Week 02 Spiritual Path: Open the Door

[rejectionchallenge]

Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way, p. 50-51

One of the things most worth noting in a creative recovery is our reluctance to take seriously the possibility that the universe just might be cooperating with our new and expanded plans. We've gotten brave enough to try recovery, but we don't want the universe to really pay attention. We still feel too much like frauds to handle some success. When it comes, we want to go.

Of course we do! Any little bit of experimenting in self-nurturance is very frightening for most of us. When our little experiment provokes the universe to open a door or two, we start shying away. 'Hey! You! Whatever you are! Not so fast!'

I like to think of the mind as a room. In that room, we keep all of our usual ideas about life, God, what''s possible and what's not. The room has a door. That door is ever so slightly ajar, and outside we can see a great deal of dazzling light. Out there in the dazzling light are a lot of new ideas that we consider too far-out for us, and so we keep them out there. The ideas we are comfortable with are in the room with us. The other ideas are out, and we keep them out.

In our ordinary prerecovery life, when we would hear something weird or threatening, we'd just grab the doorknob and pull the door shut. Fast. [. . . ]

More than anything else, creative recovery is an exercise in open-mindedness. Again, picture your mind as that room with the door slightly ajar. Nudging the door open a bit more is what makes for open-mindedness. Begin, this week, to consciously practice opening your mind.

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[ljwrites]

Cameron goes on to talk in more depth about synchronicity in the Week 3 chapter. I'm resistant to believing this--it feels too much like buying snake oil--but good things really have happened, crativity-wise, once I started committing to creativity. The day before yesterday I announced I would bang out the first draft of my novel in August, even though I had only the vaguest idea of what the story would look like.

Then this morning I had a breakthrough in planning that novel when a book thrown my way by Kobo's recommendation system (The Anatomy of Story, by John Truby) gave me the exact pointers to figure things out. Rationally speaking this is due to my effort, since Kobo wouldn't have recommended that book if I hadn't been reading so many books on writing. Also I wouldn't have gained as much from The Anatomy of Story if I hadn't been reading it with my novel in mind. Still, I feel incredibly lucky that I read the right words at the right time. I'm willing to accept that it's the universe or creative force or whatever that's leading my way, if only to see what happens.