Learning through doing

Gardener of Spirit, paper collage, 2022

This week I am listening to The Vein of Gold: A Journey to your Creative Heart by Julia Cameron. I know a lot of creatives who swear by her book, The Artists Way. One friend recently shared with me that she has it on her bedside table and reads it daily. Her bible.

Cameron’s work is about healing the inner creative child and Vein of Gold is about learning-through-doing. About play. “It is the use of creativity which heals creative wounds,” she says. “Nothing else works.”

Anne Lamott:

“If you want to have loving feelings today, do loving things: Flirt with everyone, especially old people and yourself. Pick up some litter in your neighborhood, even though there will be more by Sunday. Get your work done, one inadequate sentence and paragraph at a time. Then go through your draft and take out all the lies and boring parts. Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe…”

Creativity is an alchemical process. It changes us at the soul level. By living artfully, we find the artist within. By doing loving things, we find the love within. We can read every book, listen to every podcast, think all the good thoughts, but nothing changes until we do.

Doing is brave. It requires vulnerability and humility. Creativity takes courage. It calls us out of ourselves, into the creation of something bigger: the making of our soul.

May Sarton:

It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it—and I do and always have—then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.”

Through the process of creativity, of doing, of playing, we can turn our disappointments, wounds and burdens into gold.

Jump and pray and do—

Joce