Becoming Available To The Moment

I've mentioned The Artist's Way before. Here's what jumped out at me in this week's chapter.

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well-observed or specifically imagined.

As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available to the moment.It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered.

Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific: an origin from which work flows.

Recently I've experienced the power of making myself available to the moment. It's the sort of thing we talk about a lot in improv, but it's so much more applicable than that. Overcoming the fear, doing the work, putting yourself out there to actually experience what's going on: it's powerful, transformative stuff. I don't do it enough.

This is as far as I've gotten in the book before. Presuming I make it, next week will be new ground.

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