Walking in This World

I am taking a journey through Julia Cameron's book Walking in This World, which is the sequel to The Artist's Way. A dear friend recently took the journey with me through The Artist's Way experience. We learned so much about ourselves and art. Julia takes you through a twelve-week process of discovering who you are in relation to your art. I am currently in Week 2 of Walking in This World. I will recap today what I learned differently from The Artist's Way in Week 1 and follow-up with Week 2 later.

Week 1 - Discovering a Sense of Origin

-Setting Out

• Art doesn't care where it is done (ex: in a studio). It only cares that you do it.
• Our dreams come true when we are true to them. Take small steps to achieve them.
• Our culture does not encourage us as artists to act decisively upon our creative desires. We are trained to think about them, doubt them, and second-guess them. We are trained to talk ourselves out of committing to art.
• Thinking is not the enemy, but overthinking is.
• We get a lot further creatively by staying put and doing something small and do-able daily in the life we already have.

-Committment

• We are committed to a career or professional agenda and we tell ourselves that is all we have energy or time for. This is false. When we make the art we love, it makes time and energy available to us for our professional pursuits. (Rose, you are right!)
• When we open ourselves up to make art, the finances and supplies find their way to us.

There were a couple of quotes that were very inspiring to me.

~Change everything, except your loves. - Voltaire

~How often things occur by mere chance which we dare not even hope for. - Terence