Tag Archives: The Artists Way

Fun Morning at the Zoo

This morning I took my first “Artist’s Date” in a long time. I didn’t really plan to do it… kind of fell into it. Our local zoo, which is not far from our house, recently received a herd of 5 African Elephants from the San Diego Zoo’s Safari Park. There’s one large male, Mabu, two females, Samba and Lungile and the sons of Samba — Punga and Sundzu. The zoo has transformed what was once a picnic area and soccer field into a large elephant habitat with a mud wallow, termite hills, swimming pool and wading stream. We’ve been watching the construction now for a couple of years as our daily walking path goes right by it. Finally, now, it’s finished.

The grand opening is to be tomorrow, but starting last Sunday, they have been holding a members-only preview. This morning I had a doctor’s appointment near the zoo, so decided that afterward I would go to Starbucks (also on the way to and from home) for a mocha and a scone and then head over to the zoo with my new camera.

It was awesome. The lion was out, and in the perfect position and lighting (see above). And the new Expedition Tanzania enclosure is wonderful and all the elephants were out.

Here’s Samba and Sundzu, the latter having breakfast.

Here’s Punga, Sundzu’s older brother. See his little tusks growing in? He seemed to like to throw hay on his back…

And finally Mabu, the giant male, who likes to eat branches and sticks and has already pushed over one of the trees and then broke it apart. That’s one of the “perks” of having an area with elephants in it if you’re some other kind of animal. They clear out paths and make the forests less congested…

Altogether I took 95 picture, just haven’t had time to go through and pick out the ones to keep and do the necessary editing and resizing. But what a fun morning, it’s been!

Let’s Try This Again

Well, what can I say? Even once a week seems to have become an impossible goal for me to meet with regard to blogging lately. It didn’t help that I was sick again.

Last time (before Thanksgiving)  it was some sort of digestive flu thing. This time (after Thanksgiving) it was a Perfect Storm of a cold. I still have the last dregs of its symptoms even now at day 12. 

The timing was perfect though. The first two days, when I was still not sure it was a cold, I had to drive my mother to the doctor for a white blood cell stimulating shot. I did that wearing a mask. Saturday, when I usually take her to the store, it turned out she didn’t need to go, which was a good thing because symptoms had begun by then and I don’t think the mask would’ve been up to containing them. Sunday was unbelievable. I could barely function for the sneezing and nose running. My hubby has it now. I hope and pray I won’t get it again. I don’t think I can unless the virus mutates…

Anyway, between that, and trying to catch up on the catching up I was doing when the cold hit, my time and energy for blogging have been more at a premium than ever. And the last time I worked on Sky was last Tuesday. I am at least continuing to move along with The Artist’s Way. I’m starting Week 10 today.  Though I have yet to complete today’s Morning Pages, nor did I do an artist’s date last week (unless wandering around Bookman’s Used Books for an hour looking at books counts) (I guess I can say it does). I did none of last week’s tasks — we were to read our morning pages for the first time since starting them, highlighting insights and actions. I only got the first week’s worth read and never got back to it.

And believe it or not, I’m still fighting about writing the pages. I don’t think I like having to write 3 pages whether I have anything to say or not (although I do always seem to come up with something). And then later, when I do have things to say, there’s no space in the journal that I’m using (specifically designed for morning pages, with three page increments marked out and quotes from the topics of each week’s reading used to embellish the pages) so I have to add overflow pages…  On the other hand, I’m kind of thinking that just the process of writing three pages of stream of consciousness might well be beneficial, just not in the way one would think.

God seems to do be doing a lot with me  along that theme lately… That the purpose in things done or things that occur is not what people see, or what I see but something else entirely. That God’s way of molding us into the image of His son is not anything like man’s way would be (not that man could even do it, but we seem to think he — we — can). That the sufferings we endure change us in ways we can’t really perceive and maybe can’t even imagine, and certainly are not changes we would be able to work in ourselves no matter how much we might want to.

That’s partly come out of the things I’ve been learning from The Artist’s Way.  I think I’ve mentioned that I’ve been highlighting, underlining and writing in the wide margins of the book’s pages as I’ve read and Week 9: Recovering a Sense of Compassion was heavily marked in.

Dare I save further comment on that for tomorrow? Well, one of the “guidelines” I’ve been following lately is “Try it and see.” So I will.

And hopefully I’ll be back to write some more tomorrow. Here’s a teaser, the first paragraph from that chapter:

“One of the most important tasks in artistic recovery is learning to call things — and ourselves — by the right names. Most of us have spent years using the wrong names for our behaviors. We have wanted to create and we have been unable to create and we have called that inability laziness. This is not merely inaccurate. It is cruel. Accuracy and compassion serve us far better.”

 Those who know me or have read this blog for any length of time will recognize not “laziness” but “indisciplined” as my term of choice for why I have been unable to create.  Which is perhaps just another word for the same thing, and just as wrong…

I’m Baa-ack

At least for today. And look! The falling snow is back, too!

Thanksgiving was a whirlwind of activity for me. Our son and daughter-in-law came to visit, we had a fine time. We got a new bed for them, which was delivered the very day they arrived. Next morning they and my husband ran in the annual Thanksgiving Day Turkey Trot cross country race while  I cooked turkey. We ate, cleaned up, played a board game, walked the dog, visited, worked on cars, on scrapbooking, ate more, walked the dog some more… all over the course of the three days they were here.

Anyway, I haven’t done anything with The Other Side of the Sky now for almost a week, though I was really starting to get on a roll before the holiday. Instead of 1 hour a day, I decided to do two hours a day where I just made myself go into the office and if nothing else, sit there listening to music.

Then I put on my bulletin board above my desks my Rules of the Road, gleaned and amended/adapted from The Artist’s Way (I’m currently on Week 8 and haven’t missed a day of morning pages, though some of them were not the full three pages; I’ve even managed a couple more artist dates):

RULES OF THE ROAD

 In order to be an artist, I must:

  1. REBOUND!
  2. Show up at the page. Use the page to rest, to dream, to try.
  3. Fill the well by caring for my artist.
  4. Set small and gentle goals and meet them.
  5. Pray for guidance, courage and humility.
  6. Remember that it is far harder and more painful to be a blocked artist than it is to do the work
  7. Be alert, always for the presence of God leading and helping my artist.
  8. Never abuse my artist by judging harshly my initial creative forays into a work. It is insane to measure the baby I’m giving birth to against a full-grown adult.
  9. Remember that my Father loves me and has promised to provide everything I need to do the work HE has called me to do.
  10. Remember that it is my job to DO the work, not judge the work!

Father, I will take care of the quantity and I will trust You to take care of the quality.

 These have been very helpful. Especially the “Set small and gentle goals” rule. If my goal is “read through yesterday’s pages” that works. But occasionally I forget and give myself a goal of “finish working through the plotline for chapters 1-4”.  Then I wonder why I don’t want to go in to the office, and why when I do go in, I can’t get anywhere… because I did not set a small and gentle goal I knew I could meet.

Anyway, I’ve also added a sort of progress bar to my side bar. It’s just a note, really, because my blog template apparently doesn’t support progress bar types of widgets (well, it accepted the thing, but showed me already done. A wonderful image, which perhaps I should keep. We could call it “My Progress in God’s eyes”:  already complete!

However, ahem, that wasn’t really what I had in mind here. Anyway, it’s up there right under the search box. I’m hoping to update it on the days that I work.

TAW – Artist Dates

TAW is short for The Artist’s Way, and the picture here is one I took on my artist date to Reid Park. I’ve been moving along through the course, and have now done four official artists dates with another mini date thrown in. I was planning on going to the zoo last week, but got derailed when I got sick.

The other dates? The first involved going to Target for stickers, crayons and other fun stuff in the arts and crafts area… Julia Cameron’s contention is the our artist is a child and we should attempt to do things that the child in us would like. She suggested the sticker outing. I also found some cool scallop edged chipboard books that I’m going to use for a project recording my different dates — for 99 cents!  What was fun was going to the store for silly things, not really knowing what I was after, just going and looking for fun stuff and then buying it.

That element of frivolity and no direct goals seems to be what’s most fun for me at this point. My second date was the one I already wrote about to Reid Park. The third was making shell cookies.  That one turned out to be a disaster.

Awhile back I came across a blog post of Lisa Spangler, one of the Hero Artists, about these cloud cookies she’d received from a friend — butter cookies cut in the shape of clouds with their bottom edges drizzled with chocolate.  She did a fun little video of eating them. I thought they were really cool and immediately wanted to make some. The cloud cookie cutters were sold at a website called Herriott Grace, where the man uses salvaged wood to make various objects for cooking, like spoons, bowls, plates, cake flags, etc. And also the handle for the cloud cookie cutter, the tin portion of which was made for him by a tinsmith. Anyway, they were all out of cloud cookie cutters when I looked, so I put in my email to be notified. The cutters were, ahem, $15 each. Pricey, but they were so fun and I was lusting.

A few months later I got the alert that they had some cookie cutters so I hurried to the website, clicking on the “buy it now” button only to discover that for some reason I couldn’t. After awhile I noticed a message that the cookie cutter had been purchased by someone else and there weren’t any more. Bummer! 

Then I went back to the original page and the cutter was still for sale. So I clicked on “buy it” again and this time… I could. Hmm. So I went on through the process and finally we got to the point where they added the shipping and handling. $15!  So the cookie cutter cost $15 and the shipping and handling cost $15 (the store was in Canada) and that made something like $32 for a cookie cutter the size of one’s hand. Well, the cookies were cool, but not THAT cool. So I backed out… and suddenly realized that’s probably what happened to the person who’d come before me.

I decided to see if I could find some cloud cookie cutters locally and went to Ace Hardware where they have lots of tin cookie cutters. No cloud cutters. But they did have a shell. And really, I love clouds but shells are cool, too. So… I bought a shell cookie cutter. For 69 cents.  LOL

Anyway, after all that I decided that it would be fun to make an artist date out of making those cookies. Well, things happened that day and instead of being able to use the afternoon — as I’d expected when I took out the butter in the morning to soften it — I had to quickly mix the dough around 4pm. Then it didn’t work right — way too dry and crumbly, impossible to “pat into a disk” — and I discovered that I’d misread the recipe and instead of 3/4 cup I was supposed to have used 3/4 pound. So I took more butter out, softened it in the microwave, mixed it into the dough, but it was still weird. Hoping the next step of chilling it would do the trick, I patted (with the help of plastic wrap to keep it together)  it into a disk and went to walk Quigley and then do Bible class.

So it was sometime after seven when I got back to it. I couldn’t put it off because the next day I was going to have to get up at 5:30 to take my mother to the hospital to get her portacath.  So I just had to get it done. Well, chilling the dough did not help. When I tried rolling it out, it just crumbled, so I had to break it up and add milk, flour was everywhere, Quigley kept trying to eat the dough bits that had fallen on the floor. I was NOT having fun!  🙁  But I got them baked, and then it was time to do the chocolate. That went no better than the other part. I finished them at 10 pm, completely wiped out, so tired I wasn’t even interested in trying one of the cookies. They did turn out to be pretty good. 

So that date was a disaster. In retrospect I realized I should have just abandoned the whole idea of trying to get them baked that day when things first went off from my plan and instead, should’ve put The Scarlet Pimpernell into the DVD player and done the movie date instead.  It was a great learning experience, though, as to how one can make something that is supposed to be fun into not-fun. The time pressure I think, is the biggest thing. When you have to get it done, even though you’re tired and no longer want to do it, it is no longer fun. Funny because the whole point of the dates is NOT to be in that kind of situation.

Thus my next date, a week later, was to go to Starbucks with my journal, eat a pumpkin scone, drink a latte and write in my journal. Afterward I wandered over to Office Depot to use my rewards card, no special anything in mind, and yet I found all sorts of things I needed, or just wanted and used the whole amount on the card.  It was like discovering treasure while you’re out for a walk. That one was like the Reid Park date where I came home light hearted and happy. Excited that I’d used the reward for things I needed, and had such fun doing it. I even bought a pad of post it notes, which I do not need, with a picture of a yellow lab puppy sitting on a chair. I have tons of plain post-its in my office. I bought the puppy because he was cute and made me smile and felt like a “kind thing” to do for myself. Which is what The Artist’s Way encourages. Do you your morning pages and one kind thing for yourself a day.

 He still makes me smile.

Under the Weather

Why do they call it feeling “under the weather” when someone is feeling sick? Well, let’s see. I can google that… hmm. Turns out the phrase originated in the 1870s and is believed to have been a seaman’s reference to the weather deck on a ship, the topmost deck most exposed to the weather. When they were sick they would rest below the weather deck in their quarters. So says idiomSite. I would add that in bad weather they might also rest there, and in really bad weather most of them would not be feeling well at all.

So. Glad I got that straightened out. It’s a good term then for my latest foible. Last Thursday at 2am I awoke suddenly feeling awful. Hurried to the bathroom, stayed there an hour, but nothing happened except I continued to feel sick. The next morning I still felt bad and figured I should take it easy, using the BRAT diet, but even that was difficult to eat more than a few bites of. At first I thought it might be a result of exposure to my son, who, as I mentioned in a previous post, had come down with a viral infection about ten days before.  Later, I recalled that the side effects of the new prescription for megadose Vitamin D I’d just started taking included nausea, sleepiness and headache. So which was it? Why would I care? Because tomorrow (Monday) I needed to be taking my mother to her second chemo treatment. If I’m sick, I can’t be around her. Well, I called the Nurseline today, and the nurse said that we have to assume I’m sick and someone else would have to take her. But not my husband, who might also be contagious,  just not showing any symptoms.

I called the Pharmacist about the side effects, and the weekend shift person was aghast to think I would be taking so many units and surely that would have more intense side effects. On the other hand, the pharmacist who went over it with me knew all about the recently changed Vitamin D levels and the new treatment for deficiency involving megadoses, and said the old 400IUs was obsolete.

So. Confusion reigns again. The only one who knows anything is the Lord. So after trying to figure out what to do with far too little information for more time than I should have, I finally gave it up and turned it all over to the Lord. My mother would have to find another ride and it turns out she has: the neighbor has agreed to take her. Hopefully she will arrange for the neighbor to bring her back as well, as I urged her to.

So that’s been the Distraction of the Week. But yesterday I decided to stop letting circumstances derail me as they have. In some of the Artist’s Way stuff I read about the notion of having a “studio hour”, wherein the person would go into her studio for an hour every day if only to dust and organize. So I decided to have an office hour. I just have to go in and be there. If only to dust and organize. I cannot however, read blogs.

Actually the blog reading has dropped way off thanks to the tool introduced by The Artist’s Way last week (Week 4): Reading/media deprivation. We were to attempt to refrain from reading for the entire week. I failed miserably — it was during the election after all and we had close races locally. But the exercise has shown me not only how much time it takes but how addictive and really waste-of-time it’s been. So for now I’m cutting back.

And, instead of telling myself I have nothing of interest or importance to write about in a blog post, I told myself to just do it and let it be whatever it is rather than trying to judge it’s worth. That’s Rules of the Road number 9:  “Remember that is it my job to DO the work, not judge the work!”

Thus you have a post to read today!

Time Warp

I feel like I’ve been caught in some sort of time warp. Two weeks seemed to have passed in a flash. I want to thank everyone for their prayers and also  those of you who commented on my last post with your words of encouragement. I greatly appreciate it.

The last ten days or so have been crazy. After the shock of finding out my mother’s cancer was back two weeks ago Monday and her new chemo treatment on Tuesday, we had to come in every day for the rest of the week for her to get shots to build up her white blood cells. Then there were blood pressure issues, which involved much phone tag with the doctor’s office and a new prescription called in to the pharmacy. I also had to set up an appointment for her to get a portacath, and that involved even more phone tag — I’m really starting to see where a cell phone or at least a cordless one would be beneficial. I would step outside to hang out clothes, or just turn off the water and the guy would call and leave a message. Then I’d call him back and leave a message… We did finally get it all settled and she went in Friday to have the portacath placed.

A portacath is a small reservoir and catheter inserted entirely under the skin. The reservoir has a special skin on the top of it that can be pierced by a special needle, which is what they use to draw blood or infuse medications. The catheter runs from the reservoir to a large vein in her neck.

On Friday at 6am we arrived at the hospital for the outpatient procedure. The nurse said I couldn’t come in with her and told me to go home and come back at 10:30am. So I left, went out to the car, parked in the hospital garage and discovered, all out of the blue, that it wouldn’t start. I had to walk almost a mile and a half to her house, to get her car which I then drove to my home. It was God’s provision that I had her purse with me, because that’s where she keeps her extra set of keys. Actually it turned out to be a nice walk, and I enjoyed it. The only downside was that lugging two purses and a bag of books and water did not make my back terribly happy. And when it’s unhappy, it tends to interrupt my sleep…

To further complicate matters, my hubby had left the day before to go hunting and was in the mountains, completely out of contact. He left without knowing when he’d be home… possibly not for several days. Meanwhile, our son and daughter-in-law were due to arrive that same day and wanted to spend time with us/me that night…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. At 10:30 I drove my mother’s car back to the hospital and picked her up. The procedure had gone without a hitch and she was doing well. I took her home, and since she still can’t drive (waiting now, for glasses to arrive) I took the car with me to my home.

I prayed that Stu would get a deer Friday morning and come back. That was unlikely, and even if he did, he’d really have to push it to get back in time to visit with the kids, so I wasn’t surprised when they arrived and he wasn’t there; nor was I when he wasn’t back by bedtime.

My twitching back woke me up Saturday morning about 4:30, a time I’ve come to call the carnal hour for the way things that normally wouldn’t bother me get all blown out of proportion. I thought about the car in the garage, and whether security would come and tow it, or vandals would scrawl graffiti over it. Finally I had to put the whole matter firmly in God’s hands. It’s His car, He would have to take care of it. I drifted back into sleep and about an hour and a half later, Stu came in the door — having gotten his deer late Friday afternoon, then working all night to get it out. (He’d hiked in and had to carry it out, all uphill. It took him five hours, in the dark).

On Saturday, after I had taken my mother to the grocery store (except for two small, sutured incisions she was almost entirely recovered from the portacath insertion) and Stu had slept a bit, he and I returned to my car still parked safely and without graffiti in the hospital parking garage — the battery was dead, he jumped it and we went to Autozone and the guy put in a new one. All better. I love the way God works.

Sunday we went to a party at the grand-inlaws’ house in honor of my DIL’s grandfather turning 80. Adam cooked the steaks — they were very good — and Kim made an amazing German Chocolate Cake from scratch. Yummm! We had a really nice time. The kids left to drive back home on Monday.

Meanwhile my mother and I returned Monday morning to the oncology center to try out the portacath for a blood draw. My mother was still losing weight, and the doctor kept suggesting things she “couldn’t” do — things like snack or eat more protein and fat — until he was banging his forehead with his hand. Finally he prescribed for her a medication that is supposed to increase appetite. She took it for about three days, then decided it was making her itch and quit. We had to go in Tuesday and Wednesday for more white blood cell stimulating shots. Wednesday I had a doctor’s appointment of my own as well, then returned home to find a message from Kim that after she and Adam had returned home on Monday night, Adam had gotten really sick and Tuesday night they took him to Urgent Care with a fever of 105. He was given fluids and Tylenol and was told there was some sort of problem with his liver… Liver?! By then the hits were coming so fast and furiously — and obviously — I was almost at the point of laughing. (But not quite)

Now, almost a week later, it turns out Adam had some sort of unidentified viral infection that must be allowed to run its course and from which he is steadily recovering. The liver problem readings were a result of the fact that he’d been vaccinated years ago for Hepatitis B.

Thankfully this week has been much calmer than the last two. Through it all, though I have gotten no writing done, I have continued with The Artist’s Way, with the Lord’s blessing it seems from the way He keeps working not only the daily Bible classes along with it, but other things as well. I even managed to finish reading a novel on Sunday that related in a very weird way. But this post is already too long, so those subjects will have to wait for another day.

TAW – Basic Principles

I continue to be amazed and excited by the way God is using the material in The Artist’s Way to stimulate thinking and encourage me in operating more freely in the creative part of my soul. The way He’s leading me through this, drawing my attention to parallels between what’s in the book and what’s in the Christian life, then providing confirmation, sometimes almost word for word in Bible class is really exciting.

Today (Sunday) I begin Week 2, which is called Recovering a Sense of Identity.   (Week 1 was Recovering a Sense of Safety).  Week 2 focuses on the things which will come in to attack and hinder the concepts taught and gains made in Week 1. One of the tasks for this week is to read through daily the “Basic Principles” that were listed on page 3.

One of the things I’ve been doing as I move through the course is to make it mine. When I first got the book, brand new from Amazon, I was reading it at the dining room table and drinking iced coffee. Barely had I started when I set the glass down wrong and it fell over, the entire contents flooding the book. After picking off the ice cubes, I mopped up the mess and spent a good amount of time sliding pieces of paper towel between all the pages. Yes. ALL the pages. There is not a single page untouched by coffee and some have a delightful, distressed look about them. At first I was dismayed and asked the Lord if this was some kind of sign. Was I not to read it after all? Instead, I got a laughing sort of thought: “Now it’s no longer ‘precious’ and you can feel free to write in it.”

Ahhh!  Very true. So I have done exactly that — underlined, highlighted, circled, starred, commented in the margins, crossed stuff out and replaced it with other stuff. Thus, I have amended the Basic Principles to my own liking, (You can find the original HERE) and I share them with you now:

Basic Principles

1. Creativity is a God-given part of the soul, bestowed for our blessing and benefit.

2. The Bible is full of songs, poetry, imagery. The book of Job was originally performed as a play. Jesus told stories in his teachings – the parables. Both David and Moses composed melodies and songs. David danced in the street as he worshiped the Lord. We are commanded to sing praises to the Lord, to “make” melodies. Angels sang for joy when God made the universe. God is the one who made flowers, birds, sunsets, the sea, clouds, mountains, lakes, trees.

3. God is the only one who creates out of nothing, but we echo His creative aspect in creating new things out of the materials He’s placed around and in us.

4. He has made each of us unique, with unique and specific creative gifts that come with the desire to use them. Sin, lies and distortions stop us.

5. He has a specific will and destiny for every person – for the unbeliever to be saved, for the believer, a specific journey or calling in which to glorify Him, a calling which no one else can fulfill.

6. He has given me creative gifts to be used for His glory and my blessing.

7. Part of using those gifts involves nurturing and encouraging them through filling the well with imagery and experience, and giving them time to be practiced.

8. Refusal to encourage my creativity and provide material for it to play with is a refusal to walk through the open door of operating in the gifts He’s given me.

9. When I open myself to exploring the creative part of my soul, I open myself to discovering and living in the full person God has made me to be, and to learning more about Him. He is the Great Creator and He is in me.

10. Functioning in and nurturing the creative side of my nature is as important as functioning in the logical, orderly side.

11. Why wouldn’t I want to open myself to His leading me into increasing creativity?

12. We must love ourselves before we can love others and in loving ourselves we must know who we are. As part of tending our own vineyard we nurture our creativity, for it is a vehicle by which we glorify Christ, as much through the process of living in it and enjoying it, as through whatever it produces.

13. Special word from Bible Class today (the day I typed this up for the first time): Some people who would never walk into a church or listen to a message will read one of my books. Or read my blog. And I am able to continue to witness to others through the art of card making.

Artist’s Date

The Artist’s Way has two major “tools” as part of its course: the morning pages, which are to be done daily, and the Artist’s Date, which is to be done once a week. To quote from The Artist’s Way Website,” the Artist Date is a one to two-hour block of time set aside weekly for an excursion on your own that celebrates and nurtures your creative self. These excursions or playdates should be festive.”  The book adds, “Think delight, magic, fun. Not duty. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you. Follow your sense of the mysterious not your sense of what you should know more about.”

Twelve years ago, I bombed out on the Artist Dates for the most part. They seemed silly. How would I ever find the time? I spent a lot of my time alone anyway, what’s the good of taking the time and effort to go somewhere. So I didn’t do them.

Today I went on my second Artist Date since starting this course. I left at 9am and went to a nearby McDonald’s to redeem the rest of a gift card I’d been given for mother’s day — got a small mocha frappe and took it across the street to Reid Park with my sketchbook and camera. I went alone, which is one of the requirements — as in, Quigley stayed home. I sat on a bench near one of the lakes and sketched — the ducks and geese, the trees, the lake. First time in maybe ten years that I’ve done that. (Yes the sketch is lame, but I am very much out of practice. And part of all this is about getting comfortable with making not-so-great-art and just having fun.

It was SOOOO cool! I LOVED it. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed doing that. It was such a blessing I could hardly believe it. A beautiful day, not many people, just enough, really. And the trees. I love the trees, and the variety… God’s details. Nothing in nature is linear and straight and simplistically ordered. Even though there is order behind all of it.

There were two loose dogs, but since I didn’t have Quigley, I didn’t care!

After I filled a sketchbook page, I packed up and pulled out the camera, then went around taking pictures of whatever caught my fancy — overriding any protests that my choices might be silly. After all, what difference did it make? It’s a digital camera. It’s not like I’m wasting film.

So…

 … I photographed the geese, the ducks, the lake, the man with the two short-legged dogs…

….. the trees, a night heron, the waterfall all sparkly with morning light, the sunny hillside with the grass such a bright yellow-green.

I love that color. Photographs can’t capture it.

I was so jazzed by it all when I left at ten. It was amazing. I couldn’t believe I’d actually done it. And while there I was even consciously and literally taking notes on the people and what I was hearing and smelling… thinking there could be a place like this in Sky.  I can’t even describe the sense of lightness and joy I had coming home. Who woulda thought? I’ve been going to that park forever. But today it was all brand new.

Then when I got home, as I came back inside from hanging out the laundry I found a mushroom in the grass. Last night there was nothing, this morning, a fully formed mushroom. Thinking it was probably poisonous, I picked it up to throw it away, but it was so cool, so perfect I decided to draw it. 

Then I threw it away. Good thing, too, since I just identified it: Green Gilled Parasol  or  Chlorophyllum molybdites . And it IS poisonous.

What an awesome time!  And oh yeah, I also got in three more pages on Sky. To go with the three I did yesterday. Which means I’ve reached page 15. In addition to taking my mother for her PET scan. So, silly and goofy or not, this Artist’s Way course seems to be making good on its promise of breaking through creative blocks!

Is Creativity “Spiritual”?

Last week when I read the Introduction in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, (the 12-week course on “discovering and recovering your creative self”  I blogged about last time) I quickly came upon one of the issues that has long befuddled me in reading these sorts of books.  Quoting Ms. Cameron:

“For a decade now, I have taught a spiritual workshop aimed at freeing people’s creativity. I have taught artists and non artists, painters and filmmakers and homemakers and lawyers — anyone interested in living more creatively through practicing an art; even more broadly, anyone interested in practicing the art of creative living. While using, teaching and sharing tools I have found, devised, divined and been handed, I have seen blocks dissolved and lives transformed by the simple process of engaging the Great Creator in discovering and recovering our creative powers.

‘The Creat Creator? That sounds like some Native American god. That sounds too Christian, too New Age, too…’ Stupid? Simple-minded? Threatening? … I know. Think of it as an exercise in open-mindedness…Allow yourself to experiment with the idea there might be a Great Creator and you might get some kind of use from it in freeing your own creativity.”

When I first read this some twelve years ago, it bothered me. Because while God can and does use people who are not saved to communicate His truth, He doesn’t do it the way she’s describing. People are born depraved. He can’t creatively empower someone who has never believed in His Son, because they aren’t spiritually alive. They are darkened in their understanding, living in bondage to sin… So while you might be able to apply Ms. Cameron’s thinking as expressed above to someone who is saved, who has a new nature which cannot sin, who has received God’s very own righteousness imputed to them at the point of belief in what His son did for them on the cross and because of that work, the ability thru confession of sin to be filled and empowered by His Spirit, you just can’t with people who have not been regenerated.

Her whole premise is a lie, unworkable, deceptive… even evil. Years ago,   I tried to set that aside and read on, but this particular concept kept tripping me up. And as I mentioned in my previous post, eventually I quit reading the book and abandoned the “course.”

I come back to it now with the realization that Satan knows doctrine. He’ll use it, distorted, of course, with people who are unregenerate. He’ll move them to make applications of true doctrines in situations where they don’t apply. I learned this from my study of Job, where Job’s three friends were bringing up correct doctrines about the law of volitional responsibility and divine discipline for believers who had gone astray from the Plan, they just didn’t apply to Job.

So, armed with this new knowledge — ie, that some of the things said in The Artist’s Way might actually be truth, just applied to the wrong situation or person — I am finding myself able to read it as I had not been able to before. And almost the first thing that hit me in reading this introduction was the realization that creativity is not a spiritual function per se, but a soulish one.  As I said above, the ability to be creative is part of the soul of all men, part of being created in image of God.

And it’s this creative part that she’s trying to describe and discuss. Which is admittedly difficult because it’s invisible. Nor is it a faculty we can control. The left brain, which is said to be verbal, linear and logical is the area where we do our conscious thinking. The right brain is not verbal, but more spatial, intuitive, spontaneous and holistic. It’s the part that combines disparate elements into something new. With left brain thinking we work through a problem step by step. With the right brain, the ideas come out of the blue. You have no idea how they were formulated, they just appear.

Because of this, people have over the ages attributed them to various elements outside themselves, from the Greek muses to God Himself, via the Holy Spirit. Many writers of the books on creativity and making art that I’ve read are part of Western culture and not surprisingly interpret the situation in accordance with the Christian traditions of our culture, that is, they attribute their creative flow or urge to God in them. People who don’t believe in Jesus Christ and are embracing all manner of other occultic, fallacious things — yoga, trances, shamanism, meditation, out-of-body experiences, conversations with their spirit guides — nevertheless claim that God is moving them to create. Because God is a creator they are creators. Creativity is really the norm in life, and most people have just shut it down. Creativity is our link to God Himself. (and never mind about Jesus Christ).

I might be tempted to say, well, they’re unbelievers, so of course they’re wrong about that. It’s not God that’s moving them, simply the creative function itself. And how else are they going to talk about it?

As I said earlier, it’s not something we can see or feel while it’s working, nor is it something we can control at will. Yes, some people claim they can, and maybe they can to a degree, but I tend to doubt that. If one is just going to write the same story again with different minor components or paint the same picture again with different colors, I don’t call that true creativity. That’s more like cabinet making. Once you’ve made a model it’s easy to churn out others or variations on the theme. But to do something different, to start out not knowing where you’re going, how the story will turn out, to write with the notion that it has to be something that keenly interests you, to reach down inside yourself and pull out the things that really matter to you, that are true or painful or significant… that’s different. I know I can’t do that. It just happens. Things emerge and I run with them. Many times it’s only after I’ve completed a draft that I have any clear idea what a story is really to be about.

I was reflecting today about playing tennis and how when you start out you have to be willing to play really, really badly. I hated it at the beginning because all I ever seemed to do was chase balls that I’d hit over the fence or down the long stretch of courts that had no barriers between them. I used to practice hitting balls against the backboard, and at first many of them went over the backboard, thunked off my racket, were missed altogether, hurt my arm I hit them so badly, etc.

You can’t really control your movement. Not in the fine tuning. You don’t stand there and consciously direct each nerve to fire, each muscle to move at such and such speed at such and such time. You can’t. It’s hard enough to remember not to bend your wrist and to turn yourself sideways to the ball and to follow through after you’ve hit it. And when you get into an actual game, most of that flies out the window because you just can’t keep it all in your head. You don’t improve at tennis by concentrating harder. You don’t improve because you will to improve.

The only way to improve is to practice — hitting at the backboard and on the court with a partner, and playing actual games. Usually it’s playing against people better than you that helps the most, which means you’re going to lose.   Probably a lot.

And all that is for something physical — actual movements that we can “control” in at least a broad sense. I haven’t read any books about playing  tennis as a spiritual discipline (though I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re out there; I know there’s one about golf), though I have read about “getting in the zone”. That’s where you become one with the game and your play suddenly elevates to another level. I’ve experienced it the zone, myself. My point here, though, is that we can talk about playing tennis in a way that doesn’t bring God into the picture, so why can’t we do that with creativity?

Granted, this business of the idea suddenly blooming in your head, full-petal in the midst of taking a shower, does make it seem like something not of yourself. When you sit down blank-headed and start writing and suddenly it’s like you’re recording something you’re observing or even participating in, when you see it all in one fell swoop, when it starts flowing without any effort on your part, and suddenly this new character appears, or your old ones refuse to do what you’d planned for them and start doing something completely unexpected — that all seems pretty magical and even “godlike.” I’m connected to “spiritual electricity,” is how Julia Cameron describes it.

But that’s not what “spiritual” actually means, at least so far as the word is used in the Bible. There “spiritual” is used in contrast to “fleshly”. In 1 Co 2:14 the naturally minded man — the psuchikos or soulish man — is contrasted with the pneumatikos or spiritually minded man — the latter filled with the Holy Spirit, his thinking having been transformed to align with the mind of Christ through the study of His word. 

True spirituality can certainly produce “brilliant” ideas, but I believe it does so within the context of the way man has been made. Everyone, spiritual and soulish, Christian and non-Christian, gets brilliant ideas out of the blue — marketing folk, engineers, cooks, artists. It’s not some special connection to God regardless of one’s status with respect to Jesus Christ and His commands for the spiritual life. It’s an aspect of how we’ve been made, one that is mysterious because it cannot be clearly explained, traced out, or controlled. But an aspect all of us have.

In researching the ancient Romans, I learned that they had gods for everything. A god for every river, every stream, even a god of the cupboards. You had to appease all of these gods or bad things would happen to you. We think that’s silly today. People don’t worship a god of the cupboard or appease the god of the stream anymore, because we’re so much more sophisticated. People don’t drown because the irate stream god pulled them in and drowned them. We understand that accidents happen. There are the risks associated with streams and rivers. So we build fences, put up warning signs, redesign bridges or boats, heed weather forecasts,  wear life jackets, and follow safety rules, thinking in some way we control our destiny. We understand the situation now.

But this faculty of creativity, this sudden filling of one’s mind with an entire symphony, with a scene, with an image compelling us to paint it… where did that come from? We don’t know. We can’t see it, we can’t trace it, we can’t break it down into components of cause and effect… and so… oddly, we — or at least many in the fields of creativity — ascribe it to a god, or a spirit, or some universal power, or spiritual electricity — even to the God of the Bible, if that happens to be their thing. 

I suppose that believing you are connected to the God of the Universe through your art will give you a confidence you’d not have otherwise, so perhaps that’s the draw. Confidence and relaxation are important elements in the free functioning of the creative faculty, so believing in a higher power would no doubt produce the desired results, even if the object of that faith was bogus.

What’s important to me here, though, is my understanding that the creative element of man’s soul works in a mysterious way, in a way that we can’t see, logic or control, and it works that way in all of us, believer and unbeliever. It is a gift we cannot control or summon at will. And while the simple fact of its arrival may feel strange, mysterious and outside ourselves, that doesn’t make it a spiritual function. Even with Christians, creativity in and of itself isn’t a spiritual function, any more than speaking is. Spirituality depends on the filling of the Holy Spirit. And the content of what is created or spoken, though it may feel as if it did not come from us, I believe is drawn from whatever amount of God’s word you’ve learned and metabolized.

Not to say the Holy Spirit can’t or doesn’t direct creative function. He certainly can and does. I couldn’t write if I didn’t believe that. But it’s just like with the Pastor. The Holy Spirit speaks through his message, but if the man never studies the word, the Spirit’s not going to have much to work with.

I could go on in this vein, but I’ll desist. The point of this post was to sort through my thoughts on this association with creativity and spirituality and I think I’ve done what I wanted to do there.  It’s been like having a lightbulb go on in my head to realize that it’s part of how we were all made, and I find the fact that God made half our brains to think in ways we can’t direct or understand to be amusing. And significant.

I’m Jumping In

Well, I’ve decided to pursue the twelve-week course that is laid out in the book The Artist’s Way, which I mentioned last week. There were too many true statements being made. I kept asking the Lord if He really wanted me to do it, because it is truly coming from a cosmic sort of viewpoint. The relationship she describes as being between God and the Creative Person is amazingly accurate … if you’re talking about the relationship between God and one of His children, which is to say, someone who has believed in Jesus Christ — His person and His work — for eternal life. It is not the relationship someone who has not believed in Christ can have, yet it is billed as such in this book. Basically the spiritual life and relationship with God are said to be reached through embracing and living in your creativity, with creativity and spirituality being presented as synonymous.

The subtlety of the distortion is breathtaking. Everything that we have as believers through Christ, through His work, this books says we can have through our own efforts. I don’t want to think more highly of myself than I ought to; and I am well aware of my capacity to get sucked into thinking something that seems good but is really another facet of human viewpoint, which is why I have approached this with a certain amount of trepidation.

So why am I going to read it and do the things it suggests? Because I’m pretty sure I’m being led to do it.  On Sunday Pastor Bob took a break from his teaching on the doctrine of the Open Door to do a special on… metaphors for the Christian life. He was specifically wanting to share with us a baseball metaphor, but to do that had to lay the ground work for all the other metaphors used in the Bible. The military metaphor, the athletic metaphors… Having thoroughly laid out all that, he set forth the baseball analogy — and it was pretty cool.

That evening I finished up the Introductory part of the book, before moving into Chapter One, and in it was a section on logic Brain versus artist brain. Logic brain thinks in neat, linear fashion. It likes control and order and, well, logic. Anything outside those parameters are regarded with suspicion and even alarm. Artist brain on the other hand, says Ms. Cameron,

 “is our inventor, our child, our very own personal absent-minded professor. Artist brain says “Hey! That is so neat!” It puts odd things together (boat equals wave and walker.) It likes calling a speeding GTO a wild animal: The black howling wolf pulled into the drive-in.”

“Artist brain is our creative holistic brain. It thinks in patterns and shading. It sees a fall forest and thinks: Wow! Leaf bouquet! Pretty! Gold-gilt-shimmery-earthskin-king’s-carpet! Artist brain is associative and freewheeling. It makes new connections, yoking together images to invoke meaning: like the Norse myths calling a boat ‘wave-horse.'”

Artist brain thinks in terms of metaphors. Analogies. And as I contemplated that fact tonight, I began to think of all the metaphors in scripture. There were, of course, the military and athletic metaphors Pastor mentioned Sunday morning. But also the shepherd, the vine, the Lamb, the door, the tree, the cross, the brazen serpent, Noah’s ark, the red sea crossing, Abraham’s almost sacrifice of Isaac… all of them analogies, metaphors, types. The Bible is full of them. God is full of artist brain metaphor making!

The “coincidence” of all this is just too great. Plus, I started with the morning pages last week, and oddly that seems to have cut down the amount of time I feel compelled to write in my journal. The whole thing has got me more focused on the function of writing, is reminding me of lots of things I’d forgotten and today… today, despite suddenly feeling the old aversion the moment it was time to go into the office and work, I had the idea to take a walk, gleaned from the list of optional tasks for Week 1. So I took a 20 minute walk through the neighborhood, and when I returned the aversion was gone and I got to work. I worked from 10 til about 5, with time off for lunch. And I got a lot of things resolved. Better still, I did four more pages of Chapter 1.

So. I’m pretty happy about that.