I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
[The] assumption that I am the source of what I write has transformed, after much love and suffering, into my soul is the inlet through which life courses. And the metaphors, images, stories, and poems that have come from this effort have been my teachers. Quite naturally, then, I don’t know where each engagement will lead or what each will reveal. This is a true condition for every soul, whether you consider yourself an artist or not: we engage and then we discover and comprehend….
All this invites us to put down the notion of producing great art at all cost in favor of entering the call to express authentic moments of life.
Mark Nepo, The Fifth Season: Creativity in the Second Half of Life
The idea that we create as channels rather than as originating sources appeals to me very much. It means I do not have to be some sort of artistic genius to create meaningful art; I need only show up and create, with a sincere desire to channel authenticity. This is what Nepo is saying here, that acts of creation work best when they are not attempts to create great art but simply rely on authentically showing up.
My project Things Men Gave Me (TMGM) is perhaps the most authentic creative effort I’ve ever taken on. Instead of hiding my essential and enduring boy-craziness, it celebrates it and composts it into art. Instead of limiting me to writing or painting, this project demands both modes of expression. Instead of worrying about how I might monetize it, I’m doing it only to ensure it gets out into the world. I want to create “something wrought from truth in a lasting way that transforms you or me for experiencing it” as Nepo describes what great art should be.
In Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, author Elizabeth Gilbert writes that ideas are energetic life-forms that want to be made real, and they “visit” people to find a willing partner:
Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It’s only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.
The idea for TMGM visited me long ago, when I was in the midst of a difficult romantic relationship after my divorce, one in a long string of difficult and unsustaining relationships. Fortunately, TMGM hasn’t given up on me despite my delay in acting upon it. I had to delay. I wasn’t finished living it yet, so I couldn’t turn it into a memoir, or a screenplay, or a conceptual art project combining essays and paintings.
Now that era of my life is complete. It ended in 2023 when I moved out of my last post-divorce boyfriend’s house, bought a house of my own, and invited my mother and daughter to live with me.1
So far, I have one essay and painting pairing virtually done, and three more in progress, but going slowly. I feel I might be able to move faster if I wasn’t being too precious about doing good work versus doing authentic work. This week I’m going to see how I can cultivate authenticity in my work while letting go of worrying about the quality level of my work.
I suspect I might have taken on too much outside of TMGM and that’s slowing me down too: publicity director for Heritage Fine Arts Guild, Facebook moderation for Women’s Caucus for Art Colorado (WCACO), and signing up for four courses at the community college in the fall. I also just agreed to help out by writing a guide to an upcoming WCACO show. I’m so excited about that but I wonder how am I going to get TMGM out in the world if I keep adding other things to my schedule? This is something to ponder; I may need to take a more essentialist view of my schedule and pare it down.
In particular, it could be that signing up for classes versus just creating my authentic work is a diversion from my true purpose. I could be relying on a past winning strategy, “if in doubt, get some formal education” rather than dwelling in possibility beyond my past patterns.
- Now I’ve entered a new relationship but I don’t consider it post-divorce, because that era is done. In living with my mother and daughter, I found a happiness and stability that didn’t depend upon being in a romantic partnership. That became the foundation of the next era of my life, which I hope will eventually be composted into its own conceptual art project in the future. ↩︎