Taking Creativity Seriously

Inspiration from Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way”

Collage: Saint Brigid’s Crosses on Gradient Sky Background

The first week of February is one of my favorite times of the year.

In particular, I love the Feast of Saint Brigid on February 1, which celebrates the patroness saint of Ireland. This Feast is the Christianized version of the ancient Gaelic festival of Imbolc, which traditionally marked the beginning of Spring. It is a time of creative stirrings, of emerging potentialities, of new life peeking out from beneath the frost of winter.

In my own small way of recognizing both the modern and ancient significance of this season, I have dusted off my copy of “The Artist’s Way,” by Julia Cameron. If you have worked with this book before, you know it is organized as a 12-week course through which anyone can discover (or rediscover) their creativity.

In the opening section, “Spiritual Electricity: The Basic Principles,” Julia Cameron has a wonderful paragraph about what will happen as we begin the process of withdrawing from the many distractions and returning to the abandoned or neglected creative core within:

“We begin to excavate our buried dreams. This is a tricky process. Some of our dreams are very volatile, and the mere act of brushing them off sends an enormous surge of energy bolting through our denial system. Such grief! Such loss! Such pain! It is at this point in the recovery process that we make what Robert Bly calls a ‘descent into ashes.’ We mourn the self we abandoned. We greet this self as we might greet a lover at the end of a long and costly war.”

I’ve read this paragraph before, several years ago when I first purchased the book on the recommendation of a writer friend. But I wasn’t ready then for this book or its punch-in-the-gut quotes like that one. Reading it anew yesterday truly did send that “surge of energy bolting through [my] denial system!”

Do you have buried creative dreams? I certainly do – and they’ve been smothered under the “nice self” which Julia Cameron identifies as the safety mechanism we use to “make do” in the world. But that nice self, as polished as it may be, cannot fully cover up our deepest creative longings – as evidenced by the pain we feel when we pull back its veneer.

Cameron says we must “feel the bolt of pain” in order to recognize that we are blocked creatively. I also love this passage from her, in the same opening section, about questions to ask yourself to tell if you are blocked:

“Do you tell yourself that if you only took your creative potential seriously, you might:

• Stop telling yourself, ‘It’s too late.’

• Stop waiting until you make enough money to do something you’d really love.

• Stop telling yourself, ‘It’s just my ego’ whenever you yearn for a more creative life.

• Stop telling yourself that dreams don’t matter, that they are only dreams and you should be more sensible.

• Stop fearing that your family and friends would think you crazy.

• Stop telling yourself that creativity is a luxury and that you should be grateful for what you’ve got.

If there were ever a season in which to take creativity seriously, I can’t think of a better time than this first week of February, in which Saints roam, green push up through the white snow, and when even rodents are permitted to emerge from the depths and make bold proclamations.

If a groundhog is allowed to be creative… why shouldn’t I be too?!