Day 18

I was reading The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and came across this passage: "I seldom conceived a delicious plan without being given the means to accomplish it." It is easy to dismiss such a bold claim, but I believe it.

As I look back, I can see that whenever I have had an earnest and clear intention it has been realized. The challenge is to get clear about the intention. I have been seeking this kind of clarity about my writing.

To say that I simply want to write is dishonest. I want more than that. Sometimes I think that what I want is to impact other people with my writing: move them, change them, transform them. From where I sit that seems like a pretty tall order.

I was a drama geek in high school. I remember performing a monologue once about a girl who lost her twin brother to leukemia. When I looked out into the small audience, there was a woman, the mother of one of my classmates, crying. I was mesmerized by the single tear running down her cheek. The knowledge that I could move someone in this way made me feel powerful.

This desire to change other people through my creative work is, no doubt, an egoic one. Ultimately it is tied to the need for immortality. We all want to leave our mark, to live on through our creative works or good deeds. Perhaps this is just another house of cards. Doesn't everything, after all, eventually fade away? Dust to dust and all that.

If that is the case, why create? What is the motivation? When we push all the egoic desires aside, we create because of the way it makes us feel when we do it. It's the same reason people bungee jump or sky dive or have sex. If we can learn to get out of the way, we can become a channel for the creative energy that Carl Jung called collective consciousness and some people call God. That experience can be transcendent.

So, there it is. That's my intention: to be a channel. I see myself as an expectant mother, taking the classes and reading the books to prepare for the birth.