The Artist’s Way, A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, by Julia Cameron
It’s mid summer, 2009 and I’m looking for a book to read.
I happened to catch a segment of a program on PBS that featured the co-author of ”The Artist’s Way; A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity.” I was fascinated. The book looked awfully familiar and found it in my cabinet, given to me by my cousin while I was in the hospital recuperating from surgery. I remember I had tried to read it in 2006, but didn’t get far. This time, I couldn’t put it down.
At this time, I felt I was in a state of virtual “emptiness”, doing all the things I was taught I needed to do to live a good life, but where was the good life? I did not feel it at all on a personal level. Everything I did was for work or my family, there was no shred of Me left, no energy for Me left, yet I only had enough energy to prepare dinner, do homework and get my daughter ready for bed, and exhausted, lay down to sleep only to start the same process over the next day.
So I kind of read this book and it helped me to gain trust in myself on a creative level, which is the level I came to appreciate, that Julia articulated for me, at which every human being can feel empowered to live a more fulfilling life. She said that it takes will NOT to be creative; that it is important at the most fundamental level to embrace what is the “natural order of life” and that “we are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves”. I readily accepted this because I had pushed away my creativity all my adult life and I knew what she meant. Creativity has since come as a gradual process. And I came to love “the Process“.
I am a fine arts major in design and photography. I never pursued art after 1983 when I felt a kind of embarrassing shame to be working as a textile artist. I was relatively poor and hungry. Thank goodness I could go home and eat at mom’s house back then. So I quit and became a realtor, which I came to love, but didn’t grow rich like I had planned, and stayed in the field until 2000. I ended up in the San Francisco Bay area in 1996.
So I started writing what Julia calls “morning pages”, although I usually wrote them in the afternoon or night as there was no time in the morning with the daycare. I wrote everything that came to mind. My spiral notebook listened; I wrote about nothing and everything- it’s a tool to let your thoughts stream. Sometimes I struggled to fill the pages, but usually by page three, there was some substance.
A small trickle turned into a flow. I engage in a lot of creative endeavors, small as they may be, but I feel differently than I did a year ago. My projects have been modest, but they never would have come to be one year ago. I never would have trusted, or listened or acknowledged my artist; or experienced the joy of creating something. One year into writing morning pages, I feel I am kind of growing a new skin and shedding an old. I feel my creative spirit awakened. My eyes feel like they are seeing things in a fresh, exciting way.
