This year’s Creativity Prayer

I am Pagan, but I often use the term “God” rather than Goddess or specifics. This offends my fellow Pagans at times, and since getting offended about another person’s non-invasive religious practices, I mostly ignore them. God in my mind is Good Orderly Direction. God has also never been a gendered concept to me.

Digression:

Leaving the church wasn’t about seeing the female in God. It was, at least partially, about how the women in the church with me were treated and expected to behave. It was about the expectations placed on me that devalued my talents and abilities as a human being. It was about not wanting to spend my life baking cookies as a form of social competition and making catty comments about fellow congregants. It satisfied the women I was raised with, but all it did was make me see them as less than worthwhile human beings. I just wanted to hang out with the person (?) that answered me when I prayed with questions.  That being doesn’t hang out in churches but will come in if you happen to be there. That’s what the whole Pagan thing has always been about for me.

Prayer

Hello God –

How are you? Really?

I am getting a lot better about asking you for help with the small stuff, but there’s still some resistance. I think it’s your reminder that the big problems – war, pestilence, crazed police officers – every single bit of that can only be truly resolved with small steps. Billions upon billions of small steps.

Please help me stop resisting the impulse to ask for help. Please help me tell the people I love what I really need, and give me the courage to tell the people I trust what I’m experiencing. Help me find friends – you helped me build a strong network of wonderful friends of diverse backgrounds and interest in the Twin Cities, and now I need your help doing the same in the Bay Area. Remind me that it took time and effort before and it takes time and effort now. Remind me to ask myself “Why am I doing this for myself?”

Please help me get my writing groove back. Help me find the place where the words come easy and fast, where the ego steps aside all the way through the last draft, and help me find a way to be a good quality writer while stepping up how much I produce. Please help me get some clarity about my career. I don’t know exactly who I am, and I don’t know exactly what I want beyond the surface needs of money and security.

Help me disengage from my sense of obligation, since I feel like right now it’s my most negative motivator and a manifestation of my inner critic. Obviously I still need to meet deadlines and do the work I am paid for as a matter of acting honorably – but please help me break from the sense that “people need this, and so I must…”  Free me from doing things simply because I get paid – help me find work that will put me in that blessed state of flow and union with you.

Amen, So Mote It Be

 

 

 

Believing Mirrors

Believing Mirrors are people that reflect back belief that you are a worthwhile individual who can accomplish what you set out to do. I have a significant list – I have become incredibly lucky in the people I find since I started this path.

1. Mike – he really is my fanboy. I’ve had to block him from notebook reading over it.

2. Lisa – she has believed in me and supported me since the late 90s.

3. Ruth – she’s smart about things, and reminds me that effort for effort’s sake is not a good reason to do anything.

3. Xiane – we haven’t talked lately and I miss her, but when we do connect it’s always about mutual encouragement.

4. Cynthia – she looks to the heart of the trouble, and helps me step back a little when working things out.

5. Tonya G – I kind of wish she and Cynthia could meet. They’d adore each other. She’s always been my chief sane maker.

I have more at this point in my life – so many more. But I still have a weird thing about the number 6 and don’t want to assign it to anyone I care about.

25 Wishes

Priestess of Delphi by John Collier
Probably the one I have the most in common with of all the great ancient priestesses.

1. I wish I could get around the city easier.

2. I wish I had more friends here – a lot more friends.

3. I wish I could find the more hidden occult shops.

4. I wish I spoke Spanish/remembered Spanish better.

5. I wish I had friends to go dancing with.

6. I wish I could finally polish off my reading stack. Someday, someway.

7. I wish I could find a writing program I can afford.

8. I wish I could find poets that were as amazing as my poetry group in Minnesota.

9. I wish I knew exactly where I wanted to point my career right now.

10. I wish I didn’t feel an obligation tug of war with Fat Chic.

11. I wish I could finish this consent culture essay and feel right about it.

12. I wish I had more time to stretch and see to my physical health every day.

13. I wish I could do all the exercise, all the social, and all the professional things I need to do.

14. I wish I had more time for that Lynda thing – it’s not really working out in terms of time commitment. 😦

15. I wish I didn’t feel so overwhelmed all the time.

16. I wish Mike and I could both establish strong support systems out here.

17. I wish there was more Pagan stuff in SF itself, but since almost no one can afford it…

18. I wish I could find a decent therapist out here.

19. I wish I could feel at peace with the rest of my past. I’ve buried the crap with my family, now it’s the stuff that I’m actually culpable for.

20. I wish I could fly up to see my friend Joe.

21. I wish I could travel to see Lisa and Tonya – they are all in that direction too.

Wait a minute, they are all in that direction. Why am I still sitting here?

22. I wish I had a clear sense of my place with my volunteer gig.

23. I wish I had some form of steady income of my own again.

24. I wish I could overcome my 1:1 social anxiety issues.

25. I wish I could take a vacation on my own – or maybe get in on a writer’s retreat. Maybe after I do that portfolio.

The Creative Benefits of Decluttering

In a chapter of The Artist’s Way for Parents Julia Cameron talks about the benefits of decluttering. I wholeheartedly concur. A lot of people nowadays comment on how organized I am (and I do hear the silent amendment of “terrifyingly” on that, don’t think I don’t hear it.)

That organized version of myself did not come about until my early twenties. There were traces of her when I was young, but since the people I lived with were very particular – in the no one is ever good enough way – I kind of drifted without much in the way of skills. Any attempts to clean or organize were things I was badgered into, only to watch all my work redone while listening to a litany of failures that that person had assigned to me, completely free of any actual observation of my behavior. Only fear – fear of being late, fear of missing classes – kept me all that together. When it came to my personal living space beyond things I immediately needed, well, kablooey.

During my first marriage, our apartment became more and more of a pit. It depressed me. I had to climb over things to check my email, to write, to sleep at night. Since I worked a full time job and my ex spent his time either in school or playing video games, little ever got done about the mess. He kept me in clean laundry (though my dry clean only clothing was destroyed) and we lived in an eternal standoff over the dishes. Everything else we owned sort of got strewn around in physical markings of our streams of consciousness. Then one day during grad school, I magically hit my clutter limit. I’m not sure why, and I swear it wasn’t because of one of my fires. I just suddenly looked at all the shit we’d accumulated and couldn’t take it anymore. It took me almost forty five days and a near walkout from my ex over throwing things away he hadn’t wanted me to (he had some serious packrat/abandonment problems) but after all the grit-teeth sorting through I discovered we still had a beautiful apartment underneath it all. As I finished, I also found a depression I’d had hovering over me since shortly after our marriage had lifted.

Nowadays my approach isn’t quite so extreme. I like Cameron’s 15 minute method – pick a task, focus on it for 15 minutes, see what clears up. I have also noticed a distinct link between my creative energy and clutter. If I feel too weighed down by stuff, I struggle to create. If I get rid of stuff – or at least get stuff on walls and off the floor – I have more creative energy for a longer period. (I have a running theory that while creative energy is infinite, it only actually flows through the brain for a set amount of time. You can increase that amount of time with daily work as you can increase muscle mass with regular exercise, but even so, you still only get a finite amount per session.) I don’t have any non-dramatic declutters of late; narrowing down the stuff in an apartment from a three story townhouse to a three bedroom flat is never easy.

I am happy to say that once free of the stuff – even the sentimental stuff – it’s easier to write. It’s easier to find things fast, which gets me on the road to writing faster. It’s just easier to be.

I know some people vaunt the clutter as a sign of their creativity. Me, I don’t need the status symbols, not even the stylish messes. I’d rather have the crap out of my way and get to work.

5 Talents I have

Talents have revealed themselves to me of late, though some are hardly a surprise.

1. Writing (duh.)
2. Perseverance. Yes, it’s a talent.
3. Ability to visualize social constructs and identify missing pieces in an organizational structure.
4. Dance – I’m pretty good, got a little rhythm.
5. Singing. I’ve really loved singing lately.

About Structure

Julia Cameron’s comments about structure in The Artist’s Way for Parents rings a few dozen bells for me. I wholeheartedly concur that the key to creativity is not total freedom, but freedom within established limits. The freedom comes in determining those rules and limits for yourself before you begin your work.

In my case, I’ve found that I do my best work when I set up rules. In fiction that’s called world building. In poetry, form. In nonfiction, it’s an outline. In addition to the form/structure of the work itself, the form structure of my workday also makes a significant difference. A strict schedule including breaks to go for walks, meditate, or watch TV also all make a significant difference to me.

This is actually something I am struggling with at the moment, since I thrive on schedule. Clearly the move and my new environment is forcing at least to some degree an alteration of schedule. My health and the medications I  am on also factor in: I have a hard time rising before 10 am most days, and I get the most (if not always the best) work done between 6 am and 10 am. While the west coast – at least this part – seems to consist of late risers/second sleep folks in my neighborhood (get up, surf, go back to bed), and I do work from home, it still feels like I miss out. Getting up earlier would usually at least get me a better shot at a treadmill at the gym, for instance.

I was having trouble with schedule in Minnesota, too. There’s been a lot of disruptive influences so I’ve been working on settling that, and striking as needed. Here’s hoping that I get it worked out!

5 x 5 Interests: His, Mine

The exercise calls for me to list 5 interests, and then 5 interests of my child that are unfamiliar to me. In this case, I am instead going to list my partner’s interests since our “child” is a stuffed baby penguin named Theo.

5 of my interests:
1. The occult
2. Beat poetry
3. Dance, all types
4. Urban exploration
5. Jewelry making

5 interests of his that I am unfamiliar with:
1. Anime
2. Fancy pens, their engineering
3. Video gaming
4. Debian programming
5. Youtube in general. I am fascinated with its platform potential but I am not one of those people that can surf it for hours.

Thoughts on common criticisms of the artist’s way

Clearly, this comes from a known advocate of the artist’s way. This is my deal, and it works for me. I am a big advocate of doing what works, and I do know people that this system really, really doesn’t work for. Atheists find it problematic, with reason, since a lot of it is higher-power oriented consciously along the lines of AA. People with ADHD, weird work schedules, hand problems find limits in the Morning Pages. I get that – all of it.

There are, however, two criticisms that come from either not understanding or just not doing the work of the Artist’s Way:
1)It’s narcissistic
2)It uses “pop psychology.”

On Narcissism
People who associate taking time to take care of themselves with narcissism are mistaken about how narcissism works. Narcissists don’t take care of themselves. A narcissist would never make it through the Artist’s Way. Why? Because narcissists expect everyone else to take care of them. Self care is a different story. The Artist’s Way encourages you to work on yourself, to humble yourself, to make gentle changes until you actually do like yourself. For example, the self-sabotage chapter where you write down and then challenge your own excuses? No narcissist in the world would actually do that exercise. Narcissists as a rule don’t like themselves but like absolutely everyone else even less.

When you like yourself, your behavior towards other people changes. Narcissists don’t just have inflated egos – they are lost in them. The steps of the Artist’s Way untethers you from that ego.

Its Use of Pop Psychology
One person who admitted to reading the book through rather than working the steps complained of it using “pop psychology” (referencing Inner Child Work) but not really identifying how this was bad/didn’t work. The argument seemed to be that it was bad just *because* it smacked of “pop psychology.” That’s some pretty lazy, stereotype laden thinking. Also in this
read through” the critic in question did not actually read any of the foreword or end material. It says pretty clearly in both of those that the work at hand is not intended to replace therapy even though it is therapeutic in practice.

The concept of an inner child is a metaphor. Artists used metaphors long before therapy existed. It seems likely that the metaphor existed before it was co-opted in the 80s.

As to the criticism of “pop psychology” unfairly and inaccurately linked in to the Artist’s Way I have to say, as I say entirely too often of late, a little discernment, please.

The stigma on pop psychology is just a general distaste for all psychology that traces back to misinformed people that think getting counseling means “crazy.” Not only is this another example of lazy stereotype thinking, it displays an absolute unawareness of how good therapists work. In western culture, we leave emotional management skills to the wild, evidently assuming that whole people are born knowing them and genetically flawed people just don’t. Neither is true. Most emotional skills can be taught; without those skills life can get distressing for just about anyone. Most of the time a good psychotherapist is nothing more or less than a tutor in those skills, and often that person had to go seek training in those skills him or herself. Medication doesn’t – or shouldn’t – come in unless something is happening in the biochemistry that keeps you from mastering those skills.

The pop psychology market of books capitalizes on those skills many people just don’t get taught. Often they are actually helpful. Other times, they are exploitative and stereotype driven – just look at Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, anything Dr. Phil writes, the very existence of Laura Schlessinger. Undeniably bad stuff there.

But as with any subject, a little careful thought and discernment goes a long way. The “bad” examples above always encourage some status quo, whether it’s one where “morality” is substituted as a word for “inequality” or where guilt and shame are advocated in place of sorting out what is genuinely harmful and accepting the rest.

The Artist’s Way is about creative recovery – it absolutely operates as a program for artists alongside the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous. It operates on the understanding that humans resist big changes but can handle small ones. That may offend people that still believe they need to feel strained, burned out, and exhausted or they’re not “really working.” For those that work the steps, however, it’s nice to do the work while the ego – the source of all that stress – goes somewhere else for awile.

5 Freeing Things I did as a kid

These activities made me feel free/absorbed in the task when I was a child:

1. Spinning in circles until I fell over. Looking back, I did it for the high. This may explain why alcohol/getting drunk never has appealed to me all that much. It’s only half the ride. I want the whole thing.
2. Making abstract paper cutouts. I think I usually tried to make a doll chain, usually failed, but did not feel any frustration or deterrence in the face of this failure.
3. Dancing. Always, always dancing.
4. Reading – I always loved to read, but I remember really, really loving to read after my grandfather bought me Dragons of Autumn Twilight one summer. It never led me to much RPGing – I didn’t know who to ask, really, and when I finally found some people to play with it seemed tedious – but I loved those stories, and I still adore the fantasy genre.
5. Sketching, drawing, crafting with no specific purpose at hand. I can’t remember why I quit – I think my parents refused to buy me sketch books at some point, (these things were often launched upon me arbitrarily with no prior discussion or clear trigger for the decision) and I had to pay for my own clarinet reeds so it just kind of stopped.

Supplies: the complex thing about Mikey

from Florida Memory Flickr Commons Archive

The complicated thing about Mikey is that I did have sounding boards who kept warning me to get out. But they were other types of crazymakers, other types of blockers. They wanted this predator cleared so they could get a better crack at me.

Mikey did make it clear to me exactly how bad the women I called my “best friend” for years was actually for me – how bad her intents towards me almost always were. She liked the idea of Mikey and me together. She thought his calling me at 6 am when he knew I needed the sleep was romantic, not the abusive that it actually was. She figured I would eventually relent to his constant demands I take care of him.

There were others, of course, but most just sort of rolled their eyes. They didn’t recognize what was going on. One girl who had a thing for Mikey was relentlessly jealous of me – I can only imagine how bad he would have messed her life up if I hadn’t presented a distraction. While I have no liking for her as a human being, she is a human being and deserved to be treated as one. That’s not how this  guy would have treated her.

My sudden onset illness, as frustrating as it can be, probably saved me from what would have been one of the most abusive relationship of my life and also ended a female friendship that I have only come to recognize as abusive.  The constant hiving and allergies forced me to be reclusive.

It’s normal to have these patterns when you come from a dysfunctional home. You have to recognize dysfunction at home before the rest of the alphabet falls into place and you get the correct read on things. It took me awhile to see the source of it. Now I see all of it.

Now I have friends who would spot that kind of madness and tell me so right quick.