My Week 11 Check-in
As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been working my way through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way with a group of friends. I am nearing the end, and I have been putting off writing this check-in for three days. But now I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time on it. So I thought I’d be brave and share it here, too.
I am now — unbelievably — on Week 12 of The Artist’s Way: “Recovering a Sense of Faith.”
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Unbelievably? It does feel as though I’ve been keeping this journal (those morning pages) for 3 months; that’s not the unbelievable bit. But I don’t feel “done.” The week 12 task that most resonates for me is, “Reread this book.” I feel as though there was something ELSE that I was meant to break through, or into, or out of. In this final chapter, I’m reminded that even when we don’t see it (change? improvement? direction?), it’s always already there: “Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.” (Julia Cameron, 195)
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What was it I expected? What did I get that I didn’t expect?
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I don’t give myself enough credit for being on an end-of-life journey with my mother…for the amount of parenting my three daughters still and constantly seem to need…for being at the end-stage of a novel (which seems to require more commitment than I have available at present). I don’t get enough sleep. I mean to go to the gym, but I don’t. I eat the wrong foods, and just when I think I’ve proved to myself that I can do without a glass of wine in the evening, I open another bottle. I decide to cut back to one cup of coffee per day, and find myself drinking 2 double lattes in the afternoon (why don’t I sleep at night?). I set aside a morning for my husband, and he wakes up with a bad cold, feeling miserable. I resolve to spend less money, and my 15 year old drops her phone on the driveway and smashes it. I promise my editor 50 pages, and my sister calls and says Mom needs me.*
husband), I dropped by The ArtSpot in Edmonds (on Main, or follow the link for more information) and I discovered that they have an Artist’s Way circle. They have a six-week art class based on The Artist’s Way, and they have a Wednesday drop-in class once a month. I signed up for the March 4 class, 6-8. If any of you can join me, that would be great.*
I am committed to each of your journeys, and I know you are at various weeks. Expect me to keep circling back (and continuing the chapter highlights). Thanks for hanging in with me this long, for cheering me on, and each other. I look forward to reading your check-ins.
(And I will check-in next week, too.)
When I was thinking about starting a blog–five or six years ago, back in 
plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self–which is absorbed in the moment–your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out. Why would a football fan let a few flubbed minutes at the end of the game ruin three hours of bliss? Because a football game is a story. And in stories, endings matter.” —
directly with this subject (and who among us is not?)–it is full of gems. One of them, in the chapter about his own father, is ODTAA syndrome: