The Artist's Way Week One Recap
I am a wildflower person, who knew!
Francesco Paolo Michetti (Italian, 1851–1929), Springtime and Love was shown at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878 and in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair (also known as the Columbian Exposition). It entered [The Art Institute of Chicago’s] permanent collection eight years later.
The summer I graduated from college, my beloved creative writing professor—and cookbook writer!— invited me to a pie social at her apartment. When I arrived, her party was buzzing with professional artists, a scene that was new to me as a recent graduate. I was used to socializing with students who were my peers, and so suddenly I felt both very grown up and completely new to the grown up perspective on life.
As we sat around her living room, eating the pies that everyone had made for the occasion, one of my professor’s friends asked me what I did. I thought he meant to pay my rent, so I told him that I had just gotten a temp job in corporate recruiting. “No, no,” he waved his hand as if to evacuate the job from the airspace, “what are you working on?”
His genuine interest in my own writing practice caught me by surprise because until that point I had perceived of myself as a student. I was still learning a craft and developing a point of view. It was also 2008, the height of the recession, and jobs were the main subject of conversation with my friends from college. Did we have a job yet? Did we like our job? Did our job pay the rent? I had always worked part time jobs in college, but this job was a relatively new feature of my life.
I felt I needed answers to these questions about my job before I could let myself work on anything the way I had worked on things in school. “I’m writing little poems here and there,” was about all I said before asking about this artist’s work. Because I didn’t quite know what to say, I listened to see what I could learn.
In Week 1 of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron asks us to practice stating truths about ourselves like, “I am a brilliant artist,” and see what negative core beliefs might come up when we do. For me it was a negative core belief about time. I always seem to not have enough. It’s true, I have less time than I did when I was in college (and oh, what a gift that was!). But when feeling like I don’t have time to be a brilliant artist came up for me, I knew I had to acknowledge that I will take 20 minutes to deep clean a kitchen drawer before I will take 20 minutes to write a poem. Of course I know great art takes time, but when my negative core belief rose up, I thought about a line from Gabrielle Zevin’s novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow where a character, reflecting on her life changing as the years pass and her responsibilities increase, says that we do what we can in the time that we have.
So this week, I tried to do what I could in the time that I had. For my artist’s date, I took my inner artist on a 20-minute walk around the block. This is a prompt that Cameron offers in the Week 1 activities list which felt like cheating until I did it.
I went on a 20-minute walk around my block in the middle of my workday. Right before I stepped out of the door I set the intention to be fully present on my walk, and to return to my desk with fresh eyes afterward. Within minutes of setting foot out the door, I noticed the wildflowers in bloom on a neighbor’s lawn, then more flowers in another neighbor’s landscaping. Normally, I would have missed the landscape because my head would be elsewhere, but on this walk, the colors filled me with joy and hope, and I delighted in the fact that I am someone who loves flowers!
I mean, I had always kind of known that about myself. I like to arrange cut flowers that I buy from Trader' Joe’s. But I never thought of myself as a wildflower enthusiast. Now, I think I will! The bliss I felt looking at the flowers was telling me something. I don’t really know what yet except maybe to relax and look around more, and to take more 20-minute pockets do have little adventures like these?
What was so informative to me was that my 20-minute artist date happened on a very hectic day, one in which I wouldn’t normally allow myself 20 minutes to slow down and look at flowers. But I made it happen, and I surprised myself in doing so. And the next day, whaddya know: I had a whole hour to myself and I made major progress on a creative project, and I do think the walk had something to do with it.
That I ended up writing this week brings me back to the story I started telling about the pie social that my beloved professor hosted. She was always encouraging me to see myself as more than a student. In her in-line comments on the poems I wrote in her class, in the conversations that we had about internships I was applying for, and most especially in including me among the folks she invited into her home to eat pie. Looking back, I can see that she saw me as a working artist long before I figured out that I was one. She nurtured me through words of encouragement and curiosity, and invitations to be in conversation with other artists. Among the activities that Cameron offered this week, she suggests writing a mentor or a letter of gratitude. So, here is my postcard—a note of thanks to my teacher who saw me before I saw myself.
I am sure that The Artist’s Way won’t always be full of little surprises. Having failed to finish the course before I know there’s both highs and lows ahead. Still, I will take the lesson I learned this week with me moving forward. I am realizing that these little decisions to nurture yourself or your inner artist is the stuff that creativity and living creatively is made of. That, and the artist date doesn’t have to be anything more than self-care.
I am curious to know what you did on your artist date, what you are learning about yourself?
I know some folks have expressed an interest in joining, so I have opened my group chat! You may have gotten an email about it, or you can also head over to the Substack app to participate!
