If You Love What You Do, Will You Love It ALL the Time?

by | Mar 8, 2011 | Reflections

Yesterday I went to an art store on an Artist’s Way-style Artist Date.

I found myself in tears over a 28″ x something stretched canvas that made me remember how much I’ve always wanted to try oil painting. I walked away from it quickly and then turned to go back to see what else there was to “see.”

I remembered my old boyfriend who was a “real” artist (Julia Cameron says shadow artists like to hang out with real artists and project their creativity onto their partners. Um. Here!).

I remembered how he had painted a picture of the girl he was cheating on me with and tried to pretend that it was just a gift for a friend.

On a similar piece of canvas.

I remembered how he had made me a painting a long time before I and I hadn’t liked it and didn’t know what to do about it. He never did give it to me, and I never did know how to handle it.

Double ouch.

And then the tears spiked again over a beautiful “artist’s marker pad” that was a perfect vehicle for the diagrams I’ve been wanting to do. (I brought it home.)

As I walked through the aisles of the art store, I was reminded of all the delicious art tools I already own, but that have been untouched for so long.

I wondered why I stopped doing the watercolors that delighted me so much once upon a time. Did I stop simply because I stopped traveling overseas so often? Had I lost the connection because I’d given up urban design work? Did it just start to feel too much like work?

All around the store I found reminders of my past creative endeavors (fabric dyeing, rug making, drafting and tracing, portfolios, yummy art supply containers) and so many possible future adventures. I thought about how I couldn’t afford to buy all the supplies so there was no point in learning a new craft.

But I also considered how much I love learning the tools of my craft — whatever it is — designing, drafting, drawing, coaching, website making — I am such the perpetual student. A true renaissance soul (or “scanner”). And how I wished I could just simply be a perpetual student (oh, wait a minute, I kind of already am) with a patron who wanted to sponsor all my wild ideas and wonderful projects (well, not so much that part, at least not yet).

Whilst all this transpired, I continued a conversation I’ve been having with myself for the past few days.

If I love what I do, will I love it ALL the time?

Will it ALWAYS feel easy and like I can’t wait to leap out of bed in the morning?

My screenwriting teacher often spoke of the pain of writing, the loneliness of it. That it would feel like swimming in a vast sea, just trying to get to the next “tent pole” in a script as if it were a buoy you could grab hold of to save you from drowning.

There are days when writing feels like a wretched chore. When it feels like I’ll never (ever) succeed at it, that my work will never be any good, and my ideas are not clever or brilliant enough.

But if they are my ideas, are they not enough? Isn’t it enough to write what I’ve been given, unleash my creativity as far as I can and hope for the best?

I look for where my fear comes up biggest and loudest, and go there. Is that always going to feel easy and flowing and delightful? I doubt it.

At the same time, there are days when writing feels like the most precious gift I’ve ever experienced.

A freedom to put words on the page and become one with them in the most amazing discovery of story and flow and ideas and energy that I’ve ever seen.

I figure there are good days and there are hard days.

Facing the Dark, Creative Void

Facing the Dark, Creative Void

by | Oct 26, 2010 | Reflections, Writing Articles

Artists, visionaries, and healers face the intense darkness of creativity on a daily basis.

Robert Johnson, author of Owning Your Own Shadow, writes about “why so many creative people have such a miserable time of it. . . . Narrow creativity always brings a narrow shadow with it, while broader talents call up a greater portion of the dark.
 
“While those with the largest talent seems to suffer most, we all must be aware of how we use our creativity — and of the dark side that accompanies our gifts…. all these [creative] acts will have an equal weight on theopposite side of the scale and lead us into [destructive behaviors].”

So when we create, we face the necessity of destruction to balance our creativity. Our “positive” behavior must be balance by “negative” behavior.

“There is, however,” Johnson writes, “a broader kind of creativity that folds the darkness into the finished product and finds fulfillment in the shadow.”

Creativity is essentially a birthing process, but it evokes death as well.

Here’s what I mean: One of my colleagues reminded me recently that creating anything requires a metaphorical death. Your ego has to die in order to let go enough to bring your creative vision into theworld. You have to embrace an attitude of reverent surrender and to shift into an internal space that’s connected with the divine, rather than the ego, in order to create. Fear and all. No guts, no glory.

In other words, in order to birth our ideas and visions, we have to die. DIE! No wonder it’s so incredibly terrifying to create.

It requires a huge leap into the unknown, a leap of courage, even just to begin.

And no wonder we have so many excuses not to create: Too busy, too tired, too stuck. Don’t care anymore. You know the drill.

But at end of the day, our excuses not to create are manifestations of your fears about birthing our creative work into the world.

Since birthing isn’t pretty or easy, that’s no surprise.

We have to be able to walk into the darkness, transcend the huge void between the light and thedarkness, get down on our knees in abject surrender, and give it everything we’ve got in order to bring what we’ve been given back into this earthly plane.

If you’re not doing that, you’re probably playing too small. A lot to live up to, right?

Interestingly, in our culture, you’re trained to hide from your darkness, to put a pretty face on it, and not to mention it. Not to appreciate it. But that’s where the true jewels lie. All that tension, that angst, that creative frustration is actually a huge untapped energy source, just waiting to be released in a glorious explosion of full, whole-bodied creative expression.

As Johnson says, “We are … talking about sainthood in the original meaning of the word — a full-blooded embracing of our own humanity, not a one-sided goodness that has no vitality or life.”

How can we bring our darkness — shadow — into our creative expression and thereby find our own true “sainthood”?

How can we release being “good” to find our true self-expression?

Worth thinking about.