Your Creative Autonomy

"I need to create what wants to be created." Julia Cameron (Pg. 180)

You have traveled a long way to get here and together we have traveled more.  You found this tribe to help you hold space for what is birthing from inside. This is not the last tribe you will find.  We are approaching the end of our time together, yet I know this will not be the end of anyone's journey.  This is just the beginning. It is ALWAYS the beginning.  You get THIS moment right now to create, to move in a direction, to stay still if you wish. You get THIS moment, right now, to celebrate who you are and the gifts you bring to this Earth.  I know there are human moments when we don't feel as if we are doing anything. Times when we feel as if we aren't "doing what we are supposed to be doing". Times when we feel as if we are failing tremendously as a human being.  I am here to tell you, it is in those spots of vulnerability where we find our strength, our power, our surrender, and change.  Things are always changing.  Creativity is born from change. Life in itself, is CREATIVE.  I AM CREATIVE BECAUSE I AM HERE. I AM A CREATION!  What a creation I am! 

Whatever you do, it will always be unique because you are unique.  Whatever you create will be special because YOU are special.  Play, dance, sing, draw, write, leap around your living room, spend time in nature.  All these things (and more) keep us connected to our TRUE selves. 

I took my classroom of high school students with  Special Needs (all with cognitive disabilities) to the Walker Art Museum some years ago.  With their very childlike inquisitive minds they laughed (and I laughed) at the silliness of the art pieces on the walls; at the smoke coming out of some figures' butts, at someone tying up their tongue on video and asking why.  My response to most of their questions was, "It is art."  Art allows a person to express their feelings, and thoughts about a concept in an outside-the-box way.  Artists create to find a different way to say something... maybe about something that is bothering them or has been bothering them for a long time.  What is born is their story and their expression of how they share themselves with the world.   SHARE YOURSELF WITH THE WORLD!  We are waiting to hear from you.

With a bow, Carrie

Recovering a Sense of Faith

"Life was meant to be an artist date.  That's why we were created."  Julia Cameron pg. 198

This photo hung at the Walker and was part of the exhibit, "Adios, Utopia". This exhibit was very moving to me when I first saw it and this photo still lingers in my memory.  This man is leaping off a pier in Cuba.  He appears to me as if he is walking out onto water.  As if he can, in one single step, reach the other side, touch the horizon, achieve whatever it is he has set out to do.  He leaps with a sense of faith.  I feel it from this photo.  In this moment, in time, he just..."lets go".

 
This is what Julia Cameron speaks of in her last chapter of "The Artist's Way".  I love the first quote of chapter 12, on page 194 by Mickey Hart, the Grateful Dead drummer.  He says, " Adventures don't begin until you get into the forest.  That first step is an act of faith."  That's it, right?  That is everything we do as artists.  We paint, we carve, we dance, we play our instrument, we write and then we LET GO.  We let ourselves go into the murkiness that "precedes the bright idea."  

I think about how I started this class...what preceded it was murky, dark, sludge-like, and not at all fun.  It was work. It was some of the hardest life-work I have had to do for myself/with myself to date!  Some inner longing brought me to The Artist's Way in 2011. I wrote like a mad woman.  I woke up at 4:30 am to do my Morning Pages. I went on my Artist's Dates come hell or high water. Serendipity popped up like corn kernels in hot oil.  What awaited me on the other side of all that was my divorce, the loss of my house to foreclosure, the loss of my dog, and the family unit that existed in a form I knew and was comfortable with.  Hard stuff.  Not at all what I was trying to manifest but it manifested because it did and I grew, I created, and I continued to live. The one thing that I can point to that got me through all that was FAITH.  

I have continued to believe that things happen and from these things happening (because we are energy bumping up against one another), we have OPPORTUNITIES!

Divorce sucked, foreclosing on my home SUCKED...AND...there were so many opportunities that came into my life because of those occurrences. 

OPPORTUNITY, OPPORTUNITY, OPPORTUNITY 

FAITH, FAITH, FAITH, FAITH.

Manuel Piña, Sin título, from the series "Aguas baldías (Untitled, from the series Water Wastelands)" (1992–1994). Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zurich. ©Manuel Piña