The Artist's Way (26 page)

C
REATIVITY REQUIRES FAITH. FAITH
requires that we relinquish control. This is frightening, and we resist it. Our resistance to our creativity is a form of self-destruction. We throw up roadblocks on our own path. Why do we do this? In order to maintain an illusion of control. Depression, like anger and anxiety, is resistance, and it creates dis-ease. This manifests itself as sluggishness, confusion, “I don't know …”

The truth is, we do know and we
know
that we know.

Each of us has an inner dream that we can unfold if we will just have the courage to admit what it is. And the faith to trust our own admission. The admitting is often very difficult. A clearing affirmation can often open the channel. One excellent one is “I know the things I know.” Another is “I trust my own inner guide.” Either of these will eventually yield us a sense of our own direction—which we will often then promptly resist!

This resistance is really very understandable. We are not accustomed to thinking that God's will for us and our own inner dreams can coincide. Instead, we have bought the message of our culture: this world is a vale of tears and we are meant to be dutiful and then die. The truth is that we are meant to be bountiful and
live.
The universe will always support affirmative action. Our truest dream for ourselves is always God's will for us.

Mickey Hart's hero and mentor, the late, great mythologist Joseph Campbell, wrote, “Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.” It is the inner commitment to be true to ourselves and follow our dreams that triggers the support of the universe. While we are ambivalent, the universe will seem to us also to be ambivalent and erratic. The flow through our lives will be characterized by spurts of abundance and long spells of drought, when our supply dwindles to a mere trickle.

If we look back at the times when the world seemed to be a capricious and untrustworthy place, we see that we were ourselves ambivalent and conflicted in our goals and behaviors. Once we trigger an internal yes by affirming our truest goals and desires, the universe mirrors that yes and expands it.

There is a path for each of us. When we are on our right path, we have a surefootedness. We know the next right action—although not necessarily what is just around the bend. By trusting, we
learn
to trust.

Creativity—like human life itself—begins in darkness. We need to acknowledge this. All too often, we think only in terms of light: “And then the lightbulb went on and I got it!” It is true that insights may come to us as flashes. It is true that some of these flashes may be blinding. It is, however, also true that such bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.

We speak often about ideas as brainchildren. What we do not realize is that brainchildren, like all babies, should not be dragged from the creative womb prematurely. Ideas, like stalactites
and stalagmites, form in the dark inner cave of consciousness. They form in drips and drops, not by squared-off building blocks. We must learn to wait for an idea to hatch. Or, to use a gardening image, we must learn to not pull our ideas up by the roots to see if they are growing.

Mulling on the page is an artless art form. It is fooling around. It is doodling. It is the way that ideas slowly take shape and form until they are ready to help us see the light. All too often, we try to push, pull, outline, and control our ideas instead of letting them grow organically. The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.

Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise. All too often, when we say we want to be creative, we mean that we want to be able to be productive. Now, to be creative
is
to be productive—but by cooperating with the creative process, not forcing it.

As creative channels, we need to trust the darkness. We need to learn to gently mull instead of churning away like a little engine on a straight-ahead path. This mulling on the page can be very threatening. “I'll never get any
real
ideas this way!” we fret.

Hatching an idea is a lot like baking bread. An idea needs to rise. If you poke at it too much at the beginning, if you keep checking on it, it will never rise. A loaf of bread or a cake, baking, must stay for a good long time in the darkness and safety of the oven. Open that oven too soon and the bread collapses—or the cake gets a hole in its middle because all the steam has rushed out of it. Creativity requires a respectful reticence.

The truth is that this is how to raise the best ideas. Let them grow in dark and mystery. Let them form on the roof of our consciousness. Let them hit the page in droplets. Trusting this slow and seemingly random drip, we will be startled one day by the flash of “Oh! That's
it!”

When we think about creativity, it is all too easy to think
art
with a capital
A.
For our purposes, capital-
A
art is a scarlet
letter, branding us as doomed. In order to nurture our creativity, we require a sense of festivity, even humor: “Art. That's somebody my sister used to date.”

We are an ambitious society, and it is often difficult for us to cultivate forms of creativity that do not directly serve us and our career goals. Recovery urges our reexamining definitions of creativity and expanding them to include what in the past we called hobbies. The experience of creative living argues that hobbies are in fact essential to the joyful life.

Then, too, there is the hidden benefit that they are also creatively useful. Many hobbies involve a form of artist-brain mulling that leads to enormous creative breakthroughs. When I have screenwriting students stuck at the midpoint of act two, I ask them to please go do their household mending. They usually balk, offended by such a mundane task, but sewing has a nice way of mending up plots. Gardening is another hobby I often assign to creativity students. When someone is panicked halfway across the bridge into a new life, repotting plants into larger and better containers quite literally grounds that person and gives him or her a sense of expansion.

Spiritual benefits accompany the practice of a hobby. There is a release into humility that comes from doing something by rote. As we serve our hobby, we are freed from our ego's demands and allowed the experience of merging with a greater source. This conscious contact frequently affords us the perspectives needed to solve vexing personal or creative conundrums.

It is a paradox of creative recovery that we must get serious about taking ourselves lightly. We must work at learning to play. Creativity must be freed from the narrow parameters of capital
A
art and recognized as having much broader play (that word again).

As we work with our morning pages and artist dates, many forgotten samplings of our own creativity may come to mind.

• I had forgotten all about those paintings I did in high school. I loved painting those flats in drama tech!
  
• I suddenly remembered I played Antigone—who could forget her? I don't know if I was any good, but I remember I loved it.
  
• I'd forgotten all about the skits I wrote when I was ten. I set them all to Ravel's
  Bolero
  no matter what they were about. I made my brothers and sisters swoon about the living room.
  
• I used to tap-dance. I know you can't believe it now, but I was something!
  

As we write, digging ourselves out of denial, our memories, dreams, and creative plans all move to the surface. We discover anew that we are creative beings. The impulse cooks in us all, simmering along all the time—without our knowledge, without our encouragement, even without our approval. It moves beneath the surface of our lives, showing in bright flashes, like a penny, in our stream of thought—like new grass under snow.

We are intended to create. We refurbish a dowdy kitchen, tie bows on a holiday cat, experiment with a better soup. The same child who brewed perfume from a dab of this and a dash of that, half dish soap and part cinnamon, grows up to buy potpourri and to boil a spice pot that says, “Christmas.”

As gray, as controlled, as dreamless as we may strive to be, the fire of our dreams will not stay buried. The embers are always there, stirring in our frozen souls like winter leaves. They won't go away. They are sneaky. We make a crazy doodle in a boring meeting. We post a silly card on our office board. We nickname the boss something wicked. Plant twice as many flowers as we need.

Restive in our lives, we yearn for more, we wish, we chafe. We sing in the car, slam down the phone, make lists, clear closets, sort through shelves. We want to do something but we think it needs to be the
right
something,
by which we mean
some
thing
important.

We are what's important, and the something that we do can be something festive but small: dead plants go; mismatched
socks bite the dust. We are stung by loss, bitten by hope. Working with our morning pages, a new—and gaudy?—life takes form. Who bought that azalea? Why the sudden taste for pink? Is this picture you've tacked up a
you
you're going toward?

Your shoes feel worn. You throw them out. There's a garage sale coming and you are playing host. You buy a first edition, splurge on new sheets. A friend worries once too often about what's come over you and you take your first vacation in years.

The clock is ticking and you're hearing the beat. You stop by a museum shop, sign your name on a scuba-diving sheet, and commit yourself to Saturday mornings in the deep end.

You're either losing your mind—or gaining your soul. Life is meant to be an artist date. That's why we were created.

My friend Michele has a theory, a theory born of long and entangled romantic experience. In a nutshell, it goes: “When you're going to leave them,
they
know.
”

This same theory applies to creative recovery. It occurs when you reach what Michele calls
escape
velocity.
As she puts it, “There's this time for blast-off, like a NASA space launch, and you're heading for it when
wham,
you draw to you the Test.”

“The Test?”

“Yeah. The Test. It's like when you're all set to marry the nice guy, the one who treats you right, and Mr. Poison gets wind of it and phones you up.”

“Ah.”

“The whole trick is to evade the Test. We all draw to us the one test that's our total nemesis.”

A lawyer by trade and a writer by avocation and temperament, Michele is fond of conspiracy theories, which she lays out in sinister detail.

“Think of it. You're all set to go to the Coast on an important business trip, and your husband suddenly needs you, capital
N
, for no real reason…. You're all set to leave the bad job,
and the boss from hell suddenly gives you your first raise in five years…. Don't be fooled. Don't be fooled.”

Listening to Michele talk, it was clear that her years as a trial attorney stood her in good stead as a creative person. She, at least, was no longer fooled. But is it really so sinister as she implied? Do we really draw to us a Test? I thought about everything Michele had told me and I concluded that the answer was yes.

I thought of all the times I'd been fooled. There was the agent who managed to undo done deals but apologized so prettily…. There was the editor who asked for rewrite upon rewrite until gruel was all that remained, but who always said I wrote brilliantly and was her brightest star.

A little flattery can go a long way toward deterring our escape velocity. So can a little cash. More sinister than either is the impact a well-placed doubt can have, particularly a “for your own good, just wanting to make sure you've thought about this” doubt—voiced by one of our nearest and dearest.