Check-In: Reflecting on the Journey

Our Journey Ends--Or Does It?

"No final flourishes here," Cameron says in her Epilogue to The Artist's Way. 

No flourishes, perhaps...but much reflection.

"The Artist's Way is a spiritual journey, a pilgrimage home to the self."

Are you, as I am, finding your way "home to your self" as a result of the last three months we've spent on this journey? Have you gained clarity, purpose, joy? Are you playing more? Dreaming more? Do you know your self better? Are you able to express that self with greater authenticity in your life and art?

I decided to revisit The Artist's Way at this particular time in my life because I felt lost to myself--lost and confused and vulnerable. I knew I needed to reconnect with the child-artist I had pushed aside in order to keep an uneasy peace with someone I knew at some level did not have my best interests at heart. I needed to heal. I needed to reconnect with the dreams I had let go.

I knew that leading a group through this course would hold me accountable in ways I wouldn't do on my own. I am so grateful to all of you for being here with me and for allowing me to be here with you as you, too, have deepened your relationship with your selves and reconnected with your dreams. I am honored.

I like Cameron's description of the Artist's Way as an upward winding path. "As we pursue climbing it," she says, "we circle back on the same views, over and over, at slightly different altitudes.... The road is never straight. Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing and regrouping.... A fog may obscure the distance we have covered or the progress we have made toward our goal. While the occasional dazzling vista may grace us, it is really best to proceed a step at a time, focusing on the path beneath our feet as much as the heights still before us."

I've seen glimpses of those dazzling vistas through the fog. Enough to inspire me to keep climbing! One step at a time...

"Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect."

I'm the sort who wants to figure everything out, wants to know, wants to understand why. This course has reminded me that there are different ways of knowing. I may not ever be able to understand intellectually why things happen as they happen. Reason, after all, has no answer for the unreasonable.

Soul understands we are more than reason. Soul taps into the undercurrent that flows through and between all of us and makes the unreasonable understandable solely because it is human. That's where my art comes from--not from intellectualizing but from letting myself relax into the flow.

"We all start out the same way--rich in dreams and nothing more. If we are lucky, we find friends to believe in our dreams with."

I am fortunate, indeed! 

"As artists, we belong to an ancient and holy tribe. We are the carriers of the truth that spirit moves through us all."

Why have we made such strong connections here? Is it because we are members of the same tribe, we are moved by the same spirit--a spirit we recognize in each other?

We have reached the end of The Artist's Way, but we have not reached the end of the Artist's Way. The journey never ends. We continue to move toward our dreams--to move toward our selves--as the stars continue to move through the sky. "Like neighboring constellations," Cameron says, serving each other both as guides and as company. I can say along her that "my deepest wish for you is the company of fellow lights and the generosity to light each others' ways."

Behold the light!

If anyone else has images you'd like to share, please email them to me. Celebrate your Artist!

Barbara: What I Want Is Who I Am

Barbara: Artist Altar

Nancy: picture book spread from PavoRatti

June: Artist Altar

Spread featuring June's picture book The Goodnight Train

Ginny: Heart Treasures

Pam: Splash

Ann: Artist Altar

Check-In: Week Seven

Recovering a Sense of Connection

Listening

"Art is not about thinking something up. It is about getting something down.... We are the instrument more than the author of our work." 

"Expect the universe to support your dream. It will."

Sometimes we fail to hear the longings of our hearts because we fail to create the quiet necessary to listen. That's what morning pages, artist dates, and TAW exercises and tasks are doing for me--creating quiet, making space, putting up the "Gone Fishing" sign, helping me withdraw from the busy-ness of life to pay attention to the business of Life.

For the first time this week I did one of the visual tasks, or at least the first part of it: tearing through a stack of magazines to collect images reflective of my dreams for my future. (How wonderful to be almost 59 and realize I still have dreams!) I don't yet have the pictures glued down in a collage--they are currently spread out on my kitchen island, and I've been looking at them and thinking about them for several days. The images have led me to ruminate about an old dream and articulate it in my morning pages with a wealth of details that I've never expressed or even thought about before.

Expect the universe to support my dream? That's a tough one; this particular dream excites me because it draws on so many of my strengths and skills and interests, but also frightens me because my Censor tells me it's utterly impossible and how could I be so stupid (or arrogant) as to think I could ever carry it off?!

Which brings us to...

Perfectionism and Risk

"Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right.... [It] is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough..."

"The success of a creative recovery hinges on our ability to move out of the head and into action."

"We deny that in order to do something well we must first be willing to do it badly. Instead, we opt for setting our limits at the point where we feel assured of success.... We won't do something unless we can guarantee that we'll do it perfectly."

These two sections hit me hard. I saw myself in every line. I cringed. I felt exposed. I wanted to hurry on to the next section. But writing down twenty things I would try if I didn't have to do them perfectly told me more about myself than any other task or exercise I've done thus far on my current journey through The Artist's Way. I realized how deadening perfectionism and risk aversion have been to my creativity and how many dreams they have kept me from pursuing. "Once we accept that anything worth doing might even be worth doing badly our options widen," Cameron says. Sometimes--often--a risk is worth taking simply for the sake of taking it. Taking risks enlivens us, expands our self-definition, empowers us.

I don't have to start by taking a huge risk. I can start small, taking little risks that lead me in the direction of that larger one, which by the time I get there, having built up to it with smaller risks, may not seem so huge after all. Baby steps--that's all I need!

Jealousy

"Jealousy is always a mask for fear.... [It] strips us of our will to act when action holds the key to our freedom."

There's that word again: action. I loved the Jealousy Map exercise because it really did serve as a map, identifying where I was and where I wanted to go and helping me identify baby-step actions I could take in the direction of my dreams. 

HIGHLIGHTS FOR ME LAST WEEK: 

Exercises
"If I didn't have to do it perfectly, I would try..."
The Jealousy Map 

Tasks
Lying down in the middle of the day in a darkened room to listen to Debussy
My "Dream" Collage 

Morning Pages
Letting go of some current anger
Clarifying and articulating an old dream 

Artist Dates
An hour at the library looking for early readers to prepare for a writing project
An afternoon reading them aloud to my 92-year-old mom and laughing over them together! 

What about you?

NOTE: I believe I've figured out, with Linda's help, how to get everyone's comments into your email inbox when they are posted so you can read and respond to them without having to sift through all the Platform 9-3/4 blog posts to find them. In order to do so, I need each of you to email me at bhicksgvv(at)att(dot)net from your preferred email address with "TAW Address" in the subject line--no message required.

Next Week: Recovering a Sense of Strength