The Sound of Paper

by Julia Cameron

  Nadine is an accomplished writer with many books to her

  credit. For her, writing and prayer are intermingled. The act of writing is a sort of distillate. She begins each writing session with a conscious effort to empty herself, to be a vessel for divine thought to flow through her. And yet, Nadine is a funny writer, earthy and sensuous. Her spirituality has not neutered her prose.

  Mitchell, a photographer, has been on a spiritual path for fif­teen years. He considers his considerable career a collaboration between him and a higher power. Routinely, he asks for inspira­tion and guidance. He has traveled around the world, camera in hand, finding the hidden face of God in those who face his lens.

  "Clod I believe, help my disbelief," prays Arthur, a distinguished writer. The author of more than a dozen books, Arthur asks guid­ance on each new endeavor, waiting to write until he feels a sense of lightness in a new direction. Not surprisingly, his career is not­able for its originality and often unexpected directions.

  Talk to enough artists, and the surprising fact emerges that praying for spiritual guidance results in originality, not sameness. We are inspired to become ourselves, as unique and multiple as the snowflakes.

  TO BE

  INDEPENDENT, DEPEND ON GOD

  Try this: Sometimes we are loath to rely on the Great Creator. Perhaps we still believe in a dif­ficult, negative, or withholding God. The kind of God we believe in has a great deal to do with our willingness to draw close to God. This is a two-part exercise.

  step one: Number from 1 to 10 and list ten attributes of your childhood God. For example:

  Distant

  Stern

  Male

  Humorless

  Punishing

  All-knowing

  All-powerful

  Prefers martyrs

  Prefers suffering

  10. Difficult to reach

  Now number from 1 to 10 again. This time, list the characteristics you would like your God to have. For example:

  Kind

  Encouraging

  Creative

  Humorous

  Easy to reach

  Supportive

  Enthusiastic

  Adventurous

  9. Personal

  10. Interested

  step two: Holding in mind the positive traits you have envisioned, write a letter to God asking for specific help regarding your life and creative projects. You may wish to create a ritual related to this letter, placing it in a "God Jar" or on a small altar devoted to your creativity.

  Wishes Come True

  Life is out of our control—but not entirely. This morn­ing, at the New-York Historical Society, I watched a short docu­mentary film about the founding of New York. So many of today's complaints about New York can be traced back to the founding fathers' plans and wishes for it. It was to be a city of commerce, a moneymaking venture where the frippery of mere beauty was placed aside for the more urgent business of business.

  In planning Manhattan, the founders chose to remove wildness from it, to flatten hills, ignore streams and gullies, restrict trees to borderline tracery, making greenery a rare sight except for Central Park, where the wildness and beauty of the original Manhattan Island survives, man-made but beguilingly intact. Thanks to the vision of city planners, chief among them De Witt Clinton, mod­ern New York is built upon a grid, a grid envisioned and executed to give us what we have: straight streets with numbers instead of names, a city made easy to learn for immigrants who come here speaking a wide variety of tongues. Houses and public buildings are built—deliberately built—to stand shoulder to shoulder in neat, orderly rows, very democratic in their essential sameness. In downtown New York, the part of the city built before the city planners' version, the streets run at crooked angles and have names. South of Houston Street, once a northern border, New York is a tangle on a par with London and Paris, older cities that grew a

  neighborhood at a time, not with the topiary sameness and forced urgency of New York. We have all heard the phrase "Your wish is my command," and New York heard very clearly the city plan­ners' wish to be an economic focal point, no mere spot of beauty. Wishes are potent forces, not only for cities but for people. Like the city planners of old, all of us lead lives that we have subcon-sciously gridded out. A choice at a time, we execute our lives, plac­ing into them what matters to us. We buy houseplants because we hunger for green life. We Windex our windows, yearning for more light. We may write down "next time, a sunnier apartment." We all have things we wish for more of, and we all carry with us wishes we have not articulated, even to ourselves. When we feel cut adrift, it is often because our unacknowledged wishes are crying for our attention and we are turning a deaf ear. At such times we need to take pen to the page and listen to the voices within us that want further expression in our lives. We must make our unconscious conscious. We must allow these voices to help us grid our growth or we will grow helter-skelter and not in directions that give us the soul satisfaction that we crave.

  Happy Accidents

  WISHES COME TRUE

  Try this: Take pen in hand and lay out a wish list of 1 to 20. Allow your wishes to be what they are, to range from the minuscule and eas­ily fulfilled to the large and seemingly impossi­ble. Wishes address the quality of our life and the contents of what we put into life's con­tainer. When we put our wishes to the page, we tend to act on those that are easily accessible to us and to be available when the large gears of the universe swing into place and offer us something we have felt lies beyond our reach.

  Yfsterday, making a demo disc for a musical, we ran across an unexpected problem: The music was too complex and demanding to be recorded accurately and well in the time we had at hand. The studio clock was ticking. Money was being spent instant by instant, tick by tock. With the pressure rising, the singers were still stub­bornly out of tune, missing notes and making discordant errors. Something had to be done. Reluctantly and angrily, my creative partner and I shifted gears. All right, we would lose our large and grand choral opening. We would open instead with our closing—a sprightly, upbeat, and far simpler musical medley. We hated to do it. But when we did it, the demo disc jumped alive.

  Accidents happen, and when they do and we are willing to roll with the punches, our creativity springs up and takes a turn. "Just let me see what I can make from this," the inner creator says. "There must be a silk purse in here somewhere." When we are will­ing to be open-minded, silk purses abound. They are the "found art" of life, the opportunity waiting to be seized by the optimists among us. Rather than focusing on our losses, we can learn to focus on our "founds." We can see what unexpected resource a loss calls to the fore. We can see how our being flexible and open to alterna­tive solutions can offer us not just different but better solutions to what it is we attempt. We may not like looking for it, but we can find the silver lining. Let me give you a case in point.

  SOUND

  PAPER

  HAPPY

  ACCIDENTS

  When I was a single mother, undisturbed writing time was at a premium. I was with my daughter 24/7, and she was a lively, inquisitive child not prone to napping. From this I learned to get up early and spring to the page before my daughter needed me. This is how Morning Pages came to be born. I also learned, when she was a toddler, how to write through distractions like an after­noon's cartoon show or a rigorous game of hobby horse racketing through the apartment. Because I had to write whenever I could and however I could, my writing, of necessity, became portable and doable. I hauled a notebook with me and wrote in school cor­ridors, in doctors' waiting rooms, anywhere and anytime I had a moment. As a direct result, art became something casual and daily. I well learned that plays were written a sentence at a time, because sometimes that was all I got on the page before a parent/teacher meeting, before the school bus pulled up and my daughter stepped down, needing a snack and her mommy.

  Unlimited time became the luxury I yearned for, but because I didn't have it, time became wh
at I learned to use. A minute here and a minute there and there was, surprisingly, "enough" of it. I just had to be "willing to be open-minded. I just had to be willing to give up my agenda of "lots" of time, my fantasy of life as a full-time artist, and settle for the patchwork quilt of time here and time there.

  My daughter is twenty-five now, and I sometimes have the lux­ury of time, but in the music studio yesterday, we recorded one song that I wrote waiting in a parking lot and another that came to me as I drove crosstown through Los Angeles traffic. Sam Shepard has said that he writes on highways. Gertrude Stein composed poems at the wheel of her parked car. If we are open to our art, our art will seize whatever opening we give to it.

  • 50 •

  When we are willing to be open-minded, art and beauty come Hooding into us in a thousand small ways. When we let ourselves sec the possibilities instead of the improbabilities, we become as flexible and resilient as we really are. It is human nature to create. When we cooperate with our creativity, using it to live within the lives we actually have, we surprise ourselves with our level of in­vention. The closing medley becomes the opening medley. Today's snatched sentence opens the new play.

  • 51 •

  Befriending Time

  HAPPY ACCIDENTS

  Try this: Choose one situation in your life about which you feel negative. Take fifteen minutes for yourself. With pen in hand, explore the possible positives you stand to gain through this situation. For example: "Your play seems almost like two one-acts yoked together."

  The possible positive is moving some of the action of Act II into Act I, thus linking the two halves far more closely together. This shift cre­ates foreshadowing in Act I for Act II. The play now reads as a cohesive whole, because you were willing to accept and act on constructive criticism.

  Today was unseasonably warm. Manhattan was in shirt­sleeves and wide, loony grins. The weather had everyone happily tilted toward optimism and friendliness. Old couples strolled arm in arm, beaming at those striding toward them. Children clutched helium balloons bought on the street. Lovers walked intertwined and heedlessly erotic: her hand in his back pocket. A West High­land terrier, out for a morning constitutional, assumed a stubborn, leg-braced "Westie position" and refused to be dragged indoors from the glorious day. What is it about spring that wakes up the art­ist in all of us? We suddenly have "the time" of our lives—a tell­ing phrase.

  People take walks on their lunch hours. Passersby impulsively stop to pet the small black cocker spaniel puppy making his brave way down Columbus Avenue, owner in tow. Stores leave their iloors ajar and owners loll against the doorjambs, making casual conversation with neighbors walking by. The clock is banished. C )scar Hammerstein had it right: "I feel so gay in a melan­choly way ..."

  Spring opens a trapdoor in the mind of many of us. It allows that creative imp Impulse to slip in. Rather than glancing at our watch and hurrying ahead to our next "jump" on a busy agenda, we pause, dazzled by the bright flowers banked up outside a Ko-rran grocer's. "Aren't they beautiful?" we ask a complete stranger.

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  "Indeed they are," he replies, his English accent a pleasant added treat.

  So much of art hinges on our ability to trust intuition, to fol­low our hunch about what "might" or "could" come next. The difference between a blocked artist and a free one is this precise openness to moment-by-moment invention. Agnes de Mille tells us that an artist must take "leap after leap in the dark." Picasso tells us that we are all born children, "the trick is remaining one." How do we remain one? Having the time of our lives is the answer. Being open to the right timing of coincidence is the key.

  We live in the now, where children and animals live. We learn to stop watching the inner movie—the movie of "How am I and how is my brilliant career?"—long enough to take a lively interest in the people and things around us. Children are dazzled by a but­terfly, entranced by a floating leaf, utterly captured by the sight of an unexpected horse trotting briskly along the roadside. When our adult self is too much in evidence, we "notice" such diver­sions but we do not allow ourselves to be diverted, turned aside from the serious business of life. We dampen our own enthusiasms lest they lure us from the path of our ambitions. Focused on our ambitions and the way they "should" unfold, we often miss the way they are unfolding, or are trying to if only we would let them.

  The word enthusiasm comes from the Greek words meaning "filled with God." If, as Mies van der Rohe is said to have remarked, "God is in the details," maybe we belong there as well. Maybe the most direct route to our heart's desires is a circuitous one that allows us to encounter destiny by stopping to admire the calico cat sunning itself amid the geraniums on a window ledge.

  Perhaps those shortcuts that cut out the sweetness of life are really cutting us off from life itself.

  Henry Miller advised us, "Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music—the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting peo­ple. Forget yourself. . . ."

  It is one of the ironies of opening ourselves to impulse that we not only forget ourselves—our serious workaday selves—but we discover ourselves, our luminous, "incandescent" selves. Is it too radical to consider that Brenda Ueland might just be on the right track when she urges us: "Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers."

  Certainly spring, which "springs" us from the cage of our wintry selves, makes this an easier notion to entertain. Daft with the weather, we talk to ourselves and one another—"Oh, what a beautiful morning. Oh, what a beautiful day!" Perhaps Something is talking to us and we are merely answering.

  I believe that we live in an interactive universe, that we are being talked to and responded to at all times. Everything is signif­icant, not just the few somethings that we allow ourselves to see when we are blinded by our blind ambition.

  Easy Does It

  BEFRIENDING TIME

  Try this: For most of us, time is what we feel we never have enough of. We don't have time to call an old friend and get current with each other. We don't have time to go for a walk. We don't have time to take a leisurely bubble bath. We serve quick-fix meals rather than take the time to make a real salad and broil some fish. We even choose our clothes by looking for those that require no time.

  Take pen in hand and number from 1 to 10. List ten activities that you would enjoy but tell yourself you have no time for. Don't these neg­lected possibilities sound self-nurturing? They are, of course, and that is why we need to find the time to do them. Select one self-nurturing action from your list. Make the time to execute it.

  A close examination of many an artistic career reveals that "genius" is often coupled with plain ordinary work. A case in point? Ric hard Rodgers. A daily worker, he built not only his career but his entire life on a firm foundation of "easy does it."

  The auditorium was white and small with white Doric columns, .11 ul velvet wall hangings in burgundy. The crowd was notably ami­able for a New York theater crowd, smiling and nodding, settling in comfortably. We were there to listen to little-known Richard Rodgers songs. As the lights dimmed, Rodgers's elder daughter, M.iry, took her place toward the front, a genial, silver-haired woman who bears a striking resemblance to her father.

  The program began with a few cordial bromides and then got tlown to business—show business. With three singers alternating solos and pairing up for duets, the evening moved through the lesser-known areas of Rodgers's works. The composer of nine-hundred-plus songs, he left a lot of musical territory behind him. As famous as his works are, we are familiar with only the tip of the iceberg of his output.

  All of us "who make things worry whether or not "what we make is "original." Listening to the Rodgers evening proved this worry to be irrelevant. Clearly, Rodgers was the "origin" of all his work. The prism of his sensibility is what made it original. The name is true for all of us. We are the origin of our work. Our />
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  allowing work to move through us is the issue. As we suit up and show up each day at the page or easel or the camera, we have an "eye" that becomes the "I" present in all that we do.

  Rodgers liked to work every morning. He got to the piano by nine or nine-thirty and put in his time there in the same way an assembly-line worker would punch a time clock. He left the door to the room ajar, and his daughters remember tiptoeing through the house during their father's work time.

  Rodgers's output was prodigious, but on closer examination, it was simply steady. He worked at his work. It was his lifeline and his through line. It was what he did, whether it was going well or poorly, whether it was well received or ill received. Every day, rise and shine, regardless of his emotional weather, he went to the piano and listened there for the work that would move through him. Allowing that work to enter the world, resigning from judg­ing its caliber—leave that to history—Rodgers wrote note after note, day after day, leaving us with a legacy of work and a legacy of how to work—steadily and without ego.

  From all available sources, we can conclude that Rodgers was not a happy man. He struggled with depression and with alcohol, and even so, he worked. Linked for twenty-odd years to lyricist Larry Hart—until death did them part—and later to Oscar Ham-merstein, Rodgers had a gift for devotion, and nowhere was this more apparent than in his daily giving himself over to the work. Sometimes he wrote for high-minded musicals. Sometimes he wrote for rollicking revues. The point is that he wrote, always, and that in doing so he left an example of how it is we can work as well. Some of the best work came during the darkest times. Some of the brightest times did not burnish the work. The work be-

  came a separate entity, an ongoing something that had its own life and its own rules, chief among them, "Be loyal to me."

  Rodgers had a marathon marriage to his beloved wife, Dorothy.

  "I have loved that woman for forty years," he once exclaimed. But if Dorothy was his wife, his even deeper marriage was to his work. As Dorothy herself wrote, introducing a volume of his love let­ters, "It wasn't easy for me to accept the fact that I wasn't the most important thing in Dick's life. His work was. I was, I think, the most important person in his life, but his work was, quite simply, his life."