apprenticeship tender square “all the arts we practice are apprenticeship. the big art is our life.” m. c. richards excerpt from “the artist’s way” by julia cameron; chapter 4 “recovering a sense of integrity” (82–86) people frequently believe that the creative life is grounded in fantasy. the more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined. as we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment. it is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. we may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered. art lies at the moment of the encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. we become original because we become something specific: an origin from which work flows. as we gain—or regain—our creative identity, we lose the false self we were sustaining. the loss of this false self can feel traumatic: “i don’t know who i am anymore. i don’t recognize me.” remember that the more you feel yourself to be terra incognita, the more certain you can be that the recovery process is working. you are your own promised land, your own new frontier. shifts in taste and perception frequently accompany shifts in identity. one of the clearest signals that something healthy is afoot is the impulse to weed out, sort through, and discard old clothes, papers, and belongings… by tossing out the old and unworkable, we make way for the new and suitable… when the search-and-discard impulse seizes you, two crosscurrents are at work: the old you is leaving and grieving, while the new you celebrates and grows strong. as with any rupture, there is both tension and relief. long-seated depression breaks up like an ice floe. long-frozen feelings thaw, melt, cascade, flood, and often overrun their container (you). you may find yourself feeling volatile and changeable. you are. if this description sounds dramatic, it is only to prepare you for possible emotional pyrotechnics. you may not have them. your changes may be more like cloud movements, from overcast to partly cloudy. it is important to know that no matter which form your growth takes, there is another kind of change, slower and more subtle, accumulating daily whether you sense its presence or not… we begin to move at such velocity that we do not even realize the pace. just as travelers on a jet are seldom aware of their speed unless they hit a patch of turbulence, so, too, travelers [recovering their inner artist] are seldom aware of the speed of their growth. this is a form of denial that can tempt us to abort the recovery process that “isn’t happening” to us. oh yes it is. when we have engaged the creator within to heal us, many changes and shifts in our attitudes and beliefs begin to occur. i enumerate some of them here because many of these will not be recognizable at first as healing. in fact, they may seem crazy and even destructive. at best, they will seem eccentric. there will be a change in energy patterns. you dreams will become stronger and clearer, both by night and by day. you will find yourself remembering your nighttime dreams, and by day, daydreams will catch your attention. fantasy, of a benign and unexpected sort, will begin to crop up. many areas of your life that previously seemed to fit will stop fitting. half your wardrobe may start to look funny. you may decide to reupholster a couch or just toss it out. musical bents may alter. there may even be bursts of spontaneous singing, dancing, running. you may find your candor unsettling. “i don’t like that” is a sentence that will leave your mouth. or “i think that’s great.” in short, your tastes and judgments and personal identity will begin to show through. what you have been doing is wiping the mirror. each day’s [writing] take[s] a swipe at the blur you have kept between you and your real self. as your image becomes clearer, it may surprise you. you may discover very particular likes and dislikes that you hadn’t acknowledged… conditioned as we are to accept other people’s definitions of us, this emerging individuality can seem to us like self-will run riot. it is not. the snowflake pattern of your soul is emerging. each of us is a unique, creative individual. but we often blur that uniqueness with sugar, alcohol, drugs, overwork, underplay, bad relations, toxic sex, underexercise, over-tv, undersleep—many varied forms of junk food for the soul. [writing] helps us to see these smears on our consciousness. if you look over the time you have been doing your writing, you will see that many changes have entered your life as a result of your willingness to clear room in it for your creator’s action. you will notice an increased, sometimes disconcerting, sense of personal energy, some bursts of anger, some flash points of clarity. people and objects may have taken on a different meaning to you. there will be a sense of the flow of life—that you are brought into new vistas as you surrender to moving with the flow of god. this is clear already. you may well be experiencing a sense of both bafflement and faith. you are no longer stuck, but you cannot tell where you are going. you may feel that this can’t keep up. you may long for a time when there was no sense of possibility, when you felt more victimized, when you didn’t realize how many small things you could do to improve your own life. it is normal to yearn for some rest when you are moving so rapidly. what you will learn to do is rest in motion, like lying down in a boat. your [writing is] your boat. [it] will lead you forward and give you a place to recuperate from your forward motion… one technique that can be very reassuring at this point is to use your [writing]…for written affirmations of your progress. “put it in writing,” we often say when making a deal. there is a special power in writing out the deal we are making with our creator. “i receive your good willingly” and “thy will be done” are two short affirmations that when writing remind us to be open to increased good during the day. “i trust my perceptions” is another powerful affirmation to use as we undergo shifts in identity. “a stronger and clearer me is emerging.” choose your affirmations according to your need. as you excavate your buried dreams, you need the reassurance that such explorations are permissible: “i recover and enjoy my identity.” * note about the passage: i have substituted “writing” here in place of cameron’s technique of writing “daily morning pages” because i think the effects she’s discussing are applicable to the work we’re doing collectively here on blather. here’s more on morning pages, if anyone’s interested in knowing what it is and why it works: “morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness: ‘oh, god, another morning. i have NOTHING to say. i need to wash the curtains. did i get my laundry yesterday? blah, blah, blah…’ they might also, more ingloriously, be called *brain drain,* since that is one of their main functions. *there is no wrong way to do morning pages.* these daily morning meanderings are not meant to be *art.* or even *writing*…pages are simply meant to be, simply, the act of moving the hand across the page and writing down *whatever* comes to mind. nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird to be included…all that angry, whiny, petty stuff that you write down in the morning stands between you and your creativity.” (10–11) for me personally, i have used cameron’s morning page technique consistently for six years now (i was off and on with it for a few years prior) and it’s been utterly essential to the numerous, ongoing stages i’ve encountered in my creative recovery. like my dedication to posting on blather now, i can’t imagine my life without settling in each morning to write my pages; they help me establish where i am, they help me do battle with my inner critic, and they help me contact my inner censor to uncover what i hide from myself. i consider morning pages to be my act of daily meditation and reflection in a world that does everything in its influence to keep me distracted. it is an incredibly powerful tool that fosters explosive growth. 210930 what's it to you? who go blather from