Dear Reader,
One of my Beloved's favorite type of birds are crows. There's a small murder on the lawn pecking at the cracked corn he scattered all over the place. It's been interesting to watch the birds while I'm stuck in writer's block. I have started looking over past posts in this blog to see what loose ends I can pick up and start working with again. The first one that stood out to me was the critical analysis of The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. My feelings towards this book are complicated. The first time I read through it, I found it highly inspirational and a source of encouragement. Subsequent read throughs, I started finding problems in it and places where Ms. Cameron is socially blind to the limitations of people who are disabled and who have financial security problems. I don't think this is intentional per se, but rather a case of someone of a certain social standing assuming that others have access to the resources that they did.
To say this more bluntly, I don't think Ms. Cameron can envision a person attempting to write a novel on paper napkins that came with their takeout order, because they don't have access to anything else to write on. I had the good fortune of not being in that place, but there are many who are. Some people have the reaction of 'pish, a composition notebook is just a few bucks.' But when your budget is tight and that composition notebook sitting in your shopping cart is needed for your child who is going to start school in a few weeks, you don't pick up a second one because it will cut into how much you have to get that damned expensive graphing calculator that's perilously close to breaking your budget.
And then there is the question of time. A philosopher will tell you that time is infinite. A physicist may agree and have some fancy equations to prove it. But our lives are finite which means our time in this world is finite. People love to quote that we weren't born to pay taxes and die. But if you're working a grueling job and taking care of your family, including some relatives outside your household, you are going to have a hard time finding the time or the energy to write a few poems or sketch some doodles in a notebook. And quite often the people in this position are also on the super tight budgets because they're living paycheck to paycheck and praying that they're going to get a tax return to help pay off the car.
Just as people have the reaction that you can afford a cheap notebook, there are people who say if you simply organize more and use the latest fad organizational system then you will magically have time for your artistic inclinations. The closest to that which you are going to find me endorsing is creative time management. While dinner is cooking in the oven, take that 45 min time to work a little on your chosen craft. Allow yourself to skip leg day if it's healthy to do so and take an hour to do some kind of creative work. Also remember, creative work is more than cranking out art like some kind of machine. It requires fuel/food in the form of exposure to other's work. So, that cheezy romance novel that you read to keep yourself from smoking during your cigarette break at work is helping to fill the well of ideas even as it keeps you occupied for 15 min.
As Beloved has put it to me: how do you eat an elephant? one bite at a time. Each small task that you do towards your creative work is a victory against all the distractions. Stolen moments and creative engineering of your resources leads you to where you are engaged in the great work.
