Become Available to the Moment
Week 4, Day 3 of The Artist's Way
Today, let's lose our vagueness about our self and our life situation to become available to the moment.
HONEST CHANGES (cont.)
People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy.
The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.
As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment.
It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered.
Art lies in the moment of encounter:
we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific: an origin from which work flows.
As we gain—or regain—our creative identity, we lose the false self we were sustaining.
The loss of this false self can feel traumatic: “I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t recognize me.”Remember that the more you feel yourself to be terra incognita, the more certain you can be that the recovery process is working. You are your own promised land, your own new frontier.
(The Artist's Way, 2016, p. 82)
My life is an ongoing work of art.
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TIME TRAVEL
Remember yourself at eight-years-old.
What did you like to do?
What were your favorite things?
Now, write a letter from you at eight to you at your current age.
What would you tell yourself?
“All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.”
– M. C. RICHARDS
What is one piece of advice your eight-year-old self would give you right now?
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