I know, long time no blog.  Guess I thought I would be sharing more of the Artist’s Way journey here with you, but have to say it was a busy 12-week process and I didn’t manage to make time for blogging.  Really enjoyed Julia Cameron’s guide for growth last fall along with six other women who stuck it out for the whole 12 weeks.  It was quite remarkable how much my life seemed to track what was in the book or vice versa–something of a chicken and egg issue, not really sure which was the cause and which the effect.

Learned quite a bit about myself and highly recommend the process to other artists.  It was a good look at what causes me to create and not create, and many of the underlying issues of life that seem to affect my work.  Some of them I was familiar with and some of the revelations were quite helpful, enabling me to better deal with things so that I can move forward more easily and freely.  As a group, we have decided to move forward with another of Julia Cameron’s books, Finding Water, and are currently in our second week.

Lots of morning pages…  for the first 12-weeks, assuming I did them all (which was usually the case), that adds up to 252 pages in the 12-week series, not counting other journaling exercises, of which there were many.  Still haven’t re-read them all though an assignment asked us to do so.  Yet from what I did read, I realized there was an undue focus on my schedule day-to-day, signaling that I very much need to simplify my life in order to achieve more of the things I’m looking to achieve, along with just learning to have more of a balanced life.  Going too many directions all at once is certainly not the best tactic for getting there, yet figuring out where to let go, and what activities to drop, is always the big challenge.

By this second book, I’m finding that the weekly “Artist Dates” prescribed by Julia Cameron are quite enjoyable and do tend to inspire creativity.  I realize too that I’ve gotten involved again in some creative things I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. These include 1) playing the piano again as I finally got it tuned for the first time in 18 years or so! and 2) designing theater sets.  Designed my first set for a play (in more than 20 years that is!) still showing this month at the Auxilliary Dog Theatre in Nob Hill called A Shot Away, and now working on the next one for The Price which will open in early February.  Have to say that the books by Julia Cameron really do have a lot of great ideas and are very inspirational, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed broadening and deepening the friendships I’ve made with other artistic women there in the process.

This morning I woke up reflecting on how things can change in an instant.  Certainly this is not a new concept, and it’s definitely not something I learned recently, but something I continue to learn and see over and over again in my life.  Perhaps I learned it first, and deepest when my father was killed instantly in a car accident when I was 14, though surprisingly, as deep as this memory goes, it is still a concept I forget from time to time. 

Good for me to remember that being open to what happens day to day is the best place for me to be.  My reflections began from thinking how a phone call I received about a job interview next week impacted me when it came.  I was on a certain track and feeling like things were going in one direction, but when the call came, I realized how excited I was about the possiblity it brought, and how it expanded my thinking.  Not to say that I may not continue in the direction I was heading if the interview doesn’t lead to this job, but what’s important here is the concept of remaining open to what happens.  In fact, more things happened yesterday that could take me in an entirely different direction, so my thinking was again expanded.  As a result, I am realizing, as I’ve been told more than once, that I seem to do best in life when I can stay present in today, not focusing too much on what I think will happen tomorrow.

So, moving on with this thought, and hearing a voice in my brain saying what I have heard in Klemmer trainings more than once, “as we are in anything, we are in everything,” I began to consider how this concept plays out in my art.  When I am creating a watercolor painting or a sketch, it is often the case that I start from a scene, picture or image that inspires me to go in a certain direction.  Then, as I begin to put that idea on paper, something often happens to take me in another direction.  If I remain stuck on the original idea, as in life, I can find myself very disappointed at the results and critical of myself for not perfectly executing what it was I was seeing in my initial vision.  However, if I am open to the change and remain open to it being a positive force, I often end up with something far better than I could have initially conceived. 

This is one of the most exciting and helpful things I have ever learned about the creative process, and it’s quite intimately connected to the how I view the creative forces at work in my life.  Day to day, may I not miss the blessings around me because I’m focused on the original way I was expecting something to be!