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 Eight

Recovering a Sense of Strength

I have to say this chapter didn't really seem to "hang together" for me. I had trouble reconciling the focus in the chapter title, a sense of strength, with the focus of the chapter synopsis, an exploration of my use and perception of time, with the focus of the primary task, taking steps to identify "true north" on my emotional compass. What did I miss? I'll be interested to find out if anyone else felt a disconnect with this week's material or if it was just me!

Survival: I liked Cameron's comments on liberating criticism--the kind that causes us to rethink our work and identify new directions--vs. damaging criticism, which "contains no saving kernel of truth yet has a certain damning plausibility." Any artist who has shared her work has experienced both kinds. My hope is two-fold: that I will be able to differentiate between the two when they come my way and that when I offer criticism myself it will be of the liberating sort.

The Ivory Power: "Creativity cannot be comfortable quantified in intellectual terms." Perhaps part of the reason I didn't connect with a lot of  the material in this chapter is that Cameron seems to do what she tells us NOT to do--intellectualize creativity!

Gain Disguised as Loss: I do like what Cameron says about framing our creative losses as potential gain. Every end is indeed a beginning if we ask ourselves, "How can this loss serve me? Where does it point my work?" The key, she says, is "to act as if a silver lining exists" in every creative loss. I liked her personal story of taking her destiny into her own hands by becoming an independent filmmaker after one too many times having a studio buy a script and then do nothing with it. I liken it to my experiments in self-publishing in light of the current lack of a market for picture books. (I've published two of my romance novellas as ebooks and am working with two illustrators to bring two different picture ebook projects to market.) Like Cameron, I've been asking "How?" instead of "Why me?!" I also liked the stories of a lack of success in one creative area pushing people into expressing their creativity in another form. My brother just installed a brand new work table for me and I'm wondering if it might not be time to get a visual art project going again...

Age and Time: Okay, a little soul-baring here... "I'm too old" and "I'm too young" are both, paradoxically, things my Censor has been telling me this week about my decision to quit the job with the steady paycheck to pursue writing and teaching as a freelancer. Now that I'm nearing retirement age, my Censor says, I'm too old for that--I've GOT to think about where my retirement is going to come from. I'm also too young, he says (yes, my Censor is definitely male) because I'm NOT retired yet--I'm not old and crazy enough (and financially secure enough) to let go of the paycheck in these last years I need to boost my Social Security potential (assuming Social Security even exists in another few years). So the decision that I thought was made seems to be unraveling. Yes, sometimes the job feels unbearably soul-sucking. But is it really that bad? Can I make it work a few more years and still pursue my creative interests, still have a five-year plan that will move me toward my creative goals? I see that I still have some work to do here...

Product and Process: I like the distinction Cameron makes between these two--they are not the same, and as artists we MUST be always in process or we're not growing in our craft. But I do think product is important, too. Yes, we must practice our art for the joy the process brings us, but the product is what communicates our vision and our passion to the world. Without a finished product--or a product as finished as possible--we are only talking to ourselves. That's okay sometimes, but in my opinion it's not enough. Art is meant to be shared.

Filling the Form: Another way to say "small steps." Something I need to remind myself when I feel overwhelmed. (Just realized that's been part of my problem this week--feeling overwhelmed. My "active addiction to anxiety"?) Me to my artist, right now at this moment: "You are doing enough. You are writing your morning pages. You are continuing to clarify your vision. You are making contacts. You are doing research. You are moving forward, even if sometimes only at a crawl. You are a work in progress. You are okay!"

EXERCISES, MORNING PAGES, TASKS

I found through the "Early Patterning" exercise that what I lacked in my early life was a sense of the possible. I did not know people who had made a successful life pursuing their muse. I had wonderful parents and educators who told me I could do anything, but I lacked a mentor to show me how. I think that still gets in my way...

I missed one day of morning pages--the first time since starting TAW in January! I did very few of the tasks this week, and spent less time on the one I did, "The Steps," than I needed to in order to get the information I needed. Perhaps that affected my experience of this week's work, too...

But enough about me--far too much, in fact! What about you? Did you have a more satisfying week than I did?

Next Week: Recovering a Sense of Compassion