The Artist’s Way: Week Nine
Wow it suddenly feels like I am flying through these 12 weeks. The routine of morning pages is dialed in. I wake up excited to write each morning. The artist’s dates have been more of a struggle these last two weeks, when I have been home with kiddos. I reframed this week’s artist date as a mental, rather than physical, activity, and began working on some inspirational greetings cards. These have lived on my eternal “maybe someday” idea list, and I finally decided to dig into Canva and see what could be made. Here are some samples:
Canva is amazing, right? I am just starting to explore some of its features and I love it. I have fantasies of making print patterns for fabrics, like napkins and sarongs. We will see….
Anyway, it was a good week. Week Nine was about self-compassion in the face of creative u-turns and asking for help. Cameron teaches that creative u-turns happen when we retreat to the comfort of what we know, even when it’s an unhappy or stifled state. She said we often make these u-turns on the eve of/immediately following a major creative breakthrough. It’s like we get a hint of what we want and we turn our backs on it.
While reading this, something came to mind that I hadn’t thought of in years. Something that made me cringe to recall: When I was 22, an agency offered me a modeling contract and asked me to get headshots done. I had always toyed with the idea of modeling and secretly wanted to try it, but I told myself a real offer wouldn’t require me to pay for my own headshots. So I walked away. Pride wounded. The lesson? Success can be scarier than failure. Trying and failing is worse than not trying when we don’t trust ourselves. Or trust the universe. I don’t actually regret that choice, by the way. But I see now that it was made out of fear, rather than faith.
In Week Nine, we learn to show compassion for our instinct to run when facing the great unknown. We learn to nurture our inner artists like the sensitive children they are. And we ask for help. These are the paths for managing the fear of a creative life, says Cameron. We can use the shame and pain from past creative u-turns to fuel us, too. It’s all material.
On to Week Ten!
