Kimberly O'Connor

We made it!

The culminating week of The Artist’s Way is called “Recovering a Sense of Faith.” It’s the book’s final reminder of the importance of trusting yourself, your ideas, and your intuition. It includes a last call to identify what Cameron calls the “Wet Blankets” in your life–people or situations that hold you down or snuff out your creative energy.

It also contains reminders to use the basic tools of the course, the morning pages and Artist’s Dates: things to do that help us reclaim our creative selves. It’s these things to do, concrete actions to take, that originally drew me to this course over 20 years ago, and that keep me coming back to it. So to close my writing on the book, I’d like to offer a final list of things to do that help ground us in creativity and action–some from me, some from the book, and some a combo.

• Have you been doing the morning pages? If not, start again! Even half a page of jotting down thoughts will connect you to your intuition and desires.
  
• Make a list of summer Artist’s Dates. As I’ve shared, I have a hard time getting around to Artist’s Dates. I certainly don’t do them once a week. Here’s my list of summer ideas: go to an adult dance class; try this; walk the labyrinth at Mile Hi Church; wander the Denver Botanic Gardens; wander through a library; wander through a cemetery; collect rocks and paint them; go to a clothing store and try on three outfits I think I would never wear; take myself out to lunch; spend an afternoon at home watching a movie I usually wouldn’t watch. (Some of these ideas are from this great post!)
  
• Plant something! Repot a houseplant, or plant some flower seeds. This idea comes up over and over in the book as a way to literally create something new.
  
• Clean out a closet. This is another recurring idea in the book–in cleaning out a physical space, we open a pathway to new energy in our lives.
  
• Lay down on the floor. About a year ago, my amazing therapist told me that she often goes outside to lie on her deck between appointments as a way to clear her head and rest. It was funny to me because I had long joked with my former work wife that all my yoga was really just my excuse for a chance to lie down on the floor. Since then, messages of the power of lying on the floor keep coming to me, like this photo of the opening pages of a 1950’s Betty Crocker Cookbook or in this NYT challenge.

(Wisdom from the ages (third row, first column): lie down on the floor.

And with these tips, I officially conclude my “12 weeks” of writing about The Artist’s Way. I’ve really enjoyed the chance to explore these ideas and share them with you. Thanks for reading my blog! Some good news: I’ll be offering another intro to The Artist’s Way with Denver Public Library in September! I’ll post info here once we have the details all figured out.

And last, one request from me: if you enjoy my blog and know someone who might also like it, please share it! Once I reach 100 followers, I’ll do something special–I am thinking maybe 100 days of creative prompts or 100 terrific poems or something like that. And coming soon, completely unrelated to writing, is a post about a hike I did earlier this month (hint–it was Grand.)

Thank you all, again, for being my readers! Love to you. Keep moving!