The Infinite Creative Potential
Week 12 of the Artist's Way course for recovering and building creativity
Last week, I wrote about Week 11 of Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way course to build creativity. If you purchased the book and are following along, I hope this past week was fruitful. To the rest of you, I invite you to join in and comment how the course is helping (or hindering) you in your lives!
So this is it! The final week of the Artist’s Way course! Last week focused on owning our creativity — not because we can profit from our art or because it pleases others, but because creating is an end in itself.
Unlike other weeks in the course, Week 12 is slim on concrete action to take in our recovery. Instead, Week 12 acts as a launching pad to send us — as recovered artists — into the world on our own. As such, I want to use this article to summarize the insights I had during the course as well as set the stage for moving forward.
I was uncertain about the value available in the Artist’s Way course when I began it. Of course, I used my own transgender journey as an allegory as frequently as possible to explain Cameron’s ideas as I saw them.
Through personal experience, I discovered profound insights in the simple acts of writing Morning Pages and taking a weekly Artist Date that do not present themselves until we commit to performing them in a spirit of trust and surrender.
Trust and surrender are the deepest underlying themes of the entire course.
Can’t means won’t
I admit, I stole the section title above from an excellent article by JJ Hart, who also uses her transgender experience as a philosophical and psychological allegory. I want to allow JJ’s article to stand on its own, so I won’t go into much detail except around the title.
I initially read the idea of “I can’t” meaning “I won’t” in Stephen Covey’s work. Covey wrote that we all get the same amount of time in a day. Further, we choose the level of importance we assign to each activity we could perform. If there are activities that don’t get completed during your day, it is because you chose not to prioritize them. Obviously, emergencies come up, and Covey intended his explanation as a broad brush stroke — that when we say we can’t do something, typically it means we won’t do it.
Cameron expands on the “can’t means won’t” idea by acknowledging each of us has different blocks to what we do. “I can’t” means “I won’t…because of this reason.” As JJ and I have experienced, transitioning gender is difficult — as difficult as finding our inner artist, and for similar reasons.
The primary insight to take from the Artist’s Way course is that a human’s natural state is not pain, but joy. The Universe wants us to succeed, to create, to be happy, to be the person we already know we are. Living within the context of socio-environmental factors imprints limitations that do not exist, no matter how much we believe they do.
In the face of every excuse we can give not to be creative, Cameron answers simply: begin doing it, and it will happen. Trust in the Universe to help.
Embrace the darkness
A recurring theme in my work is the need for darkness to balance light. I stated the cyclicity of Nature several ways — day and night, Dark Moon to Full Moon, Summer to Winter. In every instance, the darkness is necessary: we must have a chance to rest after every struggle to achieve.
The darkness nurtures, gestates, and completes what begins in the day. It is no coincidence that most human cultures viewed the Sun as masculine and the Moon as feminine. Like masculine energy, the Sun begins growth, but it cannot complete it. Like feminine energy, the Moon sustains growth and guides us into the completion of death, but it cannot begin it.
The masculine needs the feminine needs the masculine — the two cannot exist in isolation.
To Cameron, every creative idea we have begins as a child — a fetal intention that catches the musician’s ear, the philosopher’s eye for detail, and the writer’s imagination. We play with the idea, doodling on a sketch pad, or a guitar, or with movement. But we must allow the child to gestate completely — it does no good to dig up a seed every day to check its growth.
As evidence that beginning work on a project guarantees something will be created, Cameron demonstrates that embracing our dark periods is the only method to bring a creation into the light. We must surrender to the process of growth.
Cultivating creativity
Trust and surrender on their own can move our creativity great distances, but one refinement to the process improves the probability. As we trust ourselves, we must learn to trust others to support us. Creativity is both a personal and social process.
To cultivate our own creativity, we associate with other creative people. A simple enough task in definition, but difficult in implementation. Finding supporters is tricky — finding detractors is not. Everybody’s a critic, as the saying goes, and our job is to create, but dodge the detractors. Erase them from the process.
Unfortunately, finding supporters means trusting people first. We become trusting people by trusting others. We become trustworthy people by maintaining other’s trust. As we surrender to the creative process, we engage in an activity far greater than ourselves — Cameron chose to name this “greater process” God. I rebel against the label, but the concept is sound.
Art comes into being to give our lives meaning. And our meaning for art is more important than anybody’s meaning or lack of meaning. But art is also made to be shared — we are inspired when another truly sees what we intended. The bond over art, over our mode of expression, is deeper than any physical infatuation could penetrate.
As we surrender to our creative abilities, we surrender to the Universe, truly becoming her children as we build families of artists.
To the studio and beyond
In her Epilogue to “The Artist’s Way,” Julia Cameron notes she could find no flourish, no snazzy ending, that worked for the book. She chose simply to end it. She gave us the tools. She gave us the exercises. Now — she says — we are to go on our own and live them.
I appreciate Cameron’s desire not to attempt to summarize her book as anything more than a continuous process of creation. She finished her book. Now she can move to the next project.
I completed the Artist’s Way course. Now I can move to my next project.
Cameron characterizes the best attitude at this point as “self-loving enthusiasm over mechanistic discipline.” When I began this course, all I saw was work. Switching my career from technology to writing has been difficult primarily because I saw work as a burden. I tried mightily to make writing a burden, and it was. My writing wasn’t good, either.
When I gave up my immature expectations of creativity — when I learned the lessons of trust and surrender — writing became a pleasure. Creativity suddenly exploded. I had more ideas than I knew what to do with. I expanded into podcasts and videos. All it took was embracing the idea that creativity has no flourish, as it has no ending.
So I conclude this series on the Artist’s Way with no real flourish, either. There is no greater drop of wisdom I could bestow on you, the reader, than to make the same claim Cameron does about the questions regarding who you are and what you are capable of:
You have your own answers within you.