The Artist’s Way Week 5 - Recovering a Sense of Possibility
My own joy is something worth creating.
Morning Pages
I’m going to be honest about a dishonesty. I’m not totally honest in my morning pages. I don’t lie, but I do avoid full truths and further investigations where I feel they are required, and where I know I would find the most value. I’m not sure how to get past this. It stems from a fear of them being read by anyone other than myself–
Ever since I was very, very young (I’m talking five years old), I’ve kept a diary, and I’ve been obsessed with locks. By the time I was eleven, I bought diaries that could fit up to five different locks on them at a time, and I’d hide the keys in various places around my room, even planting a few fake ones. The hiding places were pretty good, too– I remember wanting to read and reflect on one of these old diaries years after it had last been touched, but I could not find all of the keys. I had to rip off the hinges (and then, of course, burn that book and all the rest of them, which I did in 2020).
I’ve never had anyone in my life snoop through my things, not as far as I know, and I didn’t really have any suspicion that they would. There were threats of it during times in my youth when my parents were worried about my safety, but at that point, I started self censoring anyway.
I’ll talk about all of this in therapy sometime, and I’ll probably write an essay on it sometime sooner. I thought this was an important share about how I am engaging with part of this process. I want to engage more deeply and honestly, but that’s where I am in this current moment.
Another morning pages update: I stopped forcing myself to write them before I go to work. I did somewhat enjoy that time with myself in the morning, but more than anything, it was stressing me out. I have no difficulty returning to the morning pages on every other day of my week and quite look forward to them. Just not at 5:30am. My brain doesn’t even have a dialogue that early, and I’d prefer to let it stay that way. I’d prefer to stretch and eat breakfast and have a slightly more leisure walk to work. I write when I get home, and I engage with my creativity in some way everyday now. I could not say that before starting The Artist’s Way, and it’s something I’m really grateful for.
The check-in asks if I’ve discovered the page-and-a-half truth point yet, saying that the “pay dirt” in our writing often occurs after a page and a half of vamping. I have found that, though as I mentioned earlier, I tend to avoid my truth in too much depth. It’s sudden how it comes up, too. The weather this, work that, hungry, to do list…. death is sudden and life is precious and how is this one relationship serving me? Is this what happens when I allow my brain to dump, to vamp, no destination, driving down a pretty road, then suddenly, a dead deer? And following with this metaphor, in the morning pages, I’d like to go examine the deer. But a lot of times, I simply see it, get a feeling, and steer away, forward, moving along.
The Reading - Recovering a Sense of Possibility
This week’s reading was about replacing self imposed limits with a sense of possibility, as well as being authentic to your own wants and needs. Cameron poses the concept of being self destructive, and illuminates several ways that we may be self destructive without even realizing– it may not always look like that we think upon hearing the question. Cameron writes, “The question Are you self-destructive? is asked so frequently that we seldom hear it accurately. What it means is Are you destructive of your self? And what that really asks us is Are you destructive of your true nature?...This is a very difficult question to answer. To begin with, it requires that we know something of our true self (and that is the very self we have been systematically destroying)” (Cameron, 99-100).
There are times when I have been blatantly self destructive, no need to dig into my true nature to understand that the behaviors are indeed unhealthy. But more recently, looking at the question in this context has been really interesting. One of the main ways I feel I resist my own nature is by procrastination, particularly if it is surrounding something I know I actually want to do, like work on writing my graphic novel. In that context, it is somewhat self destructive to doom scroll when I could be writing.
Another concept I loved from this week’s reading, which I am significantly watering down here, is placing focus and trust in whatever our higher power is. For me, it’s the universe. I also refer to it as the source. Regarding this, Cameron writes,
“As we come to trust and love our internal guide, we lose our fear of intimacy because we no longer confuse our intimate others with the higher power we are coming to know. In short, we are learning to give up idolatry– the worshipful dependance on any person, place, or thing. Instead, we place our dependency on the source itself. The source meets our needs through people, places, and things…We tend to believe we must go out and shake a few trees to make things happen. I would not deny that shaking a few trees is good for us. In fact, I believe it is necessary. I call it doing the footwork. I want to say, however, that while the footwork is necessary, I have seldom seen it payoff in linear fashion. It seems to work more like we shake the apple tree and the universe delivers us oranges” (Cameron, 96).
This concept feels really relevant for me in so many ways. I am connecting more with my spirituality and have felt a lot of doors opening within myself and my creativity (more about that below). It is also helpful reminding myself to decenter or lower pedestals from temporal things, except those which I consider to be direct connections to the universe/source such as (but not limited to) art, music, nature, and moments of connection and presence both with others, the self, and other avenues to a greater source connection.
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