Artist’s Date: Take 2

So I am reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way. A spiritual path to reawkening one’s creative soul/spirit. This book has been around in one form or another since she started living this way in the late 1970s. She has two main calls to action that she advocates for: Morning Pages and the Artist Date.

Morning pages are stream of consciousness writing when you first wake up in the morning before the ego/censor part of your brain starts functioning. Ouch, I am not an early bird. And to start writing before I even make it out of bed to the bathroom. Yeah. I have had to modify the timing on morning pages and I am trying to get the kinks out.

The second and the meat and potatos of this post is the Artist Date. Basically it is taking your inner creative on an outing for a couple of hours. Some examples were going to see a movie alone, taking a walk, driving down an unfamilar road etc. She wants the “date” to last long enough that you are willing to open yourself up. Kinda like when you go to a kids birthday party and all the adults are standing around stiff as a board. Then something breaks the ice, a favorite childhood game, a song, and they get in the groove. They relax and have fun.

So my first date didn’t go as planned. I originally planned to grill out then make s’mores and watch the stars. Fun, easy way to dip my toes in. Except I couldn’t get my fire started. Over an hour I tried to get it going, I guess the charcoal was damp. I can count on one hand with fingers left over the number of times I couldn’t start a fire.

So I was like okay, let’s regroup and think about it. I settled on spending Saturday reading a book series I have been thinking about. Daniel Potter’s Freelance Familars series. He had the first three books on sale for $2.99 and I love a good bargin. I sorta read all three books in a day and half. They are a fun, witty, take on urban fantasy. Highly recommend them if you like urban fantasy. I’ll do a review of then in the next week or so.

My second date was last week and I spent the day hanging out with Mom. So Saturday night I found a gorgeous pattern for a knitted half pi shawl. I have been looking for an easy introduction into lacework and have a super squishy varigated ball of yarn for the project. Hobby Lobby’s Yarn Bee Rainbow Wrapsody in Teal of Fortune. Beautiful cotton and acrylic yarn, but super fine almost thread size.

So the pi shawl was designed by Ms. Elizabeth Zimmerman back in the 1950s or 1960s. And it is a complete circle that uses the theory of math and pi to make a perfect circle. They are huge, labor intensive, skill intensive, seriously gorgeous projects. I have niether the skills or the attention span for a whole pi shawl. But I think I can do a half pi.

My second date was to start a practice shawl with my regular cotton yarn that I have left over from various projects. I knitted for about three hours in the peace and quiet. Everybody else was in bed asleep except me. I had serious doubts about the pattern and Sunday I frogged (unraveled) the whole thing and started over. I had made a miscalculation on which row I was suposed to knit and which one to purl. This is exactly why I chose the bits and pieces of yarn over my project yarn to do a practice piece.

I’ll see you guys on Thursday and hopefully Saturday. Cheers nd happy hump day. james

Quote of the Day: Julia Cameron

Trying to realize and learn this again. You learn so much more from your mistakes than your successes. Mistakes encourage you to try harder, except when it doesn’t and you think about walking away. So many times I have tried walking away, yet I always come back. I’ll see you on Saturday.

Cheers, james

Absence

I have been absent of late from my blog and truthfully from myself as well. It seems the whole drama of a world pandemic completely drained every spark of motivation that I could grab. Even though I haven’t been posting, I have thought about you and worried that you were doing alright.

I have been spending time knitting. I call it knitting a worry rag (dishcloth) that I can fret and work out my thoughts and not worry about infecting ill wishes on a piece of clothing. Similar to a prayer shawl/scarf/blanket just without the nice happy feelings. But the dishcloth is perfect, it is used, wrung out, scrubbed with etc. So less of a trasnference issue in my mind.

Last week I purchased a copy of Julia Cammeron’s The Artist’s Way. It is a 12 week creativity through spiritualism course designed to help you tap into inner creative spirit. Each week focuses on specific tasks and processes. Her main tools are the Morning Pages and the Artist Date. Morning Pages are 3 stream of consciousness pages written first thing in the morning. And I’m not much on mornings. The Artist Date is making time in your week to spend time with yourself doing/being creative. In order to inspire your creativity, you must have creativity to draw from. That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. An example would be making and playing with play dough. Allowing yourself time to experience a safe haven to become your inner child. Or a walk on the beach, road trip to a new area, new music or whatever.

So far I have done one set of Morning Pages, this morning. Although I confess it seems that writing three pages at night would be more beneficial than first thing in the morning. And for curiosity’s sake I may try both a morning set and an evening set. We’ll see.

I have been reading the Forward and the prechapters. And tonight I am starting Week 1. So wish me luck.

I just haven’t felt like myself in months and I am hoping this will give me a path back to myself and my writing. I will start posting Quote of the Day and hopefully a weekly post on how I’m doing with the Artist’s Way. See you on Thursday.

Cheers, james