a narrative arts space

Week 6 Book Club

 “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.”

– Henry David Thoreau

 

    • Journal

    • Offer your reflections to this week’s Book Club in the comments

    • Revisit your creative process. Anything to update or add?

    • Prepare for our final class celebration where you’ll be invited to share a five minute work-in-progress with your peers.

  • List some of the things you're glad you accomplished or are proud of from this past week.

    What is one small step you took for your creativity this week? What is one small step you can take moving forward?

    What is something currently getting in your way of creativity? What do you think could help you work past this block?

    What's working for you right now?

    Something negative you said to yourself this week was...

    A way to reframe this negative self-talk could be to say this instead:

    Any interesting reflections or discoveries from your journaling?

    If you didn't get to it —all good!—why not try to summarize a theme for your week in six words right here, right now.

    What was something you are grateful for from this past week?

    *

    “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense out of the past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

    – Melody Beattie

    • What are some dualities that exist within you?

    • How have you changed over the last two months?

    • How do you think differently about your creativity compared to when you start this class?

    • How do you plan on maintaining creative momentum moving forward?

    • Creativity and knowledge aren't fixed commodities. How can you engage a growth mindset?

    • In what area do you currently have a strong desire to grow?

    • What is a skill or tool you'd like to develop to help contribute to your creative work?

    • What are some commonly experienced resistances that you can accept as part of your creative process?

    • Consider this: If you wrote one page a day, you'd have a book in one year. What is your equivalent to a page a day?

    • How can you reflect and talk about your project(s) more constructively?

    • What have you already done?

    • What are the positive habits and rituals in your life right now?

    • What were some positive habits and rituals you had in the past that you could try to bring back to the present?

    • What do you do to create balance and respect your boundaries?

    • What was the most impactful NO you said recently?

    • How can you take steps toward your aspirational values?

    • What is something you can accept?

    • What is something you can let go?

    • Where can you cut yourself some slack? What about others?

    • What is your purpose in connecting with other people in your life?

    • What are some words of wisdom for someone starting off in your same line of work?

    • What advice would you give other people who are motivated to become more creative?

    • What are your motivations for creating?

Recommend Readings

  • Excerpt from Big Magic
    By Elizabeth Gilbert 

    On Creative Living, Part I 

    The essential ingredients for creativity remain exactly the same for everybody: courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust—and those elements are universally accessible. Which doesn’t mean creative living is always easy; it merely means that creative living is always possible. 

    [p 158]  

    *

    Excerpt from The Artist’s Way
    By Julia Cameron 

    On Creative Living, Part II 

    Creative living requires the luxury of time, which we carve out for ourselves—even if it’s fifteen minutes for quick morning pages and a ten-minute minibath after work. ...Much of what we do in a creative recovery may seem silly. Silly is a defense our Wet Blanket adult uses to squelch our artist child. Beware of silly as a word you toss at yourself.  Creativity lives in paradox: serious art is born from serious play. 

    [pp 86; 95]

    *

    Excerpt from Women Who Run with the Wolves

    By Clarissa Pinkola Estes 

    On Creative Living, Part III 

    Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.

  • Excerpt from Free Play
    By Stephen Nachmanovitch 

    Like the rules of the universe, the whole matter of personal creativity is baffling and paradoxical. To try to control yourself, to try to create, to try to break free of the knots you yourself have tied is to set yourself up at a distance from that which you already are. It is like looking around this way and that for your own head. It’s like what happens to Zen practitioners in the thick of working on a koan, feeling as if they are trying to swallow a molten ball of red-hot iron that they cannot gulp down and cannot spit out. 

    I reach the point at which the complexities, contradictions, paradoxes, and impossibilities pile up so high that I become overwhelmed. I have gone through it again and again, have tried every avenue, and I meet frustration at every point. Finally the only way left is to stand up and burst out of the armor. I am stuck, I have to do something, I am on the edge of a cliff. I may as well jump. Suddenly I don’t care if I ever solve this enigma; I’m alive, to hell with it. Somehow, by jumping, by tossing out the whole mass of tangled paradoxes but retaining my aliveness, something inside me gives way. Out of this jump something new is born. Then the next day, as I am walking down the street, the simple solution comes. 

    Although I now know that I must give up the need to control, I cannot intentionally decide to give up, or simulate giving it up, in order to make the music rejuvenate itself out of a stuck place. That just doesn’t work. The surrender has got to be genuine, uncontrived, wholehearted: I have got to really abandon all hope and fear, with nothing to gain and nothing to lose. The paradox of control verses letting things happen naturally cannot be rationalized, it can only be resolved in actual practice. 

    [pp 141-142]

  • Excerpt from No More Secondhand Art  
    By Peter London  

    How breathtaking it is to start out on a journey into the unknown. How much easier,  more comfortable, and reassuring it is to stay where we are among familiar faces and  places. Even if where we presently are is not all that we would prefer, it is at least  known. That in itself is somehow comforting. To start off in new directions—about to  encounter who knows what, at risk of the way becoming confused at any point—takes  courage. Or to use a better word, faith. Faith that even when there are no external signs  to indicate where and how we should proceed, we are not yet lost.  

    Stepping out on that journey in the hope of uncovering sources of inner worth so that we  may step more lightly and confidently through life is our ultimate goal; our means will  be the creative act.  

    Suppose life is a journey, an endless, surprising odyssey in which we may move from  naiveté to wisdom, from self-consciousness and awkwardness to grace, and from  superficial knowledge to profound wonder. The infinite menu of possibilities that life  continuously displays before us may be viewed as an invitation to embark on this  adventure through varied and unpredictable terrain. The artistic process is more than a  collection of crafted things; it is more than the process of creating those things. It is the  chance to encounter dimensions of our inner being and to discover deep, rewarding  patterns of meaning.  

    *  

    What we never get enough of is meaning. What does all this mean? Why are we here?  Where are we going? Who am I? How do I fit into this unspeakable universe? Are we 

    alone? What shall I do with my passions, my loneliness, my possibilities? How can I ever  say “Thank you” enough for all this? Why me? Why them? How could all this happen? Is  there a pattern to this boundless garment? Who’s running this operation? Why? These  are the questions that animate artists to spin and jump and howl until the right way is  found to address the big conundrum that both invites and confounds our imagination.  

    ...In seeking the meaningful rather than the beautiful, we nurture an endeavor which  lies at the deepest levels of the traditional function of art: the uniquely human quest for  establishing personal meaning in a possibly meaningful universe.  

    [pp 7; 15; 20]  

  • Excerpt from Happier  
    By Tal Ben-Shahar  

    While empirical research and anecdotal evidence clearly show the connection between  having goals and doing well, the relationship between goals and well-being is less  straightforward. Conventional wisdom tells us that happiness is about the fulfillment of  our goals. Decades of research, though, challenge our commonly held beliefs: while  attaining a sought-after goal can provide much satisfaction, and the failure to attain a  certain goal can lead to despair, these feelings tend to be short-lived.  

    Psychologist Philip Brickman and his colleagues demonstrated this by looking at the  levels of happiness people had after winning the lottery. Within as short a period as a  month, lottery winners return to their base levels of well-being —if they were unhappy  before winning, they will remain so. Similarly, and perhaps even more surprisingly,  accident victims who became paraplegic often are as happy as they were prior to the  accident, within as little as a year after the accident.  

    Psychologist Daniel Gilbert extended these findings to show how poor most of us are at  predicting our future emotional states. We think that a new house, a promotion, or a  publication would make us happy, when in fact these achievements only lead to a  temporary spike in our levels of well-being. The same applies to negative experiences.  The emotional pain that comes with the end of a romantic relationship, losing our job,  or the failure of our political candidate does not last long—we soon return to being as  happy or as unhappy as we were prior to the experience.  

    The aforementioned research, in challenging some of our most strongly held beliefs  about the role that goal attainment plays in our well-being, offers both good and bad  news. The good news is that we can be less concerned about failure and therefore more  daring in our pursuits. The bad news is that success doesn’t seem to make much of a  difference either—and if this is the case, it may seem like there is no point pursuing  goals or, for that matter, pursuing happiness. Our life might seem then to resemble the  life of Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day or of Sisyphus eternally climbing the  mountains.  

    Is the choice, then, either to be sustained by an illusion (that the attainment of certain  goals will make us happier) or to face a brutal reality (that no matter what we do, we  cannot become happier)? Fortunately not. There is another possibility, but it requires  that we understand the proper relationship between goal and process, between  destination and journey. When we understand this relationship, our goals can lead us to  higher levels of well-being.  

    The Role of Goals  

    Robert M. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, describes joining a  group of elderly Zen monks mountain-climbing in the Himalayas. Though Pirsig was the youngest member of the expedition, he was the only one who struggled; he eventually  gave up, while the monks effortlessly ascended to the peak.  

    Pirsig, focused on the goal of reaching the peak of the mountain and overwhelmed by  what still lay ahead, was unable to enjoy the climb; he lost desire—and his strength—to  carry on. The monks also focused on the peak, but only to make sure they were staying  on course, not because reaching the peak itself as the most important to them. Knowing  that they were headed in the right direction allowed them to focus their attention and  enjoy each step, rather than being overwhelmed by what still lay ahead.  

    The proper role of goals is to liberate us, so that we can enjoy the here and now. If we set  off on a road trip without any identified destination, the trip itself is unlikely to be much  fun. If we do not know where we are going or even where we want to go, every fork in  the road becomes a site of ambivalence—neither turning left nor turning right seems a  good choice as we do not know whether we want to end up where these roads lead. So  instead of focusing on the landscape, the scenery, the flowers on the side of the road, we  are consumed by hesitation and uncertainty. What will happen if I go this way? Where  will I end up if I turn here? If we have a destination in mind, if we more or less know  where we are going, we are free to focus our full attention on making the most of where  we are.  

    The emphasis in my approach is not so much on attaining goals as it is having them. In his article “Positive Affectivity,” psychologist David Watson underscores the value of the  journey: “Contemporary researchers emphasize that it is the process of striving after  goals—rather than goal attainment per se—that is crucial for happiness and positive  affectivity.” The primary purpose of having a goal—a future purpose—is to enhance  enjoyment of the present.  

    Goals are means, not just ends. For sustained happiness we need to change the  expectations we have of our goals: rather than perceiving them as ends (expecting that  their attainment will make us happy), we need to see them as means (recognizing that  they can enhance the pleasure we take in the journey). When goals facilitate the  enjoyment of our present experience, they indirectly lead to an increase in our levels of  well-being each step of the way, as opposed to a temporary spoke that comes with  attainment of a goal. A goal enables us to experience a sense of being while doing.  

    [pp 68-71]  

  • Excerpt from Free Play 
    By Stephen Nachmanovitch  

    Artists used to be able to talk convincingly about creating something for posterity, about  making things that would live on and even grow for hundreds of years past the death of  their makers. Duration has traditionally been one of the great measures of quality.  

    But right now the world’s future seems a bit doubtful. With vast amounts of weaponry  all around us; with air, water, soil, and cities becoming more toxic every year; with the  whole of Earth’s life support systems at risk, we don’t have a clear guarantee that there  will be much posterity. For years many of us have wondered and talked about what we  

    can do to see that a world and a civilization still exist, to see that there’s someone to  make art for and with; and we have participated, each in our own way, in innumerable  projects aimed at helping to heal the situation as each of us saw it.  

    Often we find that our attempts to fix things only end up by making them worse. Part of  the impasse is that in dealing with an intricately interconnected network of patterns on  the scale of the global ecology, neither our reasoning faculties nor our feeling faculties  are equal to the job. The only capacity our species has that is powerful enough to pull us  out of this predicament is our self-realizing imagination. The only antidote to  destruction is creation. The game we are now playing is for keeps; this is an age that may  see us either go down the drain or create a whole new civilization. Precisely because the  standing of posterity is so tenuous, art is now more relevant than it has ever been. And  again, I mean not just art but artfulness: playfulness, seriousness, connectedness,  structure, wholeness. And heart.  

    So the issues raised [here] also point toward some activity beyond individual creativity,  beyond art. Let us call it the Imaginary Liberation Front. Not art for art’s sake, but art  for life’s sake. 

    This means an explosion of creativity into areas of life where it has been largely  excluded. Looking at international politics, looming multiple ecological and economic  catastrophes, resurgences of fundamentalist fanaticisms and racisms, it is fair to say  that conventional logic and conventional ideas have brought us to an impasse. What can  pull us out is the fresh perception fostered by a creative attitude, as well as openness to  the free play of possibilities. In politics more than any other sphere of life, what most  clogs creativity is fear. What we see behind the seeming impossibility of humans to  make peace among ourselves or with the planet that nurtures us is a kind of rigidity,  freezing us into outmoded categories and frames of reference. This is why totalitarian  states and fundamentalist religions make it their first order of business to restrict free  speech, art, film, and other avenues of expression and communication. Humor in  particular is anathema in such settings.  

    Looking at the state of the planet, we can easily see that only major breakthroughs will  pull us through. Miracles. What is needed in the coming generation is a whole series of  adaptive, creative, evolutionary jumps. Everything we know about individual art making  indicates that creative breakthroughs are possible, not as extraordinary messianic  events but as a matter of course. When we relax the five fears and replace compulsion  with practice, stretching the moment of inspiration, then creative breakthroughs can  become reliable everyday facts of life.  

    There is a saying, “We have met the enemy, and they is us.” Indeed we must realize this  in order to survive. But it is equally true, and equally necessary, to say we have met the  great composers, the great creators—and they is us too.  

    Creative inspiration is not the property only of certain special people like professional  artists. To give away our creative ability to professional artists is like giving away our  healing ability to doctors. The professionals are vitally necessary, as repositories of  knowledge, tradition, resources, and most of all as catalysts to the healing power that is  within us. But the real healing, the real creativity, is done by us, and we abrogate that  power at our own peril. Sir Herbert Read writes, “The aesthetic view of life is not  confined to those who can create or appreciate works of art. It exists wherever natural  senses play freely on the manifold phenomena of our world, and when life as a  consequence is found to be full of felicity.”  

    There are two notions linked here: creativity extended into more moments of time;  creativity extended into the lives of more people. Neither spectators nor victims, we can  be directly involved in the making of ourselves and our world. There are no prescriptive  solutions, no grand designs for grand problems. Life’s solutions lie in the minute  particulars, involving more and more individual people daring to create their own life  and art, daring to listen to the voice within their deepest, original nature, and deeper  still, the voice within the Earth.  

    Creativity arises from play, but play is not necessarily linked to value. Commitment and  love are. There is not a creative process. There are many creative processes, with many  layers, many levels of involvement and intent. Contemplative mystics work on the self  only. Artists wrapped up in the art world work on material only. In either case, there is a 

    separation of values and the sacred from life. But in the Imaginary Liberation Front,  artists work on the self and the material together, in an alchemy of sympathetic  resonance.  

    What we usually call creativity involves such factors as intelligence, ability to see the  connections between formerly separated facts, ability to break out of outmoded  mindsets, fearlessness, stamina, playfulness, and even outrageousness. Very creative  people can use these capacities in highly conventional fields. They can be used for good  or evil. Creativity can be manifested in medicine, in propaganda, in teaching poetry, in  designing a house or an atom bomb. Unfortunately, the same capacity for play and  experiment that gives rise to our finest achievements has also resulted in the invention  of ever more refined methods of mass destruction that may negate millions of years of  evolutionary achievements.  

    The drive to create is yet another factor, different from creativity. It characterizes  someone who is driven to do something from the depths, something he or she feels must  be done regardless of whether it’s popular or well rewarded by society. This inner  compulsion to realize a vision depends on creativity for its fulfillment, but is not the  same as creativity, The inspired poet or musician may in fact be less creative, less clever,  adept, or original than the designer of an advertising campaign, but he is motivated by a  life-or-death need to bring the vision into being. Even this passionate need to create,  however, is not necessarily compassionate or beyond ego. A physicist may be just as  obsessed with solving a problem as a composer, yet either one’s work may result in a  bomb. And there have been genius writers, like Rimbaud, who toss off masterpieces and  then give up art because it bores them.  

    Beyond the drive to create is yet a deeper level of commitment, a state of union with a  whole that is beyond us. When this element of union is injected into our play-forums, we  get something beyond mere creativity, beyond mere purpose or dedication; we get a  state of acting from love. Love has to do with the perpetuation of life, and is therefore  irrevocably linked to deeply held values.  

    I have never ceased to be astounded at the power of writing, music making, drawing, or  dance to pull me out of sadness, disappointment, depression, bafflement. I am not  talking about entertainment or distraction, but of playing, dancing, drawing, writing my  way through and out. This process resembles the best in psychotherapy. We don’t go  away and avoid the troubling thing, but rather confront it in a new framework. The  capacity to personify, mythologize, imagine, harmonize is one of the great mercies  granted in human life. We are thus able to conceptualize the unknowns of the psyche, to  work with forces in us which, if left unconscious, would overwhelm us. That is the magic  of poetry. It uses words to communicate that which words cannot communicate. When  you run into problems in your artwork, you may think you are working out the creative  problem; but indirectly you are working out other life problems as well. This healing  power works in the other direction too. If, like Picasso, you occupy yourself with  working out the problem of how to express a world of feeling in blue paint, you are also  working out something else. 

    What is something else?  

    We cannot define it or understand it, but we can do it. Zen master Dogen, in the  thirteenth century, said, “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self  is to forget the self. To forget the self is to perceive oneself as all things. To realize this is  to cast off the body and mind of self and others. When you have reached this stage you  will be detached even from enlightenment, but will practice it continually without  thinking about it.”  

    ...The ultimate source and destination of creative work lies, then, in the wholeness of the  psyche, which is the wholeness of the world. Hence, the healing properties of art.  Integration with the natural order, or big Self, is to rediscover, reveal oneself in context,  in nature, in balance, to liberate the creative voice. This essence is with us all the time,  but since it’s usually covered up, we’re usually sick. When we uncover our essence, we’re  also recovering from the sickness of the spirit.  

    I said at the beginning of [this] that we have an inalienable right to create, and that, if  anything, would be the credo of the Imaginary Liberation Front. I would like to say too  that we have a right to a beautiful and healthy world. But this is not so; art and a  beautiful world are made by hard work and free play. They are not rights but privileges.  We have the right to work, to earn it. Our work links art and survival, art and healing,  art and social change. There is a linkage between the urge toward beauty, the urge  toward health, the urge toward political freedom.  

    The obstacles to human freedom, community, and creativity are to be absorbed and  transcended in the full humanization of the person. Culture and the arts are a vital  resource for survival. Creation, in the arts, science, technology, and daily life, is a  primary source of human realization. Creativity can replace conformity as the primary  mode of social being.  

    The free play of creativity is not the ability to arbitrarily manipulate life. It is the ability  to experience life as it is. The experience of existence is a reflection of Being, which is  beauty and consciousness. Free play is that which makes this experience accessible to  the individual. The goal of freedom is human creativity, the enhancement and  elaboration of life. Creativity always involved a certain amount of discipline, self restraint, and self-sacrifice. Planning and spontaneity become one. Reason and intuition  become two faces of truth.  

    We now find ourselves, as individuals, as nation-states, and as a species, involved in a  period of intense and often bewildering transformation. The systems of government,  production, culture, thought, and perception to which we have become accustomed and  that have function for so long are not working. This presents us with a challenge. We can  cling to that which is passing, or has already passed, or we can remain accessible to— even surrender to—the creative process, without insisting that we know in advance the  ultimate outcome for us, our instructions, or our planet. To accept this challenge is to  cherish freedom, to embrace life, and to find meaning. 

    [pp 181-191] 

  • Excerpt from Big Magic
    By Elizabeth Gilbert 

    The final—and sometimes most difficult—act of creative trust is to put your work out there into the world once you have completed it. 

    The trust I’m talking about here is the fiercest trust of all. This is not a trust that says “I am certain I will be a success” – because that is not fierce trust; that is innocent trust, and I am asking you to put aside your innocence for a moment and to step into something far more bracing and far more powerful. As I have said, and as we all know deep in our hearts, there is no guarantee of success in creative realms. Not for you, not for me, not for anyone. Not now, not ever. 

    Will you put forth your work anyhow? 

    I recently spoke to a woman who said, “I’m almost ready to start writing my book, but I’m having trouble trusting that the universe will grant me the outcome I want.” 

    Well, what could I tell her? I hate to be a buzzkill, but the universe might not grant her the outcome she wants. Without a doubt, the universe will grant her some kind of outcome. Spiritually minded people would even argue that the universe will probably grant her the outcome she needs– but it might not grant her the outcome she wants.

    Fierce trust demands that you put forth the work anyhow, because fierce trust knows that the outcome does not matter. The outcome cannot matter. Fierce trust asks you to stand strong with this truth: “You are worthy, dear one, regardless of the outcome. You will keep making your work regardless of the outcome. You will keep sharing your work, regardless of the outcome. You were born to create, regardless of the outcome. You will never lose trust in the creative process, even when you don’t understand the outcome.” 

    There is a famous question that shows up, it seems, in every single self-help book ever written: What would you do if you knew that you could not fail? But I’ve always seen it differently. I think the fiercest question of all is this one: What would you do even if you knew that you might very well fail?

    What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant? 

    What do you love even more than you love your own ego? 

    How fierce is your trust in that love? 

    You might challenge this idea of fierce trust. You might buck against it. You might want to punch and kick at it. You might demand of it, “Why should I go through all the trouble to make something if the outcome might be nothing?” 

    The answer will usually come with a wicked trickster grin: “Because it’s fun, isn’t it?” 

    Anyhow, what else are you going to do with your time here on earth—not make things? Not do interesting stuff? Not follow your love and curiosity? 

    There is always that alternative, after all. You have free will. If creative living becomes too difficult or too unrewarding for you, you can stop whenever you want. 

    But seriously: Really? 

    Because, think about it: Then what? 

    [pp 257-260]

Ben-Shahar, Tal. Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment: Learn the Secrets to Daily  Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. Mcgraw-hill, 2007.  
Cameron, Julia. The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Penguin Random House. 2002
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola, PhD. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman. Archetype. Ballantine Books, 1995.
Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. National Geographic Books, 2016.
London, Peter. No More Secondhand Art: Awakening the Artist Within. Shambhala Publications. 1989.  Nachmanovitch, Stephen. Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. Penguin, 1991. 
Nachmanovitch, Stephen. Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. Penguin, 1991.

Erin Hallagan Clare3 Comments