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Finding Our Feet
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Scan your list. Select the adventure that sounds the most delectable to you. Devise one small step you can take toward having that adventure. Take that step.
In order to begin, we must start with where we are. That precise point is the taking-off place, the entryway to where we are trying to go. It is a morning in mid-May. I have just driven across the country from New York to New Mexico. I arrived "home" in Taos yesterday; my familiar house feels like a foreign country, and I do not know how to unfurl my days here. The sky outside my writing room window is blue. Deeper blue mountains bulk in the distance. Closer in, the sun beats down on the tin roof of my old adobe house and the day stretches out with languor. That is where I am. Where are you?
Often, we are dissatisfied with where we are. We want to be somewhere else, somewhere more finished and respectable before we begin. "Let me just get my legs under me," we think. "Then I will think about the art I want to make."
The truth is, thinking about the art we want to make is part of how we get our legs underneath us. When we start with where we are, however awkward and unfinished, we start with something real. The something real may be "Stop, Julia, I don't feel ready!" but that is as good a place to begin as any—and so we start. We take our pen to the page and we move our hand across it, listening to the faint, whispery sound of paper: Here we go, here we are, ready, aim, and fire. It is not so bad, really, writing from where we are instead of from some imaginary place. It is good, really, to start
with the truth: "Today I am frightened. My life stretches in front of me like a highway going nowhere that I know. I slip into the car. I put the car in gear. I touch the gas. My God, I am going somewhere, but where?"
When we say we are afraid to begin a project, we are actually saying something else: "I am afraid of how I will feel as I continue." We do not want to start because we do not know that we can continue. It is not the start, it is the finish that troubles us.
Wanting to know where we are going is often how we fail to go anywhere at all. Rather than surrender to the mystery of the creative journey, we want to know each sight we will see, each obstacle we will confront. Each "something" that we will encounter if we dare to begin.
The truth is that we cannot know where our creative trail is taking us. We cannot predict precisely who and what it is we will become. The only certainty is that we will change from who and what we are. We will become something larger and something more, but exactly the form that something more and larger will take is a creation that we have not yet created and cannot demand to know.
"Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief" is an excellent prayer for travelers, and as creative beings, travelers are what we are at the core. The refusal to begin our journey doesn't keep us from having one. We do our days in motion anyway, like prisoners making their daily rounds within the walls. It is when we willingly embark, praying, "Take me where you would have me go; make me what you would have me be," that our journey becomes at once God's and more uniquely our own.
Each of us is unique and irreplaceable. There is only one of us in all of time. We are on this earth, partnered always by unseen forces that would guide us and guard us as we journey into the unknown. No one else can take our journey for us. Two people setting off side by side will still encounter different sights, different wonders. The openness to begin is all the openness we are required to have each day. We start today, and tomorrow we start again, and the day after we start again, as we will the day after that. In this way, and no other, does our journey come to us. We begin. The rest unfolds through us.
Drought
FINDING OUR FEET
Try this: Think of what you are about to do as a field report to yourself. Take pen in hand and describe precisely where you are and how you feel about it. Nothing is too petty to be included. Allow yourself to gripe on the page. You are sending out an SOS and giving your exact coordinates. Every detail you include helps the rescue squad to know what's needed. Be precise. Where are you at?
I am back in my little crimson writing room in New Mexico. My desk looks west, over the tin roof of the adobe next door, toward a distant mountain range. A large willow tree lashes in the wind. It is very dry. The wind is stiff and full of dust. We need rain.
One of the critical issues in any creative life is how to survive the periods of drought, those long patches where ideas feel few and far between and when our creative spirit feels parched for lack of moisture. Droughts stretch too long, and we always feel they are endless. We find it hard to take our cue from the natural world, knowing that rain will come again, ideas will once more How freely.
When I am in a period of drought, my chief enemy is despair. I am afraid to harbor hope, and yet it is the gentle harboring of hope that is the antidote to dryness of the spirit. In arid times we must practice a very gentle discipline. We must keep on keeping on. Morning Pages are never more important than in those periods when we seem to eke them onto the page a drop at a time. The slightest trickle, the merest hint of water, creative juice, is what we are after.
Yesterday, driving into town, the wind was so stiff that the car rocked, swayed by its fierce bouts. Dust blew in great rust-colored clouds. Grit filled the air. I had been eight months in the verdant Hast, dripping with moisture and green. I had heard, but only
heard, that "we were dry this year," at home in Taos, but it took seeing to be believed.
My aging neighbor stepped out to greet me as I pulled the car into the drive. She waved a hand at the parched earth. "Papa brings the water in a bucket," she said. "At night there sometimes isn't any water."
At eighty-three, my neighbor has been through drought before. She knows that it will pass, and she shares that knowledge along with her advice on what to do in the meantime: "Wash and bathe early in the day. Try not to use much water. There isn't much to use."
When we are in a period of creative drought, we must believe that we carry our own water, that we can gently tap the inner stream if we are kind with ourselves, and patient. The grace of creativity is a great underground river. It flows on, untouched by the events and the apparent droughts of our outer life. Like the great rivers that flow within the earth, it is there, waiting for us to acknowledge it and dip into it with humility.
Most droughts of the spirit occur because we have tried to be too self-sufficient. We have forgotten that our creativity is a spiritual gift with its taproot in Spirit and not in our own will. "Not I, but the father doeth the works," Christ told us. Great artists through the ages have insisted that they were merely channels for divine energy, that God worked through them, bringing their art to form. We hear testimony to this fact from Brahms, from Puccini, from Blake. When we remember that our position as artists is a humble one, we begin to feel the gentle flow. When we start to listen to what would be born through us instead of trying to force into being a "something" that we will, then we begin to write or paint or sculpt or
dance more freely. Feeling our connection to the divine, we feel less alone, less the sole architect of what it is we would accomplish.
Does this mean that an artist is empty and without ambition? I don't think so. I think it means that our ambitions must be surrendered to a higher force for proper fulfillment. "This is what I have in mind, help me" is a worthy artist's prayer.
When I was first getting sober and learning the ideas of art as a spiritual practice, I was told to post a little sign in my writing area: "Dear G
od, I will take care of the quantity. You take care of the quality." This notion ran counter to all my ego-driven ideas about art and authorship. It shrank the artistic job to a very simple one: Show up and try to write whatever seemed to want to be written.
In the long years since those early lessons, I have learned that the lessons are sound and that my relationship to my creativity, in order to stay healthy, must remain one of openness and receptivity. I must strive not to be "full of ideas" but instead to be empty of self-will so that my ideas might come into me more easily.
Creative droughts do not end through willfulness. They end through the act of surrender. They end through the prayer "Show me what you would have me do." Our creative condition is grounded in and subject to our spiritual condition. We may daily strive to "work" but we will get further if we daily strive to "serve." It is not that God's will and ours are at opposite ends of the table but, rather, that we can seat ourselves near God or far from God, at the right hand or at a remove. God is the Great Creator. The Great Creator takes delight in us and our creations. Inviting this larger creative spirit to participate in our work is acknowledging the right order of things. We have been "made," and we in turn are intended to "make things." How much better we do this when we seek our creator's help.
DROUGHT
Try this: In any period of creative drought, kindness is critical. We must become for ourselves the good mother, gentling the turbulent or despairing heart. Some of us do not know where to begin with kindness. What follows is a list of ten possibilities. Read them, then find ten of your own from which to choose.
1. Buy bath salts and oils
2 Buy fresh berries
Drink more herbal tea
Get a manicure
Schedule a massage
Go to bed an hour early every night for
a week
Take a walk
Buy a good new pen
Do the mending
10. Have my hair professionally conditioned
Choosing any of these from either my list or yours will be a step in the direction of kindness and self-nurturing.
Drama
A tremendous wind sweeps down from the mountains. It carries both dust and debris. On the porch, a pigeon shelters against the wind, moving the dogs to mayhem in their frantic barking. The pine trees whip sideways. The willow tree lashes the earth. The air is fresh with change and heady with ozone. This weather is dramatic.
There are two uses for drama. We can use it to distract ourselves from work or we can use it to fuel our work. Drama contains energy, and that energy can be tapped. The cottonwoods along the creek rustle in the wind and shake loose great clouds of snowy fluff. The fluff floats in the air, coming softly to settle on a window ledge. That fluff reminds me of inspiration—sometimes so soft and gentle that it is easy not to notice it. It is particularly easy to ignore inspiration if we are in the midst of drama.
It is one of the many false myths about creativity that artists thrive on dramatic lives. The truth may be the opposite, that our creative lives are dramatic enough and that we thrive on everyday lives that are dull, routine, and structured. Artists need structure, and many times we must devise it for ourselves, setting up "work schedules and deadlines in lives that are too wide open to be productive.
"I crave structure," says writer Natalie Goldberg, who begins her day by sitting zazen, then progresses to a writing session, a painting session, and a long daily walk.
My day is structured similarly. I begin with Morning Pages, followed by guided writing, followed by music, followed by writing, followed by walking. When I can fit it in, I also do piano time, and I wish for days twice their length so that I could grid in more activities.
In the midst of personal drama, it can be harder to hold to our creative grid. We may be tempted to binge on phone time or lengthy heartfelt conversations across the kitchen table over cups of tea. Drama is seductive, and artists must learn to not be readily seduced. Our work time must be sacrosanct, and if it isn't, drama soon seeps into our personalities. We feel ill tempered and out of sorts. The world goes off-kilter and it tends to stay there until we get back to working.
The domestic partners of working artists must learn to live with the rhythm of creative work. An untimely interruption can wreak havoc on a day's productivity. We want to be like regular people, but we are not. The thread of thought that we are listening to may not be easy to recapture—and so we must take care.
It is not that artists are precious. We are actually hardy and often user-friendly as long as the simplest boundaries are in place. Many writers and painters learn to turn off their phones, leaving a cheery message that announces they will be glad to talk—"after work." Studios and writing spaces are off-limits for the casual visitor. Drop-ins are not really welcome, although sometimes when one occurs we fall on it like a ravenous dog, glad to be distracted. But it is the lack of distraction that really serves us, the long hours of boredom that we are left to fill with our own devices.
I live two thirds of the year in busy Manhattan and one third of the year in sleepy Taos. In Taos, I tend to get great swaths of writ-
ing done, as there is little to distract me. The drive into town is a drive. It is all too apparent that I really am abandoning my work if I get in the car, and so I tend to put off "town" until late in the day, after the music and the prose have had their time.
There is something very productive about having days that unfurl with cookie-cutter sameness, leaving the drama where it belongs—in the work itself. Many artists find that the drama in their own temperaments also grows curbed as their creative work progresses. A taste for crazy lovers may be replaced by a steady relationship. A fondness for alcohol may give way to sobriety in the name of productivity. Over time, drama tends to be outgrown and left behind. There is drama enough in the work itself, in the doing of it or the not doing of it—and the not doing of it becomes so painfully dramatic that we tend to avoid that too.
The wind is still whipping down the mountain. The heads of trees still bob and dance. This essay has been written despite the temptation to stand, nose pressed to the window, staring out at the great and showy storm. Instead, the storm has become a part of the work. The work has grown large enough to hold its tumult, and the gentle pages of this book on creative process have continued to build up. This is the best use of drama.
DRAMA
Try this: For most of us, drama is a sip of creative poison. Once we get into a drama, we lose focus on our creative jumps and focus on the drama instead. Because of this, we must monitor our life for trouble spots: dramas that we could become entangled in. Take pen in hand. Number from 1 to 5. Scan your life for potential areas of drama. For example:
1. Tony's gossiping about me
Jim's lack of loyalty
My financial insecurity
My sister's difficult divorce
My battle with overweight
Scanning your list, choose one dramatic situation as a booster rocket to fuel your art. Holding the situation lightly in mind, move directly into your art. Whenever your energies flag, remind yourself again of your dramatic situation and create art straight at it. You are practicing the discipline of non illegitimi te carborundum:
Don't let the bastards get you down.
Taming Time
Once again, the hot, dry westerly winds are blowing through. Along the highways, hundred-foot-high dust devils spin the hazy air. The heat and the drought create illusion: Time itself seems to be cooking in the hot summer air.
Time is a primary concern in dealing with creative block. Most of us think, "If only I had more time, then I would work." We have a fantasy that there is such a thing as good creative time, an idyll of endless, seamless time unfolding invitingly for us to frolic in creatively. No such bolts of limitless time exist for most of us. Our days are chopped into segments, and if we are to be creative, we must learn to use the limited time we have.
When ego is siph
oned off creativity, when creativity becomes one more thing we do, like the laundry, then it takes far less time to do it. Much of our desire for creative time has to do with our trying to coax ourselves into being in the right mood to create. We want to "feel like it," and when we don't, or don't quickly, we think the solution is more time. Actually, the solution is less attention to the vagaries of mood. In short, creativity needs to become daily, doable, and nonnegotiable, something as quotidian as breathing.
When we make a special occasion out of our art, we rob ourselves of the time we actually have. When we make a ceremony out of the right paper, the right noise level, the right pen and pre-
cise circumstance, we are actually creating many false conditions that make our art not more possible but more impossible. "I can't think when it's noisy" or "when the kids are home" or "when the phone's going off." We may not like thinking under those conditions, but we can think under them and we owe it to ourselves to learn that we can. By making our creativity nonnegotiable, we do it a little every day no matter what our mood and no matter what our judgment of the work. What we are after is the gut-level knowledge that our creativity is both doable and portable. We can work no matter how "adverse" the conditions. If we are writers, we can write waiting at the doctor's office. If we are visual artists, we can sketch there.
The less precious we are about how and when we do our work, the more precious it can be to us. We are like parents who take their infant everywhere. The child learns to thrive in many environments, and so, too, can our brainchild, art.
It is one of the ironies of the sabbatical system that very often the year free to work becomes a year free from work as a large and unbearable block rears its head—a block invited by the large swath of time earmarked "Now, work!" Creativity is something like an athletic career. We start with walking, move to gentle jogging, advance from there to short races and from there to longer races before undertaking a marathon. So, too, in our creative mileage we need to build our stamina. We need to exercise our creative muscles daily in the small windows of time available to us. We might want to think of it as the creative equivalent of an aerobics workout—twenty minutes will do in a pinch, forty minutes is nice, and once a week it is a pleasure to get in a long and leisurely run.