Last week in the book Week 12-Walking in this World

Discovering a Sense of Dignity

The key to a successful Creative life is the commitment to making things and in so doing making something better of ourselves and our world. Creativity is a act of faith. As artists, we aer sourced in the Great Creator, Meaning that our funding of strength and power is limitless. This week focuses on the survival of those difficulties encountered at the highest creative peaks.  Our graceful ability to encompass difficulty rests in our ability to be faithful. The reading and tasks of this week aim at acquainting the creative practitioner with the survival tools necessary for the successful accomplishment of a sustained creative life.

Dealing with the icy slopes of depression.. Julia Cameron shares about her bout of depression in this week..and you know when some shares there experience strength and hope others can learn from it. 

Today's depression and doubt is par for the course at the stage I am in on new projects. She shares that it is exactly replicates by my own anxiety: Will I ever find the real substance of this piece? Life boils down to the fish, me and I am worried it will get away...from Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. What's worse our fish are often invisible fish to the eyes of others, who see us as Daddy, as Mommy, as professor, as girlfriend or boyfriend, and not as someone engage in a heroic struggle to drag somethings huge from the archetypal creative sea.

We need uninterrupted time, How to manage this with out seeming arrogant or standoffish?  We do not communicate clearly the swaths of silence and solitude we sometimes crave. We fit our work into the crannies of life, and that's good a lot of the time. It lets us have a life, and that life enriches our art.

Sometimes, mommies and daddies-no matter how we love our children - do need to write. Unexpressed art rises inside an artist until ti reaches a level of restlessness and longing that must be addressed by making art-nothing else will scratch the itch. Nothing else is "wrong," although it may seem to be. 

Julia shared a store about her very busy life and the demands on it and at one point she wasn't able to write her own words welling up in side her and it built up and built up so bad she had to get away. Just pack up and went away...as she was traveling the words came to her and she had to write them down and even when she got to her place in New Mexico she continued to write...Prior to this she was wondering what was going on with here inside what came was that she was so busy she didn't fit in time for HER art...and ended up take a whole month away from her family which was very hard for them to understand, instead letting them know she was going to go and write..so this leads in to this part... What's wrong, Mommy?" our children wonder, sensing our distance and distraction. We have to fight not to snap their heads off if we are mulling a plot line. "Nothing, Mommy needs to write." "Nothing, I just need to paint, or write or cook...what ever you art is. I remembering have a few moments like this  some years ago.. Julia shares, when she was teaching both at a University and teaching the Artist way privately, she said I really needed to write. Teaching was taking too much of my time and focus and my family was taking the rest. Back her taking the trip to New Mexico, she realized that she was taking to big a chunk of time away from her family doing this way.  She need to go home and that she did.. Her experience taught her to be careful, to always honor my writer a little more fully. It is easier for the family to adjust to a daily writing schedule than it is for them to adjust to a season of abandonment. 

Every project has a glass-mountain phase, a period when nothing is going well enough because the work is simply so hard. Families and friends learn to know and weather this. They do if we give them an explanation and a chance.  

This all was hard at first for me to figure out, as I had to make this important to me...I couldn't put the blame on my family as of working on art work in my studio..I had to set a schedule and stick with it.  Kind of like a balancing act but once I got a little system going it just needed time for the family to see that I was happier and so where they.... 

We work so hard at being normal because we've heard so much about artists being crazy.  Our reluctance to be that kind of person has made us practiced liars-some lies are necessary and and self-protective. Women know this. As an experience artist, I carry my work like a secret pregnancy. I am always aware of inner life and the need to protect it. And Creative Men she shares she's found they have  calling for secrecy, strategy, and protection. 

Well this is a tougher week to read and share about as of the depression she is going through and her attitude about things..not that I don't understand it but it feels odd...  she shares..Yes, we can do our turn at that, I said But if you make an artist carry trash eighteen hours a day, and artist will still have to make art. It's a calling. And it's our calling. And so we do carry the trash. but we carry also our stories our symphonies, our dance and our dreams. We carry them in daily life, and every so often up the glass mountain that is our Everest.

So what I gather from this all is respect myself enough to block a bit of time in small moments that will add up, instead of starving your self from creating our art and especially when it is a busy time of your creative career...it's important for you as the artist to do first for you and the rest will flow...selfish as it sounds it could get worse if you don't...that is if it is a very strong Vocation... depriving yourself can lead to depression and that can lash out in places you wish it hadn't.

The task work is to answer a few question like
How can you steal extra solitude, even a half hour a day?
Can you manage and escape from family, friends, and telephone?

this might be a nice thing to thing about an artist retreat too.



Comments

  1. This so sums up the artistic life; it's perfect and in some ways sad that we have to be thought of as crazy, that saying we need art time requires great explanation, and that we have to hide the depths of our talent~~to stay protected and productive.
    I have enjoyed your take on this book Laura as I have read it twice before (each time seeing it as something different) but this time, as I lag and still read, I see it exactly as what it is---the tool toward commitment. Committing to the life, the work, the time, ourselves.
    Wonderful posts..... ♥

    XXOO~~
    Anne

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Thank you for support, interest and viewing my inner life with my outer life on this Blog. Wishing you many creative blessings and peace to you and yours,
~v~Laura

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