The Complete Artist's Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice (22 page)

Much of what we do in a creative recovery may seem silly. Silly is a defense our Wet Blanket adult uses to squelch our artist child. Beware of
silly
as a word you toss at yourself. Yes, artist dates
are
silly—that’s the whole point.

Creativity lives in paradox: serious art is born from serious play.

COUNTING, AN EXERCISE

For the next week you will be discovering how you spend your money. Buy a small pocket notepad and write down every nickel you spend. It doesn’t matter what it is for, how tiny the purchase, how petty the amount. Petty cash is still cash.

Each day, date a page and count—what you bought, what you spent, where your money went, whether it was for groceries, lunch in a diner, a cab ride, subway fares, or a loan to your brother. Be meticulous. Be thorough. And be nonjudgmental. This is an exercise in self-observation—
not
self-flagellation.

You may want to continue this practice for a full month or longer. It will teach you what you value in terms of your spending. Often our spending differs from our real values. We fritter away cash on things we don’t cherish and deny ourselves those things we do. For many of us, counting is a necessary prelude to learning creative luxury.

MONEY MADNESS, AN EXERCISE

Complete the following phrases.

1. People with money are __________________________.

2. Money makes people _____________________________.

3. I’d have more money if ___________________v_____.

4. My dad thought money was ________________________.

5. My mom always thought money would _______________

6. In my family, money caused _____________________.

7. Money equals _________________________________.

8. If I had money, I’d ____________________________.

9. If I could afford it, I’d _________________________.

10. If I had some money, I’d . _______________________

11. I’m afraid that if I had money I would _____________

12. Money is ____________________________________.

13. Money causes ________________________________.

14. Having money is not ___________________________.

15. In order to have more money, I’d need to _______.

16. When I have money, I usually _________________.

17. I think money ________________________________.

18. If I weren’t so cheap I’d _____________________.

19. People think money __________________________.

20. Being broke tells me __________________________.

TASKS

1. Natural Abundance: Find five pretty or interesting rocks. I enjoy this exercise particularly because rocks can be carried in pockets, fingered in business meetings. They can be small, constant reminders of our creative consciousness.

As an artist, it is central to be unsatisfied! This isn’t greed, though it might be appetite.

LAWRENCE CALCAGNO

2. Natural Abundance: Pick five flowers or leaves. You may want to press these between wax paper and save them in a book. If you did this in kindergarten, that’s fine. Some of the best creative play is done there. Let yourself do it again.

3. Clearing: Throw out or give away five ratty pieces of clothing.

4. Creation: Bake something. (If you have a sugar problem, make a fruit salad.) Creativity does not have to always involve capital-
A
art. Very often, the act of cooking something can help you cook something up in another creative mode. When I am stymied as a writer, I make soups and pies.

5. Communication: Send postcards to five friends. This is not a goody-two-shoes exercise. Send to people you would love to hear from.

7. Reread the Basic Principles. (See page 3.) Do this once daily. Read an Artist’s Prayer—yours from Week Four or mine on pages 207-208. Do this once daily.

8. Clearing: Any new changes in your home environment? Make some.

9. Acceptance: Any new flow in your life? Practice saying yes to freebies.

10. Prosperity: Any changes in your financial situation or your perspective on it? Any new—even crazy—ideas about what you would love doing? Pull images around this and add to your image file.

CHECK-IN

1. How many days this week did you do your morning pages? (Have you used them yet to think about creative luxury for yourself?) How was the experience for you?

2. Did you do your artist date this week? (Have you considered allowing yourself two?) What did you do? How did it feel?

3. Did you experience any synchronicity this week? What was it?

4. Were there any other issues this week that you consider significant for your recovery? Describe them.

WEEK 7

Recovering a Sense of Connection

W
e
turn this week
to the practice of right attitudes for creativity. The emphasis is on your receptive as well as active skills. The essays, exercises, and tasks aim at excavating areas of genuine creative interest as you connect with your personal dreams.

LISTENING

The ability to listen is a skill we are honing with both our morning pages and our artist dates. The pages train us to hear past our Censor. The artist dates help us to pick up the voice of inspiration. While both of these activities are apparently unconnected to the actual act of making art, they are critical to the creative process.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down. The directions are important here.

If we are trying to
think something up
, we are straining to reach for something that’s just beyond our grasp, “up there, in the stratosphere, where art lives on high....”

When we
get something down,
there is no strain. We’re not doing; we’re getting. Someone or something else is doing the doing. Instead of reaching for inventions, we are engaged in listening.

When an actor is in the moment, he or she is engaged in listening for the next right thing creatively. When a painter is painting, he or she may begin with a plan, but that plan is soon surrendered to the painting’s own plan. This is often expressed as “The brush takes the next stroke.” In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.

In the esoteric Judaism of the
Cabalah, the Deep Self is named
the Neshamah, from the root of
Shmhm,
“to hear or listen”: the
Neshamah is She Who Listens,
the soul who inspires or guides us.

STARHAWK

Art is an act of tuning in and dropping down the well. It is as though all the stories, painting, music, performances in the world live just under the surface of our normal consciousness. Like an underground river, they flow through us as a stream of ideas that we can tap down into. As artists, we drop down the well into the stream. We hear what’s down there and we act on it—more like taking dictation than anything fancy having to do with art.

A friend of mine is a superb film director who is known for his meticulous planning. And yet he often shoots most brilliantly from the seat of his pants, quickly grabbing a shot that comes to him as he works.

These moments of clear inspiration require that we move into them on faith. We can practice these small leaps of faith daily in our pages and on our artist dates. We can learn not only to listen but also to hear with increasing accuracy that inspired, intuitive voice that says, “Do this, try this, say this....”

Most writers have had the experience of catching a poem or a paragraph or two of formed writing. We consider these finds to be small miracles. What we fail to realize is that they are, in fact, the norm. We are the instrument more than the author of our work.

Michelangelo is said to have remarked that he released David from the marble block he found him in. “The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through,” said Jackson Pollock. When I teach screenwriting, I remind my students that their movie already exists in its entirety. Their job is to listen for it, watch it with their mind’s eye, and write it down.

The same may be said of all art. If painting and sculptures wait for us, then sonatas wait for us; books, plays, and poems wait for us, too. Our job is simply to get them down. To do that, we drop down the well.

Some people find it easier to picture the stream of inspiration as being like radio waves of all sorts being broadcast at all times.

With practice, we learn how to hear the desired frequency on request. We tune in to the frequency we want. Like a parent, we learn to hear the voice of our current brainchild among the other children’s voices.

Listening is a form of accepting.

STELLA TERRILL MANN

Once you accept that it is natural to create, you can begin to accept a second idea—that the creator will hand you whatever you need for the project. The minute you are willing to accept the help of this collaborator, you will see useful bits of help everywhere in your life. Be alert: there is a second voice, a higher harmonic, adding to and augmenting your inner creative voice. This voice frequently shows itself in synchronicity.

You will hear the dialogue you need, find the right song for the sequence, see the exact paint color you almost had in mind, and so forth. You will have the experience of finding things—books, seminars, tossed-out stuff—that happen to fit with what you are doing.

Learn to accept the possibility that the universe is helping you with what you are doing. Become willing to see the hand of God and accept it as a friend’s offer to help with what you are doing. Because many of us unconsciously harbor the fearful belief that God would find our creations decadent or frivolous or worse, we tend to discount this creator-to-creator help.

Try to remember that God is the Great Artist. Artists like other artists.

Expect the universe to support your dream. It will.

PERFECTIONISM

Tillie Olsen correctly calls it the “knife of the perfectionist attitude in art.” You may call it something else.
Getting it right,
you may call it, or
fixing it before I go any further.
You may call it
having standards.
What you should be calling it is
perfectionism.

Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole. Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right. We correct our originality into a uniformity that lacks passion and spontaneity. “Do not fear mistakes,” Miles Davis told us. “There are none.”