Well it’s the end of week one; I’m here to do my check-in. What I have discovered is good information. Any exercise that helps further one’s creative awareness is worthwhile, even if the outcome isn’t what one expected.

I am surprised to find that Cameron’s work doesn’t resonate in me! I’ve been reading ahead, doing a few tasks, and I notice something interesting to me: I feel like a person who is being treated for an illness that I’ve recovered from. This is not to say that I don’t have more growing and exploring to do with my creativity. Far from it! It’s just that somewhere along the way since I bought the book in 1997, I have gained the confidence to give myself permission to claim creativity and the title of artist for myself. The wounds have healed and the scars, while there, are not hindrances. There is really a recovery focus in her book (the title says it, doh!) that simply doesn’t fit me. My daily pages aren’t full of all the stuff she suggests will come up (whining, negative core beliefs, etc.). I’m enjoying writing the pages (good!), but generally I am not making the discoveries. I muse why and come to realize that the years of my own therapy (we’re talking over a decade) is the reason.

Huh. Now what? I’ll write daily pages and do the artist’s dates, though with modifications (i.e., I may go on dates with a friend, and may write what moves me… poetry, brainstorming, etc.). Doing these activities fills the well. I will also dip into the book and see what tasks really speak to me. But since I already feel at a remove from it, I want to be honest about this. I will continue to visit participants as time allows to read and provide support. We all need people to help us fuel the divine spark. Also, I’m going to start working another creativity book by Eric Maisel. The focus of the book seems to be about deepening creativity and less about recovering one’s lost inner artist from childhood. His style is different; his “voice” feels more egalitarian to me. I don’t feel approached as a wounded person. The book is titled in the following oh-so-scintillating way: The Creativity Book: A Year’s Worth of Inspiration and Guidance. The book is divided into 88 sections meant to be read as two sections weekly for ten months and then two months devoted to a creative project. The creative project can vary from what we typically think of. It could be focused on becoming a better supervisor, creating a new home business, implementing a complex company task, working on a theoretical problem, designing a research project. Because I’m working for a non-profit agency, I’d like to make my project the development of my identity and skills as a philanthropist.

This is not to disparage what others gain from Cameron’s book! I’m simply in a different place on my journey, and my take on her book reflects where I’m at. I wrote Kat about this (indeed, much of this post is extracted from my email) and she replied she’d read a quote “about how books come to us when we’re ready for them and when the words are just a bit further along the path than we are.” I like that idea… something to stretch for. That’s what we are all learning to do: reach farther than we have before.