Transformation

Art is not linear. Neither is the artist's life, but we forget that. We try to 'plan' our life and 'plan' our career - as if we could. We also try to plan our growth. This means transformation catches us by surprise. The notion that we can control our path is pushed on us by advertisements and by books and by experts who promise us we can learn to control the uncontrollable. 'Empower yourself,' magazine headlines trumpet. Seminars and whole expos promise the same illusory goal. And yet, experience teaches that life, and especially life in the arts, is as much about mystery as it is about mastery. To be successful we must learn to follow not the leader but our own inner leadings, the 'inspiration' artists have acknowledged through the centuries. 'Something' is telling us to make art. We must trust that something

... It is a spiritual law that when we are ready to transform, transformation will come to us. We are all conduits for a great creative energy that seeks expression in us and through us. When we yearn to be different, it is not just our restless ego. It is our accurate response to the creative energy within us that is seeking a new venue for expression. We are all creative and we are, in turn, creations. Just as we get restless to make something new, so, too, our creator may be restless to make something new from us. We are not experiencing a bout of hubris, we are actually experiencing a bout of humility. As we let go of our ego's demands to be totally in charge, we slip gently and quietly into a series of changes that we may set in motion through our own hand but experience as the hand of the Great Creator working through us. As we do as inwardly directed, a direction emerges.

Julia Cameron, Walking in this World

Here's to mystery. Here's to the unfathomable beauty that is living a live uncontrolled ... and yet, paradoxically, feeling far more in control. Bizarre. I think this is the sabbath rest of God. It's full of work :)

And a sabbath rest, yes, but nothing at all like the dreary Sunday afternoons of my childhood and teenagerhood where I felt like I could die under the stifling boredom of everything. This sabbath rest is colour, and it's festival, and it's more life than I could ever hope to poke a stick at in the space I've been allotted. Indeed, it turns out that it's not God who is stifling, boring, middle class, white, repressive and stodgy. Sometimes it's me (but I'm learning)