Skyearth Letters

Years ago, twenty-nine to be exact, I graduated from the Art Department of the University of New Hampshire with a Painting & Graphics major. I was never truly convinced that I had received my bachelor's degree because my final senior art project was a washout, and I believed the professor upgraded my grade only because I wouldn't have graduated otherwise. (I didn't ask him to do so; I can still "see" the paper with the crossed-out grade and one higher written over it. In retrospect, the project wasn't worthy of what it finally received, although I believed at the time that it was pretty good.) It's been one of the subtle things that linger in the back of my mind; one of those things one would do better to totally forget.

For about five years afterwards, I did create oil paintings and sell them. Then children came along and they don't mix well with oils. So I concentrated on taking photos of them and the Vermont and New Hampshire landscape. Other than accumulating several boxes of slides and prints and using them to create note cards, I haven't done anything else with them.

Late in the 1970s and early 80s, I turned the creative bent to designing and making patchwork quilts and sold some of them, but when a full-time job became imperative, sewing in the evenings and weekends was hard to settle down to. In 1987, out of the blue (or out of personal counseling) I began writing poetry, quite a few the first couple of years and then tapering off to maybe a half dozen a year. I had a captive audience, so to speak, for my creations, for I did the Sunday worship bulletins for my church, and the minister encouraged me to put what I wrote on their covers.

More recently I've been writing personal thoughts and opinions of which "Skyearth Letters" is one result. That is the quick story of my creative efforts for the past thirty or so years. Nothing spectacular. Not much money stream. And I've thought of myself as not truly creative but more a representer of the landscape, whether visual or thought.

I met up with The Artist's Way two years ago and began reading the chapters and doing the exercises in May 1996. Julia Cameron's first and strongest emphasis is to write, in longhand, three full-size pages every morning. Yes, indeed, every morning, right after getting out of bed or even in bed. Without thinking. Even if, after the first page and a half (about when I would run out of immediate thoughts to put down), you can only write "write write write" for several lines. I've done something like that, and, because our brains are overloaded with junk anyway, it doesn't take very long for some more coherent thought to pop out.

During the past four months, I've attended a creativity group, which has actively been reading each chapter and doing some of the activities. Because my sister in New Hampshire has my copy of the book, I've been just noting what the exercise is that the group is going to share and doing only that much. (I just realized that I should be rereading all my earlier responses as we go along.) One exercise that I omitted doing the first time was a collage of what you think about doing, what's important to you. Because I don't have a magazine collection to cut up (couldn't see moving it to Colorado), I decided to riffle through my photos and create a collage of the ones that speak loudly to me.

I began with a five-photo panorama of the mountains near the Dallas Divide in southwestern Colorado and then framed it with unusual sunrises and sets, photos of the Maine shore and family (an annual June pilgrimage), the house I lived in (and designed) before coming to Colorado, the cows next door, red and yellow columbines, snow-covered beech trees, an unusual rock formation, four cats that I used to have, and a black-throated blue warbler from last spring (the day a friend and I saw 11 different species of warblers on a morning walk). It took about an hour to choose, lay out, and tape down the photos onto a 2'x3' piece of foam core.

This collage helped me realize how important each experience embodied in the photos has been and what my loves are to lead me toward. Perhaps I didn't focus exactly on what Cameron suggested. Not having the book, I couldn't refer to it. But when I look at the collage, which is now hung on the wall beside my bedroom door, I feel good, very good. And that is what I think she was after...an active visual representation of what's meaningful and important in your life. What star to steer by, if you will.

In the fourth week, she asks that you not read at all, which seems impossible for someone who reads many books and articles. I couldn't imagine doing it at first, but then decided to restrict my reading to the minimum needed to perform my job. It worked and the experience is treasured. In fact, I'm planning to do short-term abstinence from reading soon...just as soon as I finish a couple more books that are burning to be read.

But I clearly understand her point: reading, even reading of good books, helps one put off creative actions. A week of not stuffing one's head with written words is refreshing and cleansing...as cleansing as a spring tonic.

Late in the process, she asks that you reread your morning pages from the beginning, highlighting insights and creative actions. I don't know how she thinks one can do that in a week; it took me a month.) In week 10 she talks about the seven deadlies (I can tell you five of them: drugs, alcohol, sex, family/friends, and work), and asks you to write their names on pieces of paper that are put into a container. You draw one out and write five things about it and its negative impact on your life. Then you return it to the container and draw again, doing this seven times. If you get the same thing again, you find five more things to say. I can tell you only five of them because I got one three times running. And it was a valid topic for me to write about three times.

The twelve weeks that The Artist's Way is scheduled to take stretched out from May to October for me. There were a number of tasks that I didn't do. Such resistance is an important thing to recognize and think about, or not, if you're not ready to.

The other day as I was going through a check-out line at the health food store, I was caught by a photo of Julia Cameron on the cover of the May issue of Shambhala Sun. I grabbed it and read the interview and an excerpt from her The Artist's Way Morning Pages Journal, which led me to focus this month's column on her books.

Morning pages are something that the leader of the creativity group finds not enlightening, and she's asked others what they feel. I, for one, have found them sometimes onerous, sometimes great, and sometimes neglected. It would take me 40 minutes to write three pages. But I found them interesting to reread, which I've been doing as I'm writing this. I've included dreams I've woken from as part of them; after all, if you're spilling out what's running through your mind, dreams certainly qualify.

As I read Cameron's excerpt, though, I got a better feeling for what she discovered as their great value. This value she found directly through her own experience and subsequently verified by the experience of others to whom she recommended morning pages, and out of which developed The Artist's Way. From this excerpt, I quote:

That is what morning pages are: spiritual windshield wipers. Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes. We are more honest with ourselves and others, more centered, and more spiritually at ease. For this reason, I often say that morning pages are a form of meditation. You are writing down the "cloud" thoughts that drift across your mind. In writing them down, you clear them.

When she described them as a kind of meditation, I could immediately see why. My experience of meditating is that with a quiet body, the brain just starts clicking like sixty, and I find I need a phrase to remind myself that I'm meditating and not thinking. And I am forever suddenly finding myself off on another thought, not realizing I had stopped mentally speaking the phrase. With this in mind, this morning I whizzed off three pages in 15 minutes. It wasn't that I was trying to write something coherent before, but I would censor my thoughts or find myself just thinking and not writing it down. That, of course, misses the purpose.

The other important task is the artist's date. I found it difficult to do, even to imagine doing. It's what some of the people in the creativity group find hard to get to, also. It always seemed that a week would pass, and I hadn't gotten to it. In the excerpt from her Morning Pages Journal, Cameron states that the artist's date is essential to the morning pages work to help us recover "our authentic creative selves" and describes it as "a one or two hour block of time set aside weekly for an excursion on your own that celebrates and nurtures your creative self."

She emphasizes doing what you consider fun (and pushing the edge a bit), rather than what you think you should do to be creative. It will help you build a habit of taking risks to expand your creativity. That is where many of us languish, trying to do the safe things, or if it's risky, just not doing it.

How we dislike rejection! And yet recently reading about a writer's effort to get her/his script into film underscored that one has to keep sending it out, because it took many, I want to say at least 40, rejections before someone thought it would be great, and it became a hit film.

Moving onto The Vein of Gold, Cameron's follow-up book, I've read only about a third of it, but I haven't begun doing the exercises, except for coming back to morning pages and artist's dates, and walking. Walking is the newest addition to what she considers the basic "backpack" of tools necessary to awaken creativity. Works well for me; I like walking. As she says,

Walking makes our breathing rhythmic and repetitive. As our breath steadies and soars, so does our thought. Great spiritual traditions know this....Across cultures and continents, walking is an ancient and literal form for pursuing a spiritual path...I believe that the ground is the being of God, and it speaks to our souls through our soles....Our internal horizons stretch with our external ones.

It also does a good job of easing anger, creating imaginary conversations with people, reflecting on anything that crosses your mind, including the over-built and ugly houses you go by. One of my favorite stretches of road to walk in Vermont led through deep woods. In sunshine, there would be shafts of light touching dark hemlocks; if it was cloudy, the darkness was deep except in the occasional forest openings where beech leaves gleamed in the pale light. Early morning and late evening sunpaths would be more brilliant under the arching maples.

Back to The Vein of Gold: I'm still at the first writing exercise and have been thinking about for about three months. It will take some time, as I feel it needs full attention to do an honest and complete job. It is writing a narrative time line of my life, remembering the places, the people, the events, the criticisms, the embarrassments, everything that pops up. Cameron suggests outlining it in five-year increments and jotting down quick memories to begin with. I haven't done even that much.

Is it resistance to knowing that's holding me back? Or is it that I feel the need to have a big block of free-and-alone time to do it? The narrative time line provides the basis for other exercises in later parts of the book, so it is critical to the process. The exercises in The Artist's Way are precursors to this with their delving into the past, but writing this time line would provide insights by the connections that appear as memories drift up and are written down.

Another connection appeared when I started reading The Power Behind Your Eyes: Improving Your Eyesight with Integrated Vision Therapy by Robert Michael Kaplan (Healing Arts Press, Rochester, Vermont, 1995). He has found that difficulties in vision frequently hearken back to experiences in childhood. What seemed synchronous was that his approach to integrated vision therapy would be aided by doing the narrative time line, which would provide enlightenment in the process of improving my vision.

So now to get to it. Time to let go of my worst trait, procrastination, and just do it. I know, unreservedly, that what I discover will be truth. I can see the banner that hung over the stage at my high school graduation: "Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." I didn't understand it then. It's taken thirty years to understand it. But our truths are what we need to find to open the creative heart within, to experience the passion of living.

I will close with Julia Cameron's words near the close of The Vein of Gold: