Great essay. The book we are reading is called "The Artists Way" by Julia Cameron, it's a 12 week creative-recovery program modeled on AA, so there's a lot of woo-woo stuff and plenty of very personal introspection but Shaina and I thought it would be cool to do the discussion live 1) to kind of help bless with our mess, and 2) encourage others to take up the book. I know a few people who have, even being 3.5 weeks into it, I see enough fruit to encourage it. Shaina is posting the recordings on her newsletter, so while I appreciate the prudence of refraining from gossip, the practical reality is that it's all...out there.
Your list of bullet points reminded me of the japanese concept of "ikigai" which is the intersection of what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, what you are passionate about, and maybe a few other things. It rhymes with, while not directly connecting to, the Catholic concept of vocation. I really wish I had the catholic idea of vocation as a yoot, I have wondered a lot and I have a disposition to be stressed about whether or not I can "hear" the calling. For a lot of reasons I won't get into here, I didn't start that process until I cleared a lot of the weeds from my life. In doing so, I find that vocational discernment is starting to make it's presence known. Like i had to clear a place for the helicopter to land, it was so cluttered and overgrown.
The financial pressure to make our creative passions profitable is very uniquely american i'd say. America still retains it's protestant roots (I don't know a better way to describe it, and it's no less true though I mean no intentional disrespect to any protestants who may stumble on this). The puritans believed that wealth and success follows the blessed, so that led to the protestant work ethic where people hustled to be successful and then found themselves "blessed" (but at what cost???). Likewise nowadays, the economy is so nonsensical and the world is so nonsensical that if we are struggling financially, it's almost like our knee-jerk cultural reflex is to say "you haven't tried hard enough". Which means there's not a lot of room for us to sit comfortably in our creative passions that do nothing except fulfill us spiritually and fill up our well even while we labor over our artistic endeavors.
To illustrate the point, one of my first loves is astronomy and all things space. My aunt used to ask me why I don't find a job in astronomy, and my retort to her was that "then I would need to find a new hobby". I think it's similar with creativity--everyone obviously WANTS to be financially secure from their creative work alone, but for MOST people through MOST of history, that has never been a sustainable reality. And I think most of us don't realize that we wouldn't enjoy it if it suddenly did become our sole income source.
So we come back around to contentment and detachment in our present circumstances, creating when we can create, and otherwise being content to be "poor" even if we are creatively rich. Which itself is kind of counter-cultural these days.
Hi Scoot, took me a while to get around to this reply with the baby.
The book you are readings sounds like an interesting exercise; I’m familiar with the 12 steps, though not because I completed the program. I may have to check into giving it a read. I do recommend “The War of Art” by Stephen Pressfield; it’s probably shorter but has excellent meditations on how we get in our own way when working creatively. Just as a backburner book.
And duly noted about the livestreams. Not much to be done if it’s all hanging out there anyway.
Your metaphor for discernment is an accurate one. I’m not sure if the clearing of the weeds is something we all get bogged down in because of being human, or if the age/culture we live in has extra goo to trip us up in. That being said, I think we have multiple vocations through our life and I’m genuinely excited for you as you work through what and where it is God calls you.
On the point about financial pressures being an American phenomenon, I would agree, and your thought about us being a Protestant nation is a correct one. Due to the religious wars of previous centuries in Europe, the anti-catholic sentiment of our Puritan forebears was strong in the seeding of this country. The largest mass lynching to occur in the US was directed at Italian Catholics in New Orleans area, not African Americans, as most people would probably assume. I didn’t know the part about “wealth and success” being part of the Protestant viewpoint, though it would make sense as a progenitor of the prosperity gospel heresies we see in Protestant congregations through the US. “But at what cost” is a good, thoughtful caveat.
There is little room for us to sit comfortably in creative passions, as there is also a culture of work hard/play hard, that informs us that work is our fulfillment. We are culture that doesn’t understand silence, and reminds of Elaine Aron’s work on the Highly Sensitive Person related to who settled this country: the many things that Americans prize in culture (dynamism, extroversion, go-getter personality) are not personality traits exhibited by HSPs or introverts as evolutionary strategies. Sorry, slight tangent.
Point being, our culture doesn’t encourage or foster introspection; it fosters noise and shoving difficult things away at the expense of real interior peace.
Also, ostensibly true: “everyone obviously WANTS to be financially secure from their creative work alone, but for MOST people through MOST of history, that has never been a sustainable reality. And I think most of us don't realize that we wouldn't enjoy it if it suddenly did become our sole income source.” I think most people find that what fuels them creatively becomes a yolk if they make it a job. It is still labor, and we forget that many creative hobbies we have presently started out as necessary skills to keep us warm or take care of ourselves (though some were more decorative than others): sewing, weaving, knitting, baking, even recording astronomy. It wasn’t just fun, it served a useful purpose in mapping the stars to track the seasons for crops to be planted accordingly and weather understood better to order one’s life too.
So much of our world and life is comfort that we struggle to find ways to challenge ourselves and become inert and enervated. Our modern culture reminds me of the Universe 52 experiment with the mice. I think that more than anything is closely related to the struggles of modern man : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
Anyway, thank you for commenting and on the house! And the sub. I hope as things settle down at home I can interact with other authors and readers more, though it is a real challenge.
Great essay. The book we are reading is called "The Artists Way" by Julia Cameron, it's a 12 week creative-recovery program modeled on AA, so there's a lot of woo-woo stuff and plenty of very personal introspection but Shaina and I thought it would be cool to do the discussion live 1) to kind of help bless with our mess, and 2) encourage others to take up the book. I know a few people who have, even being 3.5 weeks into it, I see enough fruit to encourage it. Shaina is posting the recordings on her newsletter, so while I appreciate the prudence of refraining from gossip, the practical reality is that it's all...out there.
Your list of bullet points reminded me of the japanese concept of "ikigai" which is the intersection of what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, what you are passionate about, and maybe a few other things. It rhymes with, while not directly connecting to, the Catholic concept of vocation. I really wish I had the catholic idea of vocation as a yoot, I have wondered a lot and I have a disposition to be stressed about whether or not I can "hear" the calling. For a lot of reasons I won't get into here, I didn't start that process until I cleared a lot of the weeds from my life. In doing so, I find that vocational discernment is starting to make it's presence known. Like i had to clear a place for the helicopter to land, it was so cluttered and overgrown.
The financial pressure to make our creative passions profitable is very uniquely american i'd say. America still retains it's protestant roots (I don't know a better way to describe it, and it's no less true though I mean no intentional disrespect to any protestants who may stumble on this). The puritans believed that wealth and success follows the blessed, so that led to the protestant work ethic where people hustled to be successful and then found themselves "blessed" (but at what cost???). Likewise nowadays, the economy is so nonsensical and the world is so nonsensical that if we are struggling financially, it's almost like our knee-jerk cultural reflex is to say "you haven't tried hard enough". Which means there's not a lot of room for us to sit comfortably in our creative passions that do nothing except fulfill us spiritually and fill up our well even while we labor over our artistic endeavors.
To illustrate the point, one of my first loves is astronomy and all things space. My aunt used to ask me why I don't find a job in astronomy, and my retort to her was that "then I would need to find a new hobby". I think it's similar with creativity--everyone obviously WANTS to be financially secure from their creative work alone, but for MOST people through MOST of history, that has never been a sustainable reality. And I think most of us don't realize that we wouldn't enjoy it if it suddenly did become our sole income source.
So we come back around to contentment and detachment in our present circumstances, creating when we can create, and otherwise being content to be "poor" even if we are creatively rich. Which itself is kind of counter-cultural these days.
Congratulations on your new house, God bless!
Hi Scoot, took me a while to get around to this reply with the baby.
The book you are readings sounds like an interesting exercise; I’m familiar with the 12 steps, though not because I completed the program. I may have to check into giving it a read. I do recommend “The War of Art” by Stephen Pressfield; it’s probably shorter but has excellent meditations on how we get in our own way when working creatively. Just as a backburner book.
And duly noted about the livestreams. Not much to be done if it’s all hanging out there anyway.
Your metaphor for discernment is an accurate one. I’m not sure if the clearing of the weeds is something we all get bogged down in because of being human, or if the age/culture we live in has extra goo to trip us up in. That being said, I think we have multiple vocations through our life and I’m genuinely excited for you as you work through what and where it is God calls you.
On the point about financial pressures being an American phenomenon, I would agree, and your thought about us being a Protestant nation is a correct one. Due to the religious wars of previous centuries in Europe, the anti-catholic sentiment of our Puritan forebears was strong in the seeding of this country. The largest mass lynching to occur in the US was directed at Italian Catholics in New Orleans area, not African Americans, as most people would probably assume. I didn’t know the part about “wealth and success” being part of the Protestant viewpoint, though it would make sense as a progenitor of the prosperity gospel heresies we see in Protestant congregations through the US. “But at what cost” is a good, thoughtful caveat.
There is little room for us to sit comfortably in creative passions, as there is also a culture of work hard/play hard, that informs us that work is our fulfillment. We are culture that doesn’t understand silence, and reminds of Elaine Aron’s work on the Highly Sensitive Person related to who settled this country: the many things that Americans prize in culture (dynamism, extroversion, go-getter personality) are not personality traits exhibited by HSPs or introverts as evolutionary strategies. Sorry, slight tangent.
Point being, our culture doesn’t encourage or foster introspection; it fosters noise and shoving difficult things away at the expense of real interior peace.
Also, ostensibly true: “everyone obviously WANTS to be financially secure from their creative work alone, but for MOST people through MOST of history, that has never been a sustainable reality. And I think most of us don't realize that we wouldn't enjoy it if it suddenly did become our sole income source.” I think most people find that what fuels them creatively becomes a yolk if they make it a job. It is still labor, and we forget that many creative hobbies we have presently started out as necessary skills to keep us warm or take care of ourselves (though some were more decorative than others): sewing, weaving, knitting, baking, even recording astronomy. It wasn’t just fun, it served a useful purpose in mapping the stars to track the seasons for crops to be planted accordingly and weather understood better to order one’s life too.
So much of our world and life is comfort that we struggle to find ways to challenge ourselves and become inert and enervated. Our modern culture reminds me of the Universe 52 experiment with the mice. I think that more than anything is closely related to the struggles of modern man : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink
Anyway, thank you for commenting and on the house! And the sub. I hope as things settle down at home I can interact with other authors and readers more, though it is a real challenge.