Getting Back to the Basics That Saved My Life and Can Change Yours

I am reading a  life-altering book in terms of spiritual growth.  I haven't been this excited since I discovered Marianne Williamson.  Now I've read Julia Cameron before, particularly, "The Artist's Way," and some of her other books on creativity.  I always gain a lot from her sharing her experience, hope and strength of her recovery.  But I recently read an interview with her in a writing magazine, and I learned she had written a book called "Faith and Will: Weathering the Storms in Our Spiritual Lives," which you can get in hardcover from Amazon (here) new copy for $2.56 and used for $1.70.  It speaks about what happens when you are left wondering where your higher power has gone to.  You're just not feeling that old connection.  You'd like to do His will, but He's not letting you know what it is as far as you know.

          There are clues as to why this might be other than the old standard, "Who moved?" when God is
          missing.  She writes, "Most of us are too hurried to know God.  And yet we act as if God is too
          hurried to know us."  She's right of course.  It's not God, our Higher Power, or the Creator who
          is afraid of missing Pilates at the health club at 2:00 so you can get in the step workout at 3:00.
         "It is we who have abandoned God."  She adds, "It is easy to be addicted to anxiety.  It is easy
         to make worry our home vibration."  "Just for today, I am going to reach out toward God.  Just for
         today, I am going to act as if I am a believer."

         
         Just as love, I know,  is a decision, Cameron writes here that faith is a decision.

       
        Just remember that we are right where we are supposed to be in the here and now.  God, the world,
        your significant other, aren't going to finally love you in a few years when you are a perfect human
        being.  They love you as you are, right now, this minute, and never forget it.


        
        I need people--writers and teachers--like Julia Cameron to bring me back and help me remember
        what's important. Like only worrying about taking the next right step.  That's all I have to worry about.
        After that I don't know what happens.  I'll know when I get there. 


   
        Cameron suggests we reunite with our H.P. by praying something like this, "Dear God, I want to be
         united with you.  Here's where I am at right now:  (List what you're doing that doesn't feel good.  You
         won't shock God.  He's heard it all.  List your failings you need to have removed.  Ask for help to
         forgive yourself and others and to be forgiven.  Ask for guidance and follow it.


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I have been caught up in arts and crafts suddenly.  I decoupaged a flowerpot, and now want to decoupage either fish or stars on my coffee table.  I am art journaling up a storm and releasing so much it's like writing my memoirs.  I am even scrapbooking.  I've been reading about why you should do scrapmoir as a form of memoir and I'm sold.  Listen to this insightful quote I didn't just come across at the same time: 








                                 "No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly
                                  where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present
                                  place." --Maya Angelou

I am learning so much about my healed and still healing places.  I am putting together a newer, stronger, more flexible version of me and I feel open, free and joyful while I shape the pieces and figure out where each goes. Last night I did a lot of scrapbook pages on some people who have made a difference on the journey of my life.  It was good to stop and recall and write a few words.  I still love many of them.  I even made a tiny beaded necklace to wear among a certain group of groovy peace, love and good drugs old pals. It's amazing the creativity that comes out once you get going. 

I'm cheating on my scrapmoirs and I'm glad.  I started it some time ago and then let it collect dust because I lost interest in it.  No wonder I lost interest.  It was a very boring project that went from my birth to preschool, grade school, and quit just when things were going to get good as a teenager.  But then I had to think about my first husband, getting married at 18, being so poor, a miscarriage--just so many sad things I didn't feel like jazzing on.  Instead I did a page on a few of my lifetime jobs and then went into adult friends, which is where I still am.  It won't be a normal scrapbook or scrapmoir.  I have the feeling I'd be utterly bored if I were to take a class in it--same for art journaling.  It conflicts with one of my new favorite quotes that I hung up on my desk over my monitor: 

              "Don't play what's there.  Play what's not there."  Solid advice from Mr. Miles Davis, who knew.

So go do the next right thing.  I hope for the benefit of your inner child it's something creative.  I just bought some fingerpaints, and they felt good.  I felt five again.

 
     

    

CAN YOU TELL YOUR INNER WISDOM FROM OTHER VOICES?

Photo: Hoverfly, by David Short
Creative Commons Attribution License
Eristalix pertenax on Mexican orange-blossom.
Taken 5/20/2011 using Canon Digital IXUS 70.



"We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other,to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity." - Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist"

Still at my 1,000 words a day, which is about all I'm writing lately, much to my dismay. I don't count journaling, which I do every day for hours--that's therapy.

I just can't seem to get it together to write articles for the two publications I freelance for, AlignLife.com and Examiner.com.  I have no readers at the Examiner yet, although I just started there recently.  I'm thinking I should have become Chicago's Bob Dylan Examiner (they really have one)  or the Ecstasy Examiner instead of Alcohol and Recovery.  Who wants to read about alcohol and recovery?  I try not to preach, but drinking people dont want to hear anything about their drinking habits.  I asked to be the Addictions Examiner, but I have to wait until I prove myself on just alcohol or something.

There's a really exciting new publication on addiction, alcoholism and recovery called The Fix.  You find articles on topics you won't find other places like this one on addiction and skin picking.  It's called trichotillomania and they say it's not as serious as cutting, but it's still in the mental illness or neurosis family of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder).  Oh ick, you say.  There's reviews of swanky rehabs, ads for stuff I never knew existed like marijuana spray for pain, and serious articles about the top ten experts in the field of addictions. 

I finished my "Developing Intuition" book by Shakrit Gawain,  and I really do mean to keep at following my intuitive messages each and every day. She writes about all the people or voices we have in our heads.  I know I have Miss Perfectionist, Mrs. Gumblehortz, my inner critic who wears her hair in a bun with not one stray hair coming out of it.  Then there is Ms. Weatherhardy, the responsible one, who believes she is a human doing and not a human being.  There is Mary Melon, the vulnerable child who gets scared by the risks of taking a leap of faith and following intuitive wisdom without knowing where it goes.  And, of course, there is the rebel who doesn't want to even follow her own gut feelings like it's some kind of scam.  There's more too.  Figure out who yours are.  The inner critic and the perfectionist make my life a living hell if I don't tie them up and put duct tape on their mouths.

So far I haven't seen any big changes in my life. I still spent two hours researching and writing a book proposal project bid yesterday only to have the Linux Live Knoppix CD crash and the letter disappear, although I spent hours looking for it.  If I had intuitively known that was going to happen, I wouldn't have written the damn letter in the first place.  I guess turning a business book into a fable is not the job for me, although I sure thought it sounded like fun.

I am currently helping my brother edit his book for teens, "A Fairy Tale Life Is No Fable," by Michael Grady, and he has done a bang-up job incorporating fables in his book that he plans to publish on his website.  It definitely will be of interest to teens.  He is a CPA, retired, and a professional speaker, who used to travel the world doing the accounts for Dun & Bradstreet.  He knows about things teens will be helped to learn and that should hold their interest like how to give a good speech, investing, money management, learning to write well, staying healthy, taking responsibility for yourself, sex, drugs, and some rock 'n roll.  I made up the rock 'n roll.  It seemed to go with sex and drugs, at least it did in my generation.

Yeah, I saw some decent jobs at Elance.com, the agency I use to get my freelance gigs.  For a while there I felt like I had walked into the wrong place.  Suddenly articles were being priced at $2-$4 and shit like that by clients, where they had been going for up to $50+.  They seem to be running from being categorized as a content mill like Demand Studios, and now AOL Seed, and Bright Hub, and now there are jobs for $500-$1,000.  I was invited to bid on some "Course in Miracles" type articles and to bid a healthy amount.  I was also invited to bid on meditation articles for good money, but I felt like too much of a hypocrite since I haven't been able to make myself meditate any more recently.  My mind is like a wild monkey.  I just want to get going on making my dreams a reality and learn grant proposal writing so I can start my own business doing that, write my self-help book on adult AD/HD (ADD), and edit my brother's book.

Oh yeah, and I also want to learn website design so I can freelance at that as well.  About.com offers free courses in that as well as the other stuff you need with it like HTML, css, java, I think, and cascading sheets.  All of it might as well be in Latin for all I know, but I figure there are a lot of hotdogs that have taught themselves how to do it and I am a good learner, I hope.  I think it would be fun to have another creative outlet.

Today I went to the thrift store and bought a stack of dime magazines to get new pictures for my vision board I want to make.  I need to update one according to my current five-year plan of dreams.    I finally found a how to do it article that didn't suck with materialism and phoniness.  My idea of my future does not revolve around a built-in pool and owning three houses, and I'm not about to glue gleaming materialistic pictures of crap and call it my dreams.  Here's the article I was looking for.  I wanted something to help me do some creative visualization on my dreams and some affirmations work.  This article came from Oprah, where else.  Here is the dream board made by Martha Beck that they refer to:

Let me know how it goes, and how you felt as you were making it.

Is anyone joining me in the 1,000 words a day challenge?  Just a reminder:  It could be your daily discipline that will end up being the springboard for the e-book you always meant to write, or the novel, play, non-fiction book, memoir, or blog.  Get going.  I spent a lot of time at college studying creative writing.  I wanted to know what the secret was that would make me a good writer.  I finally heard it from one of my professors who simply wrote on the board:  "Writers Write."  That's the secret.  No one gets good at writing by trying to drink like they're one of the American writers in Paris during the 20's like Hemingway or Fitzgerald.  You don't become a great writer by talking about writing in bars, clubs and every chance you get to impress somebody.  Writers write because they must.  It's a drive.  If you are a writer and you don't write, you feel funky, even depressed.  Follow  writer Julia Cameron's advice from her book "The Artist's Way," and this website, and write  your morning pages when you wake up and aren't yet sure what's on your mind and in your heart.   It's so much cheaper than therapy.  I get more out of it than I do therapy too.

I journaled for a couple of hours today.  I did some journaling exercises from the Joy book I told you how to get for free yesterday.  I wrote lists.  I love lists.  I wrote ten things I love about my life, ten things that are unique about me, ten things I could fix or change in the world, and ten things I'd like to share.  Do those and you'll have your 1,000 word challenge met for the day, and it will be therapeutic.  I learned some things about myself and my soul's mission/life's purpose from doing these lists.

Time to go see how many words I've got here: 1,176.

See you tomorrow.

Maryellen/MsRefusenik