Niki

Week 8 – Recovering a Sense of Strength

“The Ivory Power”

Cameron says, “It is my experience as a visisting artist that many academics are themselves artistic beings who are deeply frustsrated by their inability to create.”  She goes on to discuss the power of both encouragement and criticism; critism being perhaps the most damaging form of artistic loss.

I have been teaching adults for the past 25 years and have found that encouragement is the most powerful tool for aiding in the susccess of students.  I also often listen to students who are experiencing a critical instructor and how difficult it is for them.  They feel like failures, they always take it personally, and blame themselves rather than the instructor.  Many of our students are nontraditional, older, with families and jobs.  They have taken a huge leap of faith just by enrolling in school again.  They need constant encouragement, a kind ear, and knowing that the instructor cares.  They already are struggling with low self esteem and the burdons of life.  I have seen first hand how a kind and caring word can encourage success, and a noncaring, abrupt comment can cause a student to quit school.  I have always felt that our job is so much more than just relaying information.  I try to get to know my students and let them know they have an advocate.

Another Cameron paragraph:  “Creativity cannot be comfortably quantified in intellectual terms.  By its very nature, creativity eschews such containment.  In a university where the intellectual life is built upon the art of creation itself, the art of creative construction meets with scanty support, understanding, or approval.  To be blunt, most academics know how to take something apart, but not how to assemble it.”

My first reaction to this was OUCH!  But after thinking more about it, I think it is basically true.  We assign projects, then we grade them according to our standards.  In most of my classes, creativity is not desired, doing the assignment according to the directions is.  Just yesterday I was grading projects in a class.  All the students were doing PowerPoint presentations on ski areas with links to each area.  One student did his project totally different from the other students.  It was not really according to the instructions, yet it did meet the purpose of the assignment.  Before reading AW week 8, I probably would have marked him off and asked him to complete the assignment like the rest of the students.  But this time, I recognized his creative solution to the project.  I am going to try to be even more encouraging to my students and their unique approaches to the assignments.  Too often, if the work is fine, I make no comment; only pointing out the inaccuracies.  This is subtle discouragement and I need to also point out what they did well.

I also think back to my own schooling.  So much of it was just rote memorization, creativity not encouraged, follow directions, spit the information out on the test and then forget about it.  It remained that way throughout my schooling and college. When I returned to graduate school to work on my Master’s degree, it was a different world.  Now the professors wanted our reactions, opinions, introspections, incites, and fresh research ideas.  It was a very difficult transition.  The first paper I wrote, I received a low grade with the comment, “This is a good essay.  I want your reflection.”  Huh?  I had to learn a whole new way of learning and responding.  Now I had to reflect on what the material meant to me, how it had changed me, how I could or would use it in the future.  It was a definite growth period.  Now critical thinking was encouraged and valued.  Why do “they” (the school systems) spend 20 years beating the creativity and original thought out of us, and then in graduate school try to resurrect it?

Week 7 - taking risks

As I read week 7, I saw an image of a path which comes to a fork in the road.  We can take the safe route, which we know, or venture out on a new path.  The new path could lead to success or failure, but ultimately growth.  I drew the following to represent this process. (Click on image to see larger)

[Edited 23 February to increase image size]

Week 7 - LISTEN

WEEK 7 - Recovering a Sense of Connection

Expect the universe to support your dream.  It will.

(click on image to see larger)

[edited 23 February to increase image size]

more faces

Week 6

Treating myself like a precious object will make me strong!

New faces

Happy Valentine's Day

Week 6 – Recovering a Sense of Abundance

“This week you tackle a major creative block—money”

Wow – this is sychnocity!  As I have been reading AW and doing the exercises, there has been one nagging concern (censor?):  How can you make a living creating, making art?  I guess I do tend to think “starving artist”.  And it is difficult to reconcile in my mind the relationship between money and creativity.  I have a desire to make money from my creative endeavors, but as I believe that creating is a spiritual experience, it has seemed somehow wrong to charge money – or even think about it monetary terms.  And along comes Week 6 – About money!  Cameran writes, “We secretly think that God wants us to be broke if we are going to be so decandent as to want to be artists.”  That is a negative belief I am working to change.

I notice in the Reading List at the back of the book, that Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan have written a book. The Money Drunk about this topic.

Week 5 – Recovering a Sense of Possibility

“You will examine the cost of settling for appearing good instead of being authentic.”

“By listening to the creator within, we are led to our right path.  We must learn to let the flow manifest itself where it will—not where we will it.”

At this point we are asked to also write evening pages before we fall asleep.  At night we can list areas in which we need guidance and in the morning pages explore solutions.

Look and you will find it –what is unsought will go undetected. Sophocles

“Expect your every need to be met, expect the answer to every problem, expect abundance on every level, ecpect to grow spiritually.”  Eileen Caddy

THE VIRTUE TRAP – this really spoke to me.  Especially when I was married, working, raising children, everyone and everything seemed to be demanding my time and energy.  And sometimes I craved my “alone time”.  I have to quote all of Julia Cameron’s description as every word rings true for me.

“An artist must have downtime, time to do nothing.  Defending our right to such time takes courage, conviction, and resiliency.  Such time, space, and quiet will strike our family and friends as a withdrawal from them.  It is.

For an artist, withdrawal is necessary.  Without it, the artist in us feels vexed, angry, out of sorts.  If such deprivation continues, our artist becomes sullen, depressed, hostile.  We eventually become like cornered animals, snarling at our family and friends to leave us alone and stop making unreasonable demands.

We are the ones making unreasonable demands.  We expect our artist to be able to function without giving it what it needs to do so.  An artist requires the upkeep of creative solitude.  An artist requires the healing of time alone.  Without this period of recharging, our artist becomes depleted.  Over time, it becomes something worse than out of sorts….When we can’t get others to leave us alone, we eventually abandon ourselves….What’s left is a shell of our whole self.”

As I wrote this week I realized how the virtue trap and lack of  downtime contributed to the demise of my relationships.  Will have to write more on that another time.

Question (??)

What do you think?  If wearing scarf-like material (like the drawing) became a fashion trend, and all American women were wearing them, how would that affect the Muslim tradition?  Do you think it would be considered blasphemy?  Would they want to discontinue the practice as it now would seem too western?

Love to hear some of your ideas on this.