A painting is never finished — it simply stops in interesting places.
– Paul Gardner

Today, we bid goodbye to the work begun at Imbolc, 2009, working our way through The Artist’s Way.  I leave you with some final thoughts.

First, as we have admitted by now that we are recovering artists, we are urged to make a vow to our ongoing healing and empowerment. Here is what Julia writes. I suggest you print it, sign it, and put it in a prominent place – on your Artist’s Altar, or somewhere in your studio, or sacred space.  At the end of ninety days, I hope you will always renew these promises.

Creativity Contract

My name is _____________. I am a recovering creative person. To further my growth and my joy, I now commit myself to the following self-nurturing plans:

Journaling/Morning pages have been an important part of my self-nurturing and self-discovery. I, ___________, hereby commit myself to continuing to work with them for the next 90 days.

Artist’s dates have been integral to my growth in self-love and my deepening joy in living. I, __________, am willing to commit to another 90 days of weekly artist’s dates for self care.

In the course of following the artist’s way and healing my artist within, I have discovered that I have a number of creative interests. While I hope to develop many of them, my specific commitment for the next 90 days is to allow myself to more fully explore _____________________.

My concrete commitment to a plan of action is a critical part of nurturing my artist. For the next 90 days, my planned, self-nurturing creative action plan is _______(take as much space as you need for this) ______.

I have chosen _______________ as my creative colleague and ________________ as my creative back-up. I am committed to a weekly phone check-in.

I have made the above commitments and will begin them on ___________________.

Signed by ______________ on this date: _____________________

Trail mix for the journey

In and after the epilogue, Julia shares some yummy tidbits, including a gorgeous Artist’s Prayer and an excellent list for further reading and inspiration. (Because my copy was released long before The Artist’s Way became a publishing phenomenon, only one of the recommendations is written by her. I would imagine that this list has been updated in more recently published versions.)

She also shares a beautiful essay on how our work may be supported by the creation of Sacred Circles. I suggest you spend some time today reading and meditating on this lovely section, if you have the book. If not, and you are interested in how Sacred Circling can work, I recommend this website, which I learned of from my friend James Wells who is one of the wisest Circle facilitators I’ve ever met.

You can learn  some basic nuts and bolts of conducting Circles from their downloadable PDF file,  Circle Guidelines, which you will find in the column on the left.  Highly recommended.

Last but not least

I want to say thank you to each and every one of you. Those who have been lurking,  or those who have been sharing; the daily faithful and the occasional drop-ins; the skeptics, the reluctant, the transformed, the already-there, the still-working-on-it. It has been a tremendous honor and privilege to walk these steps with you, and hold sacred witness to your profound unfolding along the way.

My heart overflows.

Goddess speed.   May your journeys be richly blessed!

We are now at the end of this journey together on The Artist’s Way. Which is to say, we are now just beginning our own Artist’s Way: living the life of Creator.

Here are the last exercises that Julia recommends. I hope you’ll spend some quality time this weekend working through them. Tomorrow,

1. Write down any resistance, angers and fears you have about going on from here. We all have them.

2. Take a look at your current areas of procrastination. What are the payoffs in your waiting? Locate the hidden fears. Make a list on paper.

3. Sneak a peek at Week One, Core Negative Beliefs.  Laugh. Yes, the nasty critters are still there, but look at the progress you’ve made! Read yourself the affirmations you worked on here and here.

4. Mend any mending.

5. Repot any pinched and languishing plants.

6. Select a Goddess jar. (A what?) A jar. A box. A vase, or other container. Something to put your fears, your resentments, your incessantly chattering “monkey mind,” your hopes, your dreams, your worries into.

7. Use your Goddess jar. Start with your fear list from the first exercise above. When worried, remind yourself that it’s in the jar – “ The Goddess has got it.” Then take the next action.

8. Now, check how: Honestly, what you you most like to create? Open-minded, what oddball paths would you dare to try? Willing, what appearances are you willing to shed to pursue your dream?

9. List five people you can talk to about your dreams and with whom you feel supported to dream and then plan.

10. Re-read this whole journey. Or go out and buy the book and read it. Share it with friends. Remember that the miracle is one artist sharing with another.

As a recovering creative, you have now put many, many hours into your recovery over these months, growing and changing rapidly.  For your recovery to continue, you need to make a solemn commitment.  I will offer a suggestion tomorrow, as well as what Julia calls “trail mix,” some additional tidbits, munchies, and goodies for the trip.

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
– Andre Gide

As we come to the end of this journey, we may find ourselves facing a final exam or two. This is what Julia calls The Test. It is as if our most vulnerable trouble-spots suddenly come roaring back to challenge us one last time. That’s why, in order to blast off towards our dreams, we have to reach “Escape Velocity.”

According to NASA, “Escape velocity is the speed at which an object must travel to break free of a planet or moon’s gravitational force and enter orbit. A spacecraft leaving the surface of Earth, for example, needs to be going about 11 kilometers (7 miles) per second, or over 40,000 kilometers per hour (25,000 miles per hour), to enter orbit.”

In The Artist’s Way, escape velocity is getting up enough of a head of steam to break through the gravitational pull of our old dramas, habits and self-sabotaging choices.

Julia warns, “A little flattery can go a long way toward deterring our escape velocity. So can a little cash. More sinister than either is the impact a well-placed doubt can have, particularly ‘for your own good, just wanting to make sure you’ve thought about this’ doubt – voiced by one of our nearest and dearest.”

She continues, “As recovering creatives, many of us find that every time our career heats up, we reach for our nearest Wet Blanket. We blurt out our enthusiasm to our most skeptical friend – in fact we call him up. If we don’t, he calls us. This is The Test.”

We need to remember that our artist is like a child, and when s/he is scared, or excited, or on the precarious edge of Big Change, the instinct is to reach out for Mommy. “Unfortunately,” Julia wisely notes, “many of us have Wet Blanket mommies and a whole army of Wet Blanket surrogate mommies – those friends who have our second, third, and fourth thoughts for us.”

So it is critically important that we do not give away our gold – our power, our treasured dreams, our hopes. “Always remember,” Julia declares, possibly outing herself as a practitioner, “the first rule of magic is self-containment. You must hold your intention within yourself, stoking it with power. Only then will you be able to manifest what you desire.”

To achieve escape velocity, we learn to keep our own counsel, move silently among the doubters and know precisely who our real allies are.

These allies are vital to our success. They are our “believing mirrors,” the people who see our greatness and divine possibilities and generously reflect it back to us. They are not the cynics who need to justify their own failures at our expense.

Do not indulge anybody for any reason who throws cold water in your direction. Forget their good intentions or whether they really meant it or not. Their motivation doesn’t matter – the damage from your exposure to them is what does.

“Escape velocity requires the sword of steely intention and the shield of self-determination,” she insists. And her friend Michelle tells us, “They will try to get you. Don’t forget that. Set your goals and set your boundaries.”

Julia concludes by adding this: Set your sights and don’t let the ogre that looms on the horizon deflect your flight.

Tomorrow, I will post some final thoughts and the homework for this chapter. Please check back in.

The race isn’t over until you cross the finish line. You’ll be surprised at how much can change in the last twenty strides.
–Jackie Dugall (Women’s Cross Country champion and award-winning coach)

Just as our Tarot card of the week has predicted, we are leaving behind the tenderly placed heart lessons found in the chapters of this book, and preparing to walk off into the Mystery. But the last gift in this final chapter is one of my favorites.

Since first embarking on The Artist’s Way many years ago, over and over I have encountered this experience that Julia now discusses. I especially see it in my Tarot practice. It often applies to love and romance, but it can also occur in careers, family relationships, even addiction recovery. The latter is especially how it applies to The Artist’s Way, since we are, after all, artists in recovery.

Julia calls it (I just love this!) Escape Velocity. Her friend Michelle introduced the idea to her. “In a nutshell, it goes: ‘When you’re going to leave them, they know…’

“There’s this time for blast-off, like a NASA space launch, and you’re heading for it when wham, you draw to you The Test.”

“The Test?”

“Yeah. The Test. It’s like when you’re all set to marry the nice guy, the one who treats you right, and Mr. Poison gets wind of it and phones you up…

“The whole trick is to evade The Test. We all draw to us the one test that’s our total nemesis…Think of it. You’re all set to go to the Coast on an important business trip, and your husband suddenly needs you, capital N, for no real reason…You’re all set to leave the bad job when the boss from hell suddenly gives you your first raise in five years.. Don’t be fooled! Don’t be fooled!”

I am here to tell you, my friends, she is dead on with this. Over and over in my own life and in my practice, I have seen that just when you are about to break free into the stratosphere of a new, fabulous chapter, the old drama puts on a shiny new disguise, meant to suck you right back in.

It could be the abusive spouse who swears they will never strike you again; or the toxic roommate who suddenly turns sugar sweet, just when you’ve found a gem of a little apartment of your own. The old flame (who broke your heart but is now oh-so-sorry!) pops up on Facebook and wants to “just chat,” just when your marriage counseling was making headway. Those plans for building your own studio out back suddenly thrown into doubt because Eldest Son really, really needs a car.

At first dubious about her friend’s conspiracy theory, Julia thought about it carefully and agrees, even sharing some of her own Tests, that she admits she sometimes failed. “There was the agent who managed to undo done deals but apologized so prettily. There was the editor who asked for rewrite upon rewrite until gruel was all that remained, but who always said I wrote brilliantly and was her brightest star.”

Think about your own life. Your artistic longings. Your desire to express your true self.  Your need for a more nurturing, happy, wholesome creative life.  And notice how right on time, up pops the devil, that is, some kind of temptation to stay in your familiar stuckness. For so many perfectly understandable reasons, you could postpone and defer your escape one more time, right?

It’s happened to me, many times.  I know it’s happened to you (maybe even right now).  What will you do when the pull of gravity threatens to suck the momentum out of your new dreams?

More tomorrow.

Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has always been the mainspring of culture.
– Italo Calvino (Journalist and writer, 1923-1985)

The ego trip of pursuing ART, with a capital A is just another trap which is bound, sooner or later, to trigger new blocks to our actual creativity.

So to help us avoid taking ourselves too seriously, Julia advises that we nurture ourselves with playful endeavors, which are more like hobbies than Art.  Our willingness to be a bit silly, to experiment, and most of all, to lose our stifled, self-conscious attitude is key to liberating our creative inner artist child.  She notes that in order to breathe, our creativity must be freed from “the narrow parameters of capital A art.”

To do so, she reminds us of the treasures we discover, when we adhere to our morning pages and artist dates. Within them, we will stumble across long forgotten samplings of our own past creative pleasures:

• “I had forgotten all about those paintings I did in high school. I loved painting the flats in drama tech!”
• “I suddenly remembered I played Antigone – who could forget her? I don’t know if I was any good, but I remember I loved it!”
• “I’d forgotten all about the skits I wrote when I was ten. I set them all to Ravel’s Bolero, no matter what they were about. I made my brothers and sisters swoon around the living room.”
• “I used to tap-dance. I know you can’t believe it now, but I was something!”

The point of all this is for us to realize we are vastly creative beings. Few of us are one-trick ponies. Besides our main passions, we have almost certainly had joyful flirtations and long love affairs on the side with historical fiction or haiku; bonsai, beading, and baking; or perhaps watercolors, needlepoint or the oboe. Why not make a list?  You might be amazed at all the creative dabbling and exploring you have enjoyed.

Julia points out, “We are intended to create. We refurbish a dowdy kitchen, tie bows on a holiday cat, experiment with a better soup. The same child who brewed perfume from a dab of this and a dash of that, half dish soap, part cinnamon, grows up to buy [or better, make] potpourri and to boil a spice pot that says, ‘Christmas.’

“As gray, as controlled, as dreamless as we may strive to be, the fire of our dreams will not stay buried. The embers are always there, stirring in our frozen souls like winter leaves. They won’t go away. They are sneaky. We make a crazy doodle in a boring meeting. We post a silly card on our office board. We nickname the boss something wicked. Plant twice as many flowers as we need.”

Just like the fruitful, extravagant, playful, lushly abundant Gods and Goddesses that we are!

It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance…. To perceive freshly, with fresh senses is to be inspired. – Thoreau

(My thanks today to Waverly FitzGerald for this quote, in an entirely different, yet maybe not that much different, context).

As we work through the last chapter of The Artists Way, Julia Cameron offers a number of parting gifts for us. Today, she warns us about the dangers of Art. That is, Art with a capital A.

“We are an ambitious society,” she writes, “and it is often difficult for us to cultivate forms of creativity that do not directly serve us and our career goals. Recovery urges our reexamining definitions of creativity and expanding them to include what in the past we called hobbies. The experience of creative living argues that hobbies are in fact essential to the joyful life.”

Hobbies are activities that we keep separate from our commercial goals. They are, supposedly, an end unto themselves, pursued strictly for pleasure. Yet as artists, they are bound to trigger inspiration that we can apply to our creative enterprises.

Julia notes, “When I have screenwriting students stuck at the midpoint of act two, I ask them to please go do their household mending. They usually balk, offended by such a mundane task, but sewing has a nice way of mending up plots. Gardening is another hobby often assigned to creativity students. When someone is panicked halfway across the bridge into a new life, repotting plants into larger and better containers quite literally grounds that person and gives him or her a sense of expansion.”

One of the most powerful, transformative teachers and Priestesses I have ever met, Sage Goode, often insists that, as part of her magical training retreats and workshops, her students bring along handicrafts like knitting, bead work, sewing, or other projects. As our hands are busily, repetitively occupied, something deep within our spirits opens and more readily absorbs the multilayered experiences of our training.

“As we serve our hobby,” Julia notes, “we are freed from our ego’s demands and allowed the experience of merging with a greater source. This conscious contact frequently affords us the perspectives needed to solve vexing personal or creative conundrums.

“It is a paradox of creative recovery that we must get serious about taking ourselves lightly. We must work at learning to play.”

The pursuit of Art with a capital A is a scene-stealer and a joy-killer that will stop actual creativity cold.  In truth, it is a thinly veiled ego trip.  And our authentic, playful artist self always knows the difference.

More tomorrow.

What shakes the eye, but the invisible?
- Theodore Roethke

In this final chapter of The Artist’s Way, as her bon voyage gift to us, Julia offers a bouquet of ideas. When we begin to understand our creativity in terms of it being a sacred conversation between our Divinity and our human selves, she emphasizes the need for us to wait, and listen.  This requires that we must strengthen our faith.

And faith is the knack of trusting Mystery. She writes, “Creativity – like human life itself – begins in darkness. We need to acknowledge this. All too often, we think only in terms of light: ‘And then the lightbulb went on and I got it!’ It is true that insights may come to us as flashes. It is true that some of these flashes may be blinding.

“It is, however, also true that such bright ideas are preceded by a gestation period that is interior, murky, and completely necessary.

“We speak often about ideas as brainchildren. What we do not realize is that brainchildren, like all babies, should not be dragged from the creative womb prematurely. Ideas, like stalactites and stalagmites, form in the dark inner cave of consciousness. They form in drips and drops, not by squared-off building blocks. We must learn to wait for an idea to hatch. Or, to use a gardening image, we must learn to not pull our ideas up by the roots to see if they are growing.”

This hearkens back to her caution about sharing our tender beginnings with well-meaning, but potentially wet blanket, or toxic friends. But it also is great direction itself, a theme that she repeats many times: to be an artist is to give oneself the spaciousness to make lots and lots of very bad art!

We have to allow ourselves to doodle, to dream, to be unsellable and unproductive by any commercial yardstick. It is in the fooling around and the mistakes and the goofs where real juiciness often makes itself known.

“All too often, we try to push, pull, outline, and control our ideas instead of letting them grow organically. The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.”

And then, if we haven’t gotten it yet, once and for all, let us recognize and celebrate this:

“Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.

“…As creative channels, we need to trust the darkness. We need to learn to gently mull instead of churning away like a little engine on a straight-ahead path.”

Once again, we can see the importance of artist’s dates and morning pages. In both cases, they are exercises for doodling, mulling, puttering on paper or wandering through experiences, with no goal, no judgment. They are both practices that create a habit of listening, opening and allowing.

But beyond them, in our actual creative process, we are invited to trust the dark and allow the fallow times. We can know in our bones that, like this time of year, below the frozen landscape, roots are stirring, and life will burst forth. All in Good time.

Enough words have been exchanged;
Now at last let me see some deeds!
– Goethe, Faust I

Everything that we have been doing – examining our assumptions about abundance, healing our wounds, facing our fears about our place in the Multiverse, the months of hard labor on our archaeological dig to discover our authenticity – all of these exercises for the past year have been towards one single purpose.

They have been to help us align with the truth of our deepest heart’s desire – the longing to know ourselves as the liberated, creative embodiment of the Divine.

Nothing more, nothing less.

The wonderful mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote, “Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.” I think that this is imperative, and it also has a truth not always immediately evident.

In order to come fully alive, we don’t go searching for the doors. We discover and follow the bliss. Then the doors appear. This is a subtle, but important difference, I think.

Like some of you, perhaps, I spent a fair bit of my wild youth experimenting with what Aldous Huxley dubbed, the doors of perception. Changing consciousness, peering through magical windows that looked out onto landscapes of realities kept hidden, or, worse, ridiculed, feared and despised as evil or insane by the dominant culture.

But the problem was, they were only doors and windows, and never led much of anywhere; like a hall of mirrors. And I fear that many, many of my contemporaries, also following such a path, got lost there.

But the map out of the wasteland is simple, really. It is the trick of learning how to tune in to your bliss. It may not be the only way out of the “maya,” the illusion world; but it certainly is a trustworthy and joyful route.

And it is the path we have been on, here, all along. It is, Julia writes, “the inner commitment to be true to ourselves and follow our dreams.” This, in turn, “triggers the support of the universe. While we are ambivalent, the universe will seem to us also to be ambivalent and erratic. The flow through our lives will be characterized by spurts of abundance and long spells of drought, when our supply dwindles to a mere trickle.

“If we look back at the times when the world seemed to be a capricious and untrustworthy place, we see that we were ourselves ambivalent and conflicted in our goals and behaviors. Once we trigger an internal yes by affirming our truest goals and desires, the universe mirrors that yes and expands it.

“There is a path for each of us. When we are on our right path, we have a surefootedness. We know the next right action – although not necessarily what is just around the bend. By trusting, we learn to trust.”

But wait!  There’s more – tomorrow.

Dreams are illustrations… from the book your soul is writing about you.
– Marsha Norman (American playwright)

While it is true that the real artist’s adventure begins with our being able to admit to our inner dream, it is also true that we can almost instantly react with resistance to it.

Julia writes, “This resistance is really very understandable. We are not accustomed to thinking that the Goddess’ will for us and our own inner dreams can coincide. Instead we have bought the message of our culture: this world is a vale of tears and we are meant to be dutiful and then die.

“The truth is, we are meant to be bountiful and live. The universe will always support affirmative action. Our truest dream for ourselves is always the Goddess’ will for us.”

Imagine that. Always.

Have you ever read The Desiderata? When I was in college, this prose poem by Max Ehrmann was a very popular poster, a quiet counterpoint to all the psychedelic art everyone loved to splash all over their walls.  One line, in particular, comes to mind:

“You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”

If this is true (and I know you know it is!), and if we are connected intimately with All That Is, instead of separate or isolated or fallen from Love (despite the contrary teachings of the dying culture of domination and fear), then how can anything that comes from our truest heart be less than the very desire of the Divine?

I rediscover this every time one of my Tarot clients gets The Magician card in my Osho Zen Tarot. In this version, it is called Existence.  The Magician of the Tarot is a multidimensional Major Arcana card, with one of its messages being about our power and magic to manifest.

In the Osho Tarot version, a woman sits on the lotus leaf, ancient symbol of perfection, and gazes at the night sky. She is nude, wide open to Source. Before her, there is a shooting star, inviting her to make a wish. In that instant, when she is alone, naked, before (and part of) the loving gaze of Life, what will be her desire?

What is yours?

When you name it, with all your heart, completely unguarded, without inner debate, in the flash of a falling star, how can it not be what the Beloved wishes for you?  And therefore, how can it not come to pass?  Because you and She are not separate. Never were.  Never will be (except by the illusions that we ourselves create).

The only catch is getting to that place of where you are completely at ease with your own revelation.

More about this tomorrow.

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.
- Erich Fromm

First, thanks for your patience while I took a much-needed break over the Imbolc period. I know that I was, in some ways, not as available to you as usual, which may have been a bit disappointing to some. I never like to let anyone down.

But it allowed me to do some deep magical work that aligns with this being my Tarot year of Death and Transformation.  I believe you will see much of it manifesting here and in my practice in the coming months, as I retool and rebirth my services. So be on the lookout for these glimmers of new life.

Meantime, we arrive at the final chapter of The Artist’s Way. We conclude this year of work with “Recovering a Sense of Faith.” As we have been gently and powerfully discovering all along, the path of the artist is one that must be in synch with the guidance of Source, if we are to thrive in the process.

And for that to happen, we have recognized that we are in recovery as artists. This recovery requires us to surrender both our willfulness and our wounds, and trust a higher purpose. We may experience this as co-creating with a helping Someone, which we may understand as Allies, Guardians, our daemon, the Muse, our own Gods or Goddess of Creativity, or our inner artist. Or all of the above.

Julia writes that in this final chapter, “We acknowledge the inherently mysterious spiritual heart of creativity. We address the fact that creativity requires receptivity and profound trust – capacities we have developed through our work in this course.

“We set our creative aims and take a special look at last-minute sabotage. We renew our commitment to the use of the tools.”

(Don’t you just love that we are setting our creative aims in the Eight of Wands week?)

So first and foremost in our discussion for this chapter is the discovery that creativity requires faith, and faith means relinquishing control. This is truly frightening at times, and we may feel profound resistance. But our resistance, we should realize by now, is borne of our old self-destructive habits.

“We throw up roadblocks on own path,” Julia notes. “Why do we do this? In order to maintain an illusion of control. Depression, like anger and anxiety, is resistance, and it creates dis–ease. This manifests itself as sluggishness, confusion, ‘I don’t know…’

“The truth is, we do know and we know that we know.

“Each of us has an inner dream that we can unfold if we will just have the courage to admit what it is. And the faith to trust our own admission.”

Have you yet made your artist’s altar or sanctuary? As you linger there now, what visions have come to you? What dreams are stirring in you?  It is time to realize and claim them.  More tomorrow.