Cataloguing an Artistic Transformation

Entries from a journal started in 2021

So yesterday I met up with the local Artist’s Way group that I’ve been attending since January. It’s been a really magnificent experience (for anyone local, I believe it happens every year and it is put on by the Center for Spiritual living in Tacoma)

One of the things we did yesterday was talk about the experience of reading our damn morning pages. And when I tell you I was stunned with how much I learned by sitting down and reading the outpourings of my mind in that way… it was a phenomenal experience.

Truth is, I’ve found no writing tool more psychologically beneficial than morning pages, and I’ve found no psychological tool more creatively beneficial than morning pages. (It’s almost like creativity and psychology are linked somehow! Hmmm!)

There are a sequence of life-manifestations that are amazing that I can tie back to the beginning of these pages (and following the Artist’s Way book as a whole). I’m talking big stuff. Like buying our house, which kinda just fell into our laps during one of the most saturated housing market moments of the pandemic.

It was truly wild. Maybe tomorrow I’ll tell that story.

Various times I have felt the strong urge to share the morning pages I started at that time, in around May of 2021. It is the beginning of what I would now call my Artistic Transformation.

They are the pages of a blocked artist learning how to unblock.

“a writer learning how to unblock his creativity” (Kinda love this one!)

It is fitting because these 30 days of Substack consistency? Well, I think it’s safe to say they are a direct result of the busting through of blocks that was brought on by writing these pages.

The Transformation is still at hand. And I’m still writing the pages. But I think enough years have passed that I feel comfortable committing to sharing these earlier pages more consistently, as I believe the insights I stumbled into through them could be helpful to anybody on either a spiritual or artistic journey.

I’m thinking a lot this week about how I’m going to formulate things after these 30 days are done (just five more days after tomorrow!) I am pretty sure posting these pages is going to be a part of things.

Anyway, as I transcribed these today, I realized these pages are sacred to me, in a way. If you like my writing—especially when I get downright real and unfiltered—I hope you enjoy them.

(Also, didn’t mean to be repetitive, but you can see my originating thoughts about the concept of “enoughness” beginning to emerge in these first entries.)

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5-20-21

I am unsure whether or not to count the page or so that I did of “positive aspects” work of Abe Hicks as this. I don’t know; already somehow I feel a need to tailor my words or make them “right” tho I know they will not be seen, as if some unseen eye is upon them, evaluating them for correctness—amazing how easily I start self-censoring for some imaginary audience. It’s true tho that words on paper evoke audience? That writing words down in a form that can be read bespeaks eventual reading of those words? But what is the truth about enoughness here? That my words are enough—good enough, strong enough, enough enough, as they fall out of my head—is it a concern of purposes? That this has a purpose of being a dumping ground/graveyard & thus enough is enough?

That doesn’t feel true at all. It is this thing where editing confuses me—its purpose, its reason for being. If anything that comes from me is enough why would I ever change it, improve it, grow it, build upon it? How does enoughness work in the world of art? When creation is the task (and for humans it seems to always be the task) how can enoughness be both enough and leave room for improvement. Think of nature. Does the flowering rhododendron evince enoughness in one flower? Yes. So why 50 flowers? Each one is enough and all together are enough and a rhodie w/ no flowers is, you guessed it, enough. BEING is enough. Producing is a state of being. We build these castles in the sand not because the world needs elaborate sandcastles, but because we need to build and to continue building as part of I Am.

Interrupted by sessions but I am committed to finishing my third page. Perhaps I wake earlier to get it done. What was I saying? I cannot fully remember. It feels like my consciousness is practicing new thoughts over & over. I am going to look—yes. Prolific growth is not the point. Editing a work that came out enough is not the point. A human baby emerges and is and is thus enough, and then, in this enoughness, it experiences growth, the realization more and more of what it is—expansion into self, etc. etc. To be is enough; to expand is to be; to be is to expand; each step of expansion is enough and enough and enough. It is as if it works on different planes or dimensions or something. To be at all: is. Enoughness is. And then, parallel to that, growth, expansion, proliferation, gives us the experience of selfness? It is what “is-ing” is? Expansion = being?

5-21-21

Well now here we are again. I am closing in my first week, and am trying to decide to do my artist date today or tomorrow. I am excited for it. Writing these pages on the pot right now. Stream-of-consciousness allows for shit-writing, yes? I am trying to just write all the words down without thinking. I have been working on occupying space, on feeling the validity of my own existence in the last few days. I had not realized how porous and infirm I am somewhere at my center: unable to speak declaratively; unable to hold my own space; unwilling to be the master of my own life. Had an interesting experience when mom relinquished all control and welcomed me into full adulthood. [this was a spiritual visitation] I feel lots of changes happening in me; I hope they are lasting.

Part of this is somehow no longer continuing to assess my “goodness” in a co-dependent way against the perceptions of outside assessors—mom, Lolly, Carlos; naturally these have been the main characters. Even sitting here now writing on the toilet this reptilian part of me feels wisps (they might be getting less powerful?) of worry about what Carlos is thinking, about being bad, about disapproval—as if what I choose to do in space and time is always to be questioned, is always suspect and up for debate. Maybe most kids have this experience? There is a phase in every life where adults control, narrate and assess all events in a child’s life. But for me, and people like me (ADHD? trauma? child of polygamy?) it seems that season had no effective ending. I am still that child, constantly awaiting correction, critique, or congratulation. Never the adult; never in charge; never answerable only to self.

I am working on shifting this.

I am working on shifting a lot of things.

My artist wishes to hide. He or she has felt the call to emerge and I know they feel hopeful but I believe they also feel fearful. I haven’t been able to isolate any blurts yet, but here is one: “I never follow through” or “I never finish anything I start.” That is a key. That one is a key and it is haunting everything—even these pages—a sick, dull worry that all this attention, all this clamoring and writing and energy is “yet another” temporary fad to try to “get myself to do what I need to do to be successful” that will languish & disappear, leaving me empty and more devoid of hope. Oh, how the hopelessness of that thought haunts me. Me, a husk, a broken vessel, a container filled w/ good meats that rot on the wayside, never to realize its potential. I feel so trapped by the incompletion of things. I feel so stuck in mediocrity, or the fledgling beginnings of genius, but never to emerge, never to fully consummate, only to die here, unfulfilled, unsatisfied… unfinished.