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“May our words be friends.”
a spiritual workshop aimed at freeing people’s creativity.
No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.
In the brush doing what it’s doing, it will stumble on what one couldn’t do by oneself. ROBERT MOTHERWELL
(Get out of the way. Let it work through you. Accumulate pages, not judgments.)
Why should we all use our creative power . . . ? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money. BRENDA UELAND
The purpose of art is not a rarified, intellectual distillate— it is life, intensified, brilliant life. ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us. RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Ordinarily, when we speak of withdrawal, we think of having a substance removed from us. We give up alcohol, drugs, sugar, fats, caffeine, nicotine—and we suffer a withdrawal. It’s useful to view creative withdrawal a little differently. We ourselves are the substance we withdraw to, not from, as we pull our overextended and misplaced creative energy back into our own core.
THERE ARE TWO PIVOTAL tools in creative recovery: the morning pages and the artist date.
Words are a form of action, capable of influencing change. INGRID BENGIS
You need to claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. ANNE-WILSON SCHAEF
A mind too active is no mind at all. THEODORE ROETHKE
The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order . . . the continuous thread of revelation. EUDORA WELTY
When people ask, “Why do we write morning pages?” I joke, “To get to the other side.” They think I am kidding, but I’m not. Morning pages do get us to the other side: the other side of our fear, of our negativity, of our moods. Above all, they get us beyond our Censor. Beyond the reach of the Censor’s babble we find our own quiet center, the place where we hear the still, small voice that is at once our creator’s and our own.
Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance. M. C. RICHARDS
It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard. MAY SARTON
Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is strengthened by doing it. ROBBIE GASS
It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living. SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. PABLO PICASSO
Doing your morning pages, you are sending—notifying yourself and the universe of your dreams, dissatisfactions, hopes. Doing your artist date, you are receiving—opening yourself to insight, inspiration, guidance.
The most potent muse of all is our own inner child. STEPHEN NACHMANOVITCH
At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new pos...
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Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. PABLO PICASSO
The morning pages acquaint us with what we think and what we think we need. We identify problem areas and concerns. We complain, enumerate, identify, isolate, fret. This is step one, analogous to prayer. In the course of the release engendered by our artist date, step two, we begin to hear solutions. Perhaps equally important, we begin to fund the creative reserves we will draw on in fulfilling our artistry.
In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do—spiritual sit-ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery.
So you see, imagination needs moodling—long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering. BRENDA UELAND
Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about. . . . Say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it from before the beginning of the universe. JALAL UD-DIN RUMI
