Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Week Nine - Artist's Way


Apologies, dear readers. (tee freakin' hee, readers. As if.) Been busy meditating, soccering, Artist's Way-ing, reading, reading, watching tv and - ugh - working. I've moved forward on the The Way (cue Scott Miller), but I haven't always taken the time to blog about it. Consider this a remedy.

Or a ... reconnection!

Week Nine's task was to recover a sense of compassion. One of the main points of the chapter was to label things rightly, particularly "laziness," which is often just fear. Fear that we won't be able to do something perfectly, fear that we will fail, fear that we will succeed even. We say we're lazy, when we're really just afraid to try. The salve of compassion is not just for use on others, then, but we should apply just as liberally to our own skins. See what I did there?

Also discussed were creative u-turns, where we self-sabotage out of fear, and block-blasting, where we take inventory before beginning a new project of any resentments (anger) and resistances (fear) we might feel about starting. I still find this provocative because I haven't done any actual creative work, other than blog posts and one lonely collage, since I began this journey back in December.

It was my intention today to start a new poem. Truthfully, it was my intention yesterday to start a new poem. I just didn't do it. So I'm going to play a little bit with this blasting exercise and see what happens. I apologize beforehand.

Resentments: nobody ever reads poetry! it means work! thinking! editing! especially the editing!!!

Fears: people will think I'm weird for writing it. it will be awful and I won't know it and I'll show it to someone and ... it doesn't bear thinking about. I won't be able to write it! Nothing will come!

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