Creation

I have been writing.  Just not writing here.  I have been reading Julia Cameron’s The Right to Write, and I have been doing my Artist’s Way and they both involve longhand exercises.  So my writing time has gone to those pursuits.  I’ve decided to increase the time I devote to writing during the week, and to give myself permission to blog as much as I like without having to write any of these thoughts out longhand first.  Julia does advocate the pen because she believes that faster is not necessarily better and that slower and pen give you some sort of connection to your heart/soul that typing cannot.  I have to thank her for getting me this far. My writer is peeking out of the closet and I know I’d be writing less if it wasn’t for her books. So I respect where she’s coming from and am prepared to honour that.  To which end I have pledged an hour a day, long hand, in my notebook.  I began today.

This week, I am on week 6 of the Artist’s way and it is about Abundance.  Not only financial, but in all senses of the term.  Looking for and accepting abundance into your life.  Noticing when it appears.  I’m enjoying it.  Giving myself permission to take the day off and just write, for example.  To say, ok I’ll do the hour longhand but I’m also going to give myself free reign and do some blogging on the computer too.  Loosening up the rules and restrictions.

A while ago I saw an alternative therapist who suggested I create a heart space in my home, a place just for me, where I could be creative or meditate etc.  A safe, quiet place.  Just mine.  I thought about rearranging a couple of rooms downstairs but the more I planned it the less right it felt, becoming a major nightmare involving heavy lifting, lots of chaos and the end result would not have been perfect.  And then I had the idea of cordoning off a piece of our bedroom.  It is a huge room (6m x 6m approx) and the north facing right corner is unused, save for a telescope, chair and a plant.  I packed up the telescope, moved the plant and sat down on a red velvet cushion atop a Japanese straw mat, with my mug of cocoa and looked out through the wall of windows that go right to the floor.  Magnificent.  Perfect.  The violent wind gusting the dirty white clouds along so briskly you could see the underside of the leaves of the trees. Howling, then dying away, only to return and move straight into another crescendo. The sky darkened over the hour I sat there.  Rain is on the way.

There are plans afoot to further develop the space for writing.  I have an old single school desk and chair, which are currently in the shed awaiting restoration.  Last weekend I began by sanding back, and this weekend I will start on the undercoat for the metal portion.  The orange colour is cool, but I have in mind a sage/mint/pistachio green and I feel I ought to go with my instinct.  A month ago I saw some colourful saris in a shop selling Moroccan & Indian wares.  I wanted to buy one but had no use for it.  Now I see how perfect a couple would be, to hang from the rafters and make my space into a little room of its own.  Curtains, desk, chair.  Writing book. Pen.  

I am going to treat my write to a gorgeous, fabulous, no expense spared pen.  He’s always coveted such an item, but I’ve never let myself spend the money on him.  (No idea why my writer is a he, but he definitely is!  Well this one is, anyway.  Perhaps there is another one in there too…)  Seemed too frivolous a purchase.  Such outlay for something so non- constructive. Except, I now realise that in the true sense of the word, writing is totally constructive.  It’s all you do, construct words, sentences, ideas.  Perhaps I meant unproductive.  But no, you definitely produce something when you write.  So what it boils down to is this: I love writing, and I don’t allow myself to do it very much.  I try to make out that just loving the act of writing is not a good enough reason to spend time and money doing it.  Writing comes last, after all the chores are done.  Pudding only after you have eaten all your greens.  It doesn’t get the dishes done, the bed made, the food cooked, the shopping done.  It doesn’t earn money.  It doesn’t plant trees or weed or keep my body fit.  Somewhere along the line I learnt I can’t justify pleasure for the sake of it.  This strikes me not only as sad, but criminal.

A conversation along these lines was had yesterday between me and my dear friend who recently miscarried.  We are both doing the Artist’s Way, both struggling along on a similar journey through infertility and loss, both trying to find some peace and meaning and opportunities to develop a more nurturing attitude towards ourselves.  I haven’t seen her for two weeks.  I’ve been busy.  Still planting trees in the orchard (up to 25 now) and laying paths in there, pruning and tying the trees to their future espaliered shape.  Busy planting summer crops, exercising, fitting in my property management jobs and cleaning house for C.  Busy planning lessons and tutoring my reading charge.  Walking, cycling, aerobics, pump class, quiz night.  Finding time for Artist’s Way exercises, morning pages daily, Artist’s date weekly. Trying to get an assignment finished and study reading up to date.  Wasting precious time befuddled by five days of Femara. The weeks just fly by.

Then yesterday I got a text saying ‘catch up for a cuppa?’  I had planned to spend the afternoon reading study material but thought the better of it.  Stopped my saboteur before he had a chance to stifle that opportunity for spontaneity, some space in my week.  I scheduled the cuppa for 3pm and still managed to finish the first draft of my assignment, collect an order of berry plants from the tree nursery and mail a birthday present off to a friend.  But the 2 hour conversation that followed was probably the most productive event of the day.  She read me some writing she’d been doing over the past couple of weeks.  She had barely left the house. Had nothing to show for it, she said, “I’ve just mainly been writing.  It’s not something I have ever done before, but I’ve got back into the Artist’s Way and felt like I just needed to write.”  So much stuff has come up for her about her latest miscarriage, and the past four years of grief and loss and waiting.  She’s never written about any of it before.  And is finding it so therapeutic.

What really struck me was how she’d allowed herself that endless time and space just to follow her heart and write, and stuff the rest.  I was so jealous!  I told her how I’d love to take more time to write and as I talked more about it, she encouraged me.  It was clear to her, she said, how important that was for me to do.  And that I had been starving my writer.  And that writing was so connected to my heart and my sense of joy that effectively I was starving myself of joy.

And that was the key realisation for me.  Starving myself of joy.  I have looked high and low for joy for a very long time.  All over the place have I searched.  And there it was, all along, as the good books say it is: within me.  And I had been keeping it under lock and key.  Of my own volition I have been cutting myself off from joy.  Sheer madness.

So here is my new lesson.  I don’t know what form my writing will take.  I don’t know if it will ever be useful or published or recognised or even coherent.  I trust that the purpose is not in the content, it is in the process.  Because through the process of writing I am allowing my true self to be created. And from creating myself, who knows what will flow?