Look, we are nearly finished with this 12-week-long odyssey into unlocking our inner artist and we're all just ready to be done. Surely next week we'll have more eloquent things to say about this three-month journey into the heart of our creative souls. Or, perhaps, we will be so broken and filled with dread that even the promise of being among the proud few to actually complete The Artist's Way will not fill us with joy. For now we're trying to get through the last few days of morning pages.
Will this next week mark the beginning of our new lives as enlightened artists? Will one (or many) of us burn the book when we're done? Will the next time you see us be on a Broadway stage? Only time will tell.
How many days this week did you do your morning pages? How was the experience for you?
Alex Sujong Laughlin: I did 5/7! Although I did get back into the book this week and did some of the tasks at the end of the chapter. It was surprising to me how much this week's themes about dreaming about the future lined up with things that are happening in my life. Maybe because we're so close to the end, I'm feeling a bit more warmly toward the whole process and how occasionally it offers some helpful moments of reflection.
Sabrina: I did 6/7 this week! I picked up the book once when I was dusting my bookshelf and then placed it back on the bookshelf. Soon, I am sure I will deposit it in my little free library for any would be Artist's Way–ers. But I have still really been enjoying my morning pages and am hoping I will hold myself accountable to stick with the practice of journaling first thing in the morning most days, because it's offered some helpful scaffolding for my thoughts and anxieties. Before, they were all bouncing around in there. Now they're still there, but arranged on a shelf.
Kathryn Xu: Did 5/7 this week, with both days I missed being weekend days that wound up being pretty busy. I also locked in a bit embarrassingly quickly seeing "The Zen of Sports" as a chapter in the book, especially now that I'm going to pick up running again now that it's warmer out. The chapter echoed the experience of reading a lot of this book, in terms of having some stuff that resonated, some religiosity that I glazed over, and some lines that just cracked me up, like "It is one of the pitfalls of Westerners adopting Eastern meditation techniques to bliss out and render ourselves high but dysfunctional." Damn those spiritual Eastern meditation techniques, making us Westerners high but dysfunctional! I'm always saying this.
Anyway, the nice parts about the chapter reminded me of some other writing about sports that I found really interesting and moving, like Anne Carson's "Beware the Man Whose Handwriting Sways Like a Reed in the Wind"—which was an expansion of a previous essay, "Gloves On!"—and Sally Rooney on Ronnie O'Sullivan in "Angles of Approach."
Ray: Tough week to get in the six, but six it was. I was amused by the chapter itself, particularly the "As an artist" litany, and "The Zen of Sports" was kind of an abstract hoot, an interesting twist on the usual stuff. But enough about Julia. The writing has been a slog, but that's more me than her; sometimes you just hit E before you get into the driveway, and the rest of the day is about waiting for the AAA guy. Weirdly, though, I know about the Rooney piece because Ronnie O'Sullivan is a genius at the thing he does, snooker, which is something I would otherwise have no interest in. I don't suspect Sally Rooney has an artist's altar, but hey, church is not always that thing you skip on Sunday morning, and altars are just spiffed up tables.
Chris: I journaled four days last week. Just when I thought I was headed for a strong finish, too. My sleep has been all screwed up lately and the mornings have been pretty brutal. My blood is mostly coffee now.
Did you do your artist date this week? What did you do? How did it feel?
Alex: I'm going to call my artist date a documentary I saw on Saturday with some friends. I know that breaks the rule of artist dates being solo, but since it was in a theater I did have an independent viewing experience. We saw Secret Mall Apartment, which is a documentary about a group of artists who built a clandestine apartment in the Providence Place Mall in the early 2000s—and I saw it in the Providence Place Mall theater. I'm currently trying to write more about my feelings about it so no spoilers, but it was a really cool experience.
Sabrina: Oh my god, a secret apartment in the Providence Place Mall? What part of the mall was it in? That's kind of iconic. I've spent many a fine day at the Providence Place Mall Dave & Busters.
Alex: OMG, it was in a secret no man's land they found that's basically right beneath the movie theater.
Sabrina: That's incredible! So you were on top of the secret apartment, basically.
I also am kind of cheating but I went for a winter tree walk in Fort Greene Park this weekend with a friend, which was lovely. The sun was out (a win) and I had dressed appropriately for the weather (an even bigger win) and I learned all about how to look at a tree's bark, branches, buds, and various other attributes to try and identify them. There was a very sweet child on the tree walk who knew the answers to every single tree question the park rangers asked, and I found so much delight in their delight. I tried to identify some trees on my walk home but unfortunately there was a lot to remember. But the next time I see a London plane tree, it's* on sight!
*my identification
Kathryn: Oh man, that sounds so lovely. I think I've said this nearly every blog, but physical movement and walking is a big part of what keeps me sane, and I love hearing about other people's walks. My artist date this week was a bit more sedentary than that. I was cooking dinner—which is something that I don't do often enough—which was doing pasta, except pasta that took a little bit more effort, rather than struggle meal pasta. While I was cooking, I was watching Valorant esports, and on a whim, I called one of my friends who also likes competitive Valorant to chat with them. It wound up being more of me cooking and chatting with them instead of about the game, but it was lovely. As a primary texter, I always feel vaguely accomplished whenever I make a phone call, which I think is a very my age thing.
Ray: I cheated too, so there we are. Lunch with my bride at an outdoor place we've never been just to soak up a place that didn't have six TVs showing the same game, and talking about that rather than what we're eating or the other detritus of daily living. Maybe it doesn't count, but I got more out of that than the people who put radishes in the Caesar salad, those blasphemous hyenas.
As for Kathryn, I have a question: "Struggle pasta?" Cosa vuol dire, "struggle pasta?"
Kathryn: I usually try my best to present as a real adult, but sometimes, you know, when you've got very little in the fridge or don't want to cook or eat out or order takeout, you just boil some pasta and throw in some tomato sauce and call it a day … Such things have been known to happen.
Chris: My version of this is oil, whatever hard Italian cheese I have, and seasoned breadcrumbs. Disreputable but delicious. When I was a kid, my sister would make this and we would watch The Godfather.
The closest I came to an artist date this week was buying several large bouquets of flowers and then spending 45 minutes or so snipping them and dividing them up between a selection of vases. I didn't think of it as an artist date at the time, but I love doing it and I did it alone. Not to go Meghan Markle Mode, but I like being inside my home 300-percent better when there are flower arrangements in various places. And, yeah, you're damn right I like a wink of fruit flavor in my bubbles.
Did you experience any synchronicity this week? What was it?
Alex: Yeah! I thought that we had missed the director Q&A screening of the documentary and I was bummed, but when the credits started rolling, the director, Jeremy Workman, stood up and said he'd be doing a Q&A with two of the artists who had been part of the original project.
Sabrina: I guess this isn't really about synchronicity, but I experienced a small smattering of rejections this week. I moped for a few hours and then moved on. I think I've made some strides in recent years in how I handle rejection, but it's hard not to take it all personally. And I also got some wins this week, so I suppose it all balanced out.
Kathryn: I didn't experience much synchronicity in terms of moving about in my day-to-day life. On Sunday, I did go to my local coffee shop in the morning to caffeinate up for Sunday shift, and had a break at around noon to do some errands and also grab a tea from the same coffee shop. The barista told me that I came just before they got slammed and also just after, so that next time I should just get it for there rather than to go. So at least I provided a nice coincidence for other people!
Ray: I had no synchronous moments, but I can help you hate your rejectors if you need, Sabrina. There's always room for loathing, I know this to be true. There are points for creativity and imagination in this arena.
Chris: I continue to feel that I simply lack the radar system for detecting synchronicities.
Were there any other issues this week that you consider significant for your recovery? Describe them.
Alex: I feel like the phrase "life as art" has come up in a bunch of different contexts for me in the last week, so I've been thinking about what it means. One of the wishes I wrote out during the tasks this week was just a bullet point that said "Why not?" That feels like an orientation toward the world and life that I really want to maintain going forward. I think this process has helped me articulate that as a value of mine. At crossroads moments or even when an idea strikes, I want to lean toward "Why not?" instead of listing out all the reasons it can't work. That feels really important to me.
Sabrina: Why-not is a very beautiful approach to life! I can talk myself out of so many things, so I am taking this one to heart. I think this is far from insightful, but everything out there is so shitty and scary that it's made it very hard for me to concentrate on my inner artist. But I've been trying to go easy on myself; I put aside the heavily researched tome about rocks I've been reading and picked up a book about a lesbian clown who loves MILFs. And honestly, that has been helping a lot. It's amazing to go to bed excited to read which MILF this clown will join in pound-town next. (There are a lot of MILFs in the book!)
Kathryn: Oh my god, I have got to read this book. I had a similar week in terms of things being scary and, on my end, a bit stressful. The end of the work week was not fun for me, and part of that was because my roommate, who works in a cancer biology lab dependent on federal grant funding, would get back from work and then we would just talk about every shitty or stressful thing that happened during the day, which wound up being a lot of work things compiling on top of apartment things. It definitely wasn't all awful; I blogged about our board game obsession already, but that was a really lovely thing to look forward to every single day, even if it was about saving the globe from a pandemic.
Chris: My wife is doing this protocol for resetting her sleep cycle (or something) and it involves staying up a lot later and condensing her sleep, for a period of weeks. Which is fun for me, because it means we can watch movies together or just talk like grownups for a while after our child goes to bed. But also it is challenging, because now instead of winding down in my usual way, I am watching TV a little bit later or talking like a grownup deeper into the evening than I might otherwise, and as a consequence I am sleeping less. My new thing is to be groggy, red-eyed, and unhygienic; at points throughout each day I move as if underwater. It's great.
Ray: 'Twas a mostly uneventful week, mostly because this week is going to be a pie fight with glass shards instead of meringue. I made this past week about achieving nothing in the most nothing way of all, because I wanted to be fresh for the upcoming weirdnesses. All temporary, none life-defining, just a ziggurat of regularly scheduled annoyances that require I have the right frame of mind. Maybe Julia will finally earn the money I gave her for the book.
