30 Days in April: Day 25

free dandelions

I might have already written something about this before, but I'm hoping not.

In the very first week of activities in The Artist's Way, Cameron implores you to take the bad things that you tell yourself about your creativity and turn them into affirmations. It's a simple technique--just writing out, say, "I am a bad writer" if you feel that way and then changing it to "I'm an excellent writer," and so on. This method goes right along with the fact that Cameron sort of frames this process as your "artist's recovery."

Anyway, the weird thing for me was how many of these things came out rather quickly the next time I wrote after reading it. I began bracketing them with <> in my paper journal and then writing the affirming starements right after them.

Now, I've gotta say, a lot of Cameron's recovery language really feels over the top to me, because I feel more like I am cleaning out the cruft than that I am spiritually exorcising demons of self-doubt.  But while I think of myself as someone who totally supports people as creators--"Dude, if you're writing, you're a writer, PLUS, you're an artist," that sort of thing-- I'm finding, through this exercise, that, as always, I'm better at supporting others than at taking my own supportive advice.

So I'm working on it.  This project has taken up enough of that late night "free time" that I've dropped the daily morning pages and weekly exercises of TAW, to pick them back up in May.  But I will keep thinking about (and discovering how much I limit myself, so that hopefully, I'll stop doing it so much.

30 Days in April: Day 24

Today's art brought to you by the letter tired and the number queasy.

I like cameraphone shots also.

30 Days in April: Day 23

Music as
     unbelievable 
busting bursting at the seams
     thirsting catching dreams

I can just write and write and write but I never know if it really is what I really want it to be
Seeming to me like
bad poetry

"It's the process," he used to say with a laugh.

It's the process.

30 Days in April: Day 22

Foot (2009)

Ask five friends to measure their feet.

Pick the person who has a foot closest to twelve inches in length.

Take a photo of that person's foot.

Print the photo to actual size.

Hang it on a wall where you live, with the caption "Standard of Measurement" below it.