The Complete Artist's Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice (33 page)

You are lost the instant you know what the result will be.

JUAN GRIS

This means writing your morning pages. Taking your artist date. “But I run a studio,” you say—or whatever other thing it is you must do. “People depend on me.” I say, all the more reason to depend on yourself and protect your own creativity.

If we ignore our inner commitment, the cost rapidly becomes apparent in the outer world. A certain lackluster tone, a rote inevitability, evicts creative excitement from our lives and, eventually, our finances. Attempting to insure our finances by playing it safe, we lose our cutting edge. As the promised projects diverge further and further from our inner leanings, a certain deep artistic weariness sets in. We must summon our enthusiasm at gunpoint instead of reveling in each day’s creative task.

Artists can and do responsibly meet the demands of their business partnerships. What is more difficult and more critical is for us as artists to continue to meet the inner demand of our own artistic growth. In short, as success comes to us, we must be vigilant. Any success postulated on a permanent artistic plateau dooms us, and it, to failure.

THE ZEN OF SPORTS

Most blocked creatives are cerebral beings. We think of all the things we want to do but can’t. Early in recovery, we next think of all the things we want to do but don’t. In order to effect a real recovery, one that lasts, we need to move out of the head and into a body of work. To do this, we must first of all move
into the body.

Again, this is a matter that requires acceptance. Creativity requires action, and part of that action must be physical. It is one of the pitfalls of Westerners adopting Eastern meditation techniques to bliss out and render ourselves high but dysfunctional. We lose our grounding and, with it, our capacity to act in the world. In the pursuit of higher consciousness, we render ourselves unconscious in a new way. Exercise combats this spiritually induced dysfunction.

No longer conscious of my movement, I discovered a new unity with nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never dreamt existed.

ROGER BANNISTER
ON BREAKING THE
FOUR-MINUTE MILE

Returning to the notion of ourselves as spiritual radio sets, we need enough energy to raise a strong signal. This is where walking comes in. What we are after here is a
moving
meditation. This means one where the act of motion puts us into the now and helps us to stop spinning. Twenty minutes a day is sufficient. The object is to stretch your mind more than your body, so there doesn’t need to be an emphasis on fitness, although eventual fitness is a likely result.

The goal is to connect to a world outside of us, to lose the obsessive self-focus of self-exploration and, simply, explore. One quickly notes that when the mind is focused on other, the self often comes into a far more accurate focus.

It is 6:30 A.M. when the great blue heron stirs from its resting place in the short grasses and rises above the river on huge rhythmic wings. The bird sees Jenny down below. Jenny, down below, sees the bird. The pumping of her legs carries her in an effortless floating stride. Her spirit soars up to the heron and chirps. “Hello, good morning, lovely, isn’t it?” At this time, in this place, they are kindred spirits. Both are wild and free and happy in their motion, in the movement of the winds, the clouds, the trees.

It is 4:30 P.M. when Jenny’s boss looms in the doorway to her office. The new account is being picky and wants still more changes in her copy. Can she handle that? “Yes,” Jenny says. She can because she is still soaring on the glad energy of her morning’s run. That heron; the steely blue of it flashing silver as it made that great banking turn ...

Jenny would not call herself an athlete. She does not run in marathons. She does not run in cheery singles groups. Although her distances have gradually increased and her thighs have gradually decreased, she does not run for fitness. Jenny runs for her soul, not her body. It is the fitness of her spirit that sets the tone of her days, changes their timbre from strained to effortless.

“I run for perspective,” says Jenny. When the client picks at her copy, Jenny detaches and soars above her frustration like the great blue heron. It is not that she doesn’t care. It is that she has a new perspective—a bird’s eye view—on the place of her tribulations in the universe.

To keep the body in good health is a duty.... Otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.

BUDDHA

Eve Babitz is a novelist—and a swimmer. Tall, blond, and as generously curved as the freeway cloverleaf of her native Los Angeles, Babitz swims in order to direct the traffic flow of her own overcrowded mind. “Swimming,” she says, “is a wonderful sport for a writer.” Every day, as she swims the aquamarine oblong of her neighborhood pool, her mind dives deep into itself, past the weeds and clutter of its everyday concerns—what editor is late with a check, why the typist persists in making so many errors—and down to a quiet green pool of inspiration. That rhythmic, repetitive action transfers the locus of the brain’s energies from the logic to the artist hemisphere. It is there that inspiration bubbles up untrammeled by the constraints of logic.

Martha is a carpenter and a long-distance bicyclist. Carpentry challenges her daily to find innovative solutions to construction problems, to untangle the intricacies of a complicated design situation requiring a simple answer to a complicated question. “How can I build in work space without using floor space when I’m done working?” or “Is there some kind of cabinet that could fit in this corner and around on this wall without seeming too modern for my furniture?” Pedaling from her home in the suburbs to her job in the city, Martha encounters her answers to these questions. In much the same way that a red-winged blackbird will suddenly take flight and cross her line of vision, Martha will be pedaling when “louvered doors” will flash as a design solution. Pumping her bicycle rhythmically and repetitively, Martha also pumps the well of her creativity. “It is my time to let my imagination roam and work out problems,” Martha says. “Solutions just come. Somehow I am freed to free-associate, and things begin to fall into place.”

The things that begin to fall into place are not merely work associated. When she bicycles, Martha has a sense not only of her own motion but also of the motion of God through the universe. She remembers riding alone on Route 22 in upstate New York. The sky was an azure bowl. The cornfields were green and gold. The ribbon of black asphalt that Martha rode seemed to her to head straight into the heart of God. “Silence, a blue sky, a black ribbon of highway, God, and the wind. When I ride, especially at dusk and at early morning, I feel God. I am able to meditate more in motion than sitting still. Being alone, having the freedom to go wherever I want, having the wind blow, riding alone in that wind, allows me to center myself I feel God so closely that my spirit sings.”

Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the sun and moon as well as all the pilgrimage places.... I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body.

SARAHA

Exercise teaches the rewards of process. It teaches the sense of satisfaction over small tasks well done. Jenny, running, extends herself and learns to tap into an unexpected inner resource. Martha would call that power God, but whatever it answers to, exercise seems to call it forth in other circumstances when we mistrust our personal strength. Rather than scotch a creative project when it frustrates us, we learn to move through the difficulty.

“Life is a series of hurdles,” says Libby, a painter whose sport is horseback riding. “I used to see it as a series of obstacles or roadblocks. Now they are hurdles and challenges. How well am I taking them?” In the daily schooling of her horse, “teaching her to think before she jumps, to pace herself properly,” Libby has learned the same skills for her own life.

Part of this learned creative patience has to do with connecting to a sense of universal creativity. “Riding, my rational mind switches off,” she says. “I am reduced to feeling, to being a participant. When you ride through a field of grass and little flecks of fluff from the wheat ears float around you, the feeling makes your heart sing. When a rooster tail of snow sparkles in the sun in your wake, that makes your heart sing. These moments of intense feeling have taught me to be aware of other moments in my life as they occur. When I feel that singing feeling with a man and know that I have also felt it in a field of grass and a field of snow, then I know that is really my own capacity to feel that I am celebrating.”

It is not only the sense of a communion with nature that creates a singing in the heart. An endorphin-induced natural high is one of the by-products of exercise itself. A runner may feel the same celebratory sense of well-being pounding a dirty city street that Libby finds as she posts rhythmically along a country trail.

“God is in his heaven; all’s right with the world” is how Robert Browning characterized this feeling in his long narrative poem
Pippa
Passes. It is no coincidence that Pippa experienced this feeling as she was walking. Not everyone can afford to ride a horse or even a ten-speed bicycle. Many of us must rely on our feet for transportation and for recreation. Like Jenny, we can take up running. Or we might make walking our sport. As an artist, walking offers the added benefit of sensory saturation. Things do not whiz by. We really see them. In a sense, insight follows from sight. We fill the well and later tap it more easily.

Gerry is a confirmed city dweller. His country walks are limited to perusing window boxes and pocket gardens. Gerry has learned that “in cities, people are the scenery.” He has also learned to look up, not down, and to admire the frippery and friezes that often grace buildings that look quite, well, pedestrian at street level. As he roves the city canyons, Gerry has found a whole panoply of scenic attractions. There is the orange-marmalade cat that sits in the window above the window box with both pink and red geraniums. There is the copper church roof gone murky green that glistens silver in rain-storms. An ornately inlaid marble foyer can be glimpsed through the doors of one mid-town office building. On another block, someone has sunk a lucky horseshoe in civic concrete. A miniature Statue of Liberty soars unexpectedly atop a dignified brick facade. Gerry feels at liberty himself, roaming the city streets on tireless feet. This courtyard, that cobbled walkway—Gerry gathers urban visual delights the same way his primordial ancestors gathered this nut, that berry. They gathered food. He gathers food for thought. Exercise, much maligned as mindless activity among certain intellectuals, turns out to be thought-provoking instead.

As we said before, we learn by going where we have to go. Exercise is often the going that moves us from stagnation to inspiration, from problem to solution, from self-pity to self-respect. We do learn by going. We learn we are stronger than we thought. We learn to look at things with a new perspective. We learn to solve our problems by tapping our own inner resources and listening for inspiration, not only from others but from ourselves. Seemingly without effort, our answers come while we swim or stride or ride or run. By definition, this is one of the fruits of exercise: “exercise: the act of bringing into play or realizing in action” (
Webster’s Ninth).

God bless the roots! Body and soul are one.

THEODORE ROETHKE

BUILDING YOUR ARTIST’S ALTAR

Morning pages are meditation, a practice that bring you to your creativity and your creator God. In order to stay easily and happily creative, we need to stay spiritually centered. This is easier to do if we allow ourselves centering rituals. It is important that we devise these ourselves from the elements that feel holy and happy to us.

Many blocked creatives grew up in punitively religious homes. For us to stay happily and easily creative, we need to heal from this, becoming spiritually centered through creative rituals of our own. A spiritual room or even a spiritual corner is an excellent way to do this.

This haven can be a corner of a room, a nook under the stairs, even a window ledge. It is a reminder and an acknowledgment of the fact that our creator unfolds our creativity. Fill it with things that make you happy. Remember that your artist is fed by images. We need to unlearn our old notion that spirituality and sensuality don’t mix. An artist’s altar should be a sensory experience.

We are meant to celebrate the good things of this earth. Pretty leaves, rocks, candles, sea treasures—all these remind us of our creator.

Small rituals, self-devised, are good for the soul. Burning incense while reading affirmations or writing them, lighting a candle, dancing to drum music, holding a smooth rock and listening to Gregorian chant—all of these tactile, physical techniques reinforce spiritual growth.

Remember, the artist child speaks the language of the soul: music, dance, scent, shells ... Your artist’s altar to the creator should be fun to look at, even silly. Remember how much little kids like gaudy suff. Your artist is a little kid, so ...

Art does not reproduce the visible;
rather, it makes it visible.
The moon develops creativity as
chemicals develop photographic
images.