this on, and want to thank Kat once again for initiating and organizing it. I would have been unlikely to do it on my own. Some of the group are continuing at Contagious Creativity; I may join them now and then.

There have been some great pleasures for me in these past months: my dear friend Niki's participation in this project; time with Linda; visits from old friends; discovering new ones. I took a whole month of photos. I know that I lost some readers, and gained others.

Let's see what a poem-a-day will do.

The Artist's Way ~ Week 11: Recovering a Sense of Autonomy

Well. Hmmm. I've done almost none of the tasks (except, of course, the morning pages) but I did get myself some flowers, and I'm doing gentle yoga almost daily with my visiting friend, who happens to be a yoga instructor. And I've managed a photo every day for the 30DayPhoto Challenge.

OK, I confess -- I've barely thought about AW this week, even though I highlighted a lot when I read this chapter. For instance:

As an artist, I may need a different mix of stability and flow from other people.

And:

When we are not creating, artists are not always very normal or very nice -- to ourselves or to others.

Also:

To be an artist is to recognize the particular. To appreciate the peculiar.

It is this willingness to once more be a beginner that distinguishes a creative career.

. . . the Artist's Way is a spiral path.

Cameron talks about the Zen of sports, and quotes Eve Babitz:

"Swimming," she says, "is a wonderful sport for a writer." . . . That rhythmic, repetitive action transfers the locus of the brain's energies from the logic to the artist hemisphere. It is there that inspiration bubbles up untrammeled by the constraints of logic.

Swimming was my sport, before I got ill -- except for me is wasn't a sport. It was a moving meditation -- the breathing, the stretch. And this makes me grieve for it, and may push me back to the water, even if I can do only five laps at a time. One of my first attempts at a sonnet was about swimming:

Swimming Sonnet/
a nautical metrical exercise

The pool is long and blue and cool. I dive
into the soothing depth, the wet. I cut
the water, arms a knife, a curving slice,
a turn, another lap, a breath, a pull
and earth below is not allowed to hold
my body down and I am flying free
of ground, my cells expand, my spirit grows
and melts into the chlorine blue, I feel
the stretch of spine and soul, I reach to touch
some goal, it’s just beyond my fingertips
at last, another lap, if I could just
not need to breathe...
      now slow, I gasp and kick
           against the heavy claim of land-locked life,
           so hard, so harsh, so shallow, short, and dry.

Finally, this chapter encourages us to build an artist's altar, which I needn't do, as I have them everywhere:

She reminds us that:

. . . the artist child speaks the language of the soul: music, dance, scents, shells... Your artists altar . . . should be fun to look at, even silly.

I'd say I've managed that.

One more week.

The Artist's Way ~ Week 10: Recovering a Sense of Self-Protection

In this chapter, Cameron talks about blocks -- the whats, whys and hows. She talks about the usuals -- food, work, and sex -- and the less recognized:

For others, an obsession with painful love places creative choice outside their hands. Reaching for the painful thought, they become instant victims rather than feel their own considerable power.

I've been in that place. Though I must observe -- it provides lots of material. This is a justified complaint of those who are not writers against those of us who are: everything is material.

. . . note carefully that food, work, and sex are all good in themselves. It is the abuse of them that makes them creativity issues.

Interestingly, to me, she doesn't mention shopping in this chapter. Or cigarettes, though I suppose they fall into the drug category. When I was working and had disposable income, nothing would soothe me better than a cruise through the antique shops, followed by a nice smoke and a lazy -- one might almost say creative -- process of deciding where to place the new treasure(s). Oh, for the good old days...

As we become aware of our blocking devices -- food, busyness, alcohol, sex, other drugs -- we can feel our U-turns as we make them. The blocks will no longer work effectively. Over time, we will try -- perhaps slowly at first and erratically -- to ride out the anxiety and see where we emerge. Anxiety is fuel. We can use it to write with, paint with, work with. [emphasis mine]

Oh, yes. Sit with it. So easily said; done with such difficulty.

Spirals

I see the spiral metaphor everywhere; the idea that we revisit the same issues again and again in our lives, but at different -- presumably deeper -- levels. A Flickr search found many spiral images -- this one at the left was my favorite -- I think because of that lovely blue marble, and the garden behind. And because the photographer allows use under a Creative Commons License.

Recently, on one of the Blogging the Artist's Way blogs (I'm sorry, but I can't remember who this was -- if you see this, let me know so I can link to you) the writer was discouraged to see, when she read a year-old journal, that she was dealing with exactly the same issues a year later.

I laughed, because I've had not only that experience, but the experience of having some wonderful, revelatory insight -- one of those Wow! moments -- only to find, soon after, the exact same insight written in a journal from years earlier. Written down with excitement, and apparently immediately forgotten.

My path is less a spiral than a tangle:

My 30 Day Photo Challenge Flickr Set

A very nice slinky gave its life for this lesson. Let us pause to mourn and honor said slinky. OK, that's enough.

On this path, there is no nice, smooth curving around and around, to the deeper, magic center. It's more like going in circles and retracing my own route; sometimes stepping directly from one level to another; sometimes stepping way back to a place I passed long ago. Sometimes it seems I step into another dimension altogether; a multi-dimensional tangle.

That's my life.

Yours?

The Artist's Way ~ Week 9: Recovering a Sense of Compassion

Last week one of the suggested tasks was to:

Choose an artist totem. It might be a doll, a stuffed animal, a carved figurine, or a wind-up toy. The point is to choose something you immediately feel a protective fondness toward. Give your totem a place of honor and then honor it by not beating up on your artist child.

Let me get clinical here for a moment. I have long understood that adults who were sexually abused as children feel an immense sense of shame; are intolerant of vulnerability, which means just that: vulnerable to abuse; and so have difficulty accepting the child-in-themselves who was so abused. I know this. I've worked with many clients on these issues, and worked on my own. But this intertwining of creativity and childhood is a new tangle for me - or a new level of tangle, which I plan to talk about in another post.

For the moment, let me just say that these issues interfere with my enjoyment of some of these tasks. I chose, reasonably, the above doll for my artist totem. This was made for me by a lost friend (where are you, Tracey Perry?) as a representative of my child self. The doll has been on a shelf for many years; I take her out for this, and put her on the chair my mother gave me, with the sock monkey from my childhood. Or one I bought to replace that one; I no longer remember which.

So now all I have to do is be kind. To myself.

Not a small order.