Guest blogger Catherine Shaw says:
I love your honesty, Catherine. love it!
"I
have to admit that I have found the AW very challenging. Weeks 1 and 2 I battled
with. I stopped doing the ‘Morning Pages’ in week 3 (and I only managed a
minuscule amount of writing anyway) which means in week 9 I have nothing to read
in the ‘Tasks’!!
But
what I started to do was a morning meditation instead, which I find much more
beneficial to my soul than writing angst down.
Week
4 was relatively easy as I cleared my wardrobe out and had no trouble in the
reading ban (except for reading the news concerning the untimely death of Ivan
Cameron)…. I discovered in week 5 that my favourite creative block is my laptop,
which is no longer allowed to accompany me to the studio…( I found myself
disappearing, like Alice, down the rabbit hole of the internet). I read in week
6 that “When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us….(the rest of the
sentence is true, page 108) But this is not always the case…..and I’m sure there
are other Artists out there who feel the same. In week 7, I had to complete the
phrases “As a Kid, I……” I look at it now that as a kid I got what I needed to
bring me to where I am now. It also made me look at how much I have in my life
already……Week 8 I was asked to look at early patterning…..I guess I was lucky as
my Father thought Art was worthwhile, my mother taught me how to Daydream,
nobody said my dreams where rubbish.
In
week 9, we are finding a sense of compassion, which involves Enthusiasm. I can
relate to this wholeheartedly as my Studio is a complete playground and a fun
place to be working in and I am living my dream, as thy say. I am full of
complete joy when I arrive at my Studio.
However,
what I can’t relate to is “Creative U Turns”…….Julia Cameron say’s “We are now
on the road, and the road is scary.” The “road” is not called scary, the road is
called “Life” and whether one is a ‘recovering blocked artist’ or not it is just
that….this is Life and it is f@%king scary at times. Creativity is not scary,
it’s just a way of expressing oneself. We can all make excuses for not doing
what we want to do in this life, we can hide behind all manor of reasons…..some
of us will “Blast Through Blocks” some of us wont. However, the reality is we
will all do the very best we can for ourselves as individuals at anyone time. It
is no one else’s fault if we don’t follow “Our Dream”…That is an excuse for not
taking responsibility for our own lives, no matter what our parents did, or our
teachers etc I can’t think of a creative U-turn that “just kills me” and I
don’t know of anyone who has committed ”creative hara-kiri”. Shouldn’t we look
at our past so called Creative U turns as energy that we couldn’t engage with at
particular moment in time, without seeing them in this so called negative light?
It’s
my birthday on Tuesday and I had decided to take my best girlfriend (who is
having a hard time with her Catering business due to the Credit Crunch) to Paris
for a complete girlie day, Euro star, champagne, lunch, art galleries the
lot….but it all hinged on me getting a particular job……I didn’t get it…..so the
alternative was pate, French bread and wine under the Transmitter in Crystal
Palace Park. Fine as far as I was concerned but my friend decided that that
wasn’t good enough….so I was now told that she would to cook a dinner at her
home for 8 people…….and I felt CROSS it wasn’t what I wanted to do, I just felt
she was now taking over. We were at stalemate.
It
took me 2 days to step back and look at it compassionately, she was trying to
cheer me up after losing the big job, and I on the other hand, felt guilty that
she was prepared to cook a complete French Meal for 8 people. Compassion comes
from our inner core and sometimes it’s hard to find.
When
I look back over the last 9 weeks I’ve come a long way…..I’ve found and seen
aspects of myself I didn’t acknowledge. There is a lot about The Artist Way I
find flawed….and there is a lot that is pure joy to engage with. Here’s to week
10."
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