Leap, and the Net Will Appear

My new contemplative The Artist’s Way book group | Week 0

Welcome to The Artist’s Way group of my own dreams.

For the next twelve weeks, I’ll be making my way through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. We’ll be reading together, but this won’t be a traditional book club. I’m more interested in using the book as a jumping-off point for conversations about creativity, willingness, self-compassion, and what it actually looks like to support ourselves when we’re trying something new.

I bought my first copy of The Artist’s Way in 2007 when I was 21.

I can’t remember who recommended it or what made me buy it. I only remember who I was back then.

I was studying through UNISA, doing a double major in Creative Writing and Languages and Literature. I wrote poetry all the time. I went to poetry evenings at a local art café and read my work aloud, terrified every single time. Most of what I wrote was about apartheid, war, and justice. One of the poems was about Nelson Mandela.

I wish I still had it.

Creativity occupied a different place in my life then. It wasn’t squeezed into the gaps between everything else. It wasn’t something I had to justify. I didn’t spend time wondering whether I was creative enough to call myself creative.

I just wrote.

Maybe that’s one reason I keep coming back to this book.

Because The Artist’s Way isn’t really a book you read. It’s something you do.

Julia Cameron calls it “a spiritual path to higher creativity”, and unlike most creativity books, it asks for your participation. Every day.

Early in the introduction she writes:

“If you are creatively blocked—and I believe all of us are to some extent—it is possible, even probable, that you can learn to create more freely through your willing use of the tools this book provides… Do these things and a breakthrough will follow, whether you believe in it or not.”

The word that jumped out at me this time wasn’t breakthrough.

It was willing.

I’ve been thinking about willingness a lot over the last few years.

Wanting something and being willing are not the same thing.

I want to write more books than I’ll ever have time to write. I want to learn new things. I want to build things. I want to do a hundred different creative projects.

But willingness asks something different.

Am I willing to show up?

Am I willing to be bad at this for a while?

Am I willing to feel uncertain, exposed, and occasionally ridiculous?

Creativity doesn’t require certainty.

It requires willingness.

Another thread running through The Artist’s Way is Julia’s relationship with God, or what she calls The Great Creator.

I’ll be honest. This is the part of the book that puts some people off. It nearly put me off too when I first read it. These days, I read those passages differently.

I tend to think of this creative force as Life itself.

To me, it is the intelligence that turns a seed into a tree, grows a baby in a womb, guides migrating birds across continents, and inspires poems, paintings, songs, businesses, ideas, and stories into being. It is not separate from us. We are part of it, and it is part of us.

Through the work of Marion Rose and Mary Walker, I’ve come to see Life as something we are in relationship with. Not a distant authority figure handing down instructions from above, but a living and responsive presence that communicates through our desires, our bodies, our intuition, our longings, our relationships, and sometimes through those strange synchronicities that feel too meaningful to dismiss.

When I create, I don’t feel as though I’m manufacturing something from nothing. I feel as though I’m listening. Allowing something that already exists beneath the noise of everyday life to emerge. I think that’s what Julia means too.

Later in the introduction she writes:

“As you work with the tools in this book… many changes will be set in motion. Chief among these changes will be the triggering of synchronicity… Leap, and the net will appear.”

I have loved that phrase for years.

Leap, and the net will appear.

Not because the outcome is guaranteed.

Because so often in life we don’t get to see the net until after we’ve jumped.

One of the other ideas Julia introduces is what she calls “pulling focus”. Borrowing from filmmaking, she describes stepping back far enough to gain perspective on our own lives.

That idea feels especially relevant right now.

We are living in an age of constant interruption. Every time we open a screen, there are more opinions, more updates, more videos, more people telling us what to think, buy, create, improve, or become.

Julia wrote:

“Many of us find that we have squandered our own creative energies by investing disproportionately in the lives, hopes, dreams and plans of others. Their lives have obscured and detoured our own.”

She wrote that long before social media existed.

And yet it feels as though she could have written it yesterday.

I was reminded of something Johann Hari wrote in Stolen Focus:

“Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.”

If our attention shapes our consciousness, then perhaps one of the most creative acts available to us is choosing where our attention goes.

This Week’s Invitation

Before we begin Week One, here are three simple invitations:

• Read the Introduction to The Artist’s Way if you have a copy. You don’t need to. I’ll be reflecting on the material here each week. But I always enjoy seeing where my own interpretation differs from someone else’s.
• Pay attention to how much time you spend consuming information this week. Don’t judge it, just notice it.
• Buy or choose a notebook for your Morning Pages. We’ll begin those next week.

I hope you’ll join me.

This entire The Artist’s Way series will be free to read and participate in. At some point in the future I may move book clubs like this into my paid subscription, but for now I’d love this to be an open invitation for anyone who feels called to come along.

If you’re joining me for the journey, I’d love to know.

Leave a comment below and let me know you’re here. Tell me where you’re reading from, whether you’ve read The Artist’s Way before, or what you’re hoping to find over the next twelve weeks.

I’ll see you next Thursday for Week One.

With love,