Dearest friends!
Welcome back to our weekly check-in!
We are extremely glad to reunite with you as we continue our journey through The Artist’s Way — thank you for your understanding as we pressed pause on recording an episode last week! I (Elena) was struck by a truly dreadful cold that knocked me out for a solid seven days, and I do want you to know that I tried my absolute best for you not to cough into the microphone at all whilst recording today’s episode. Let this serve as a reminder to us all that cold and flu season is regrettably upon us. Stay safe out there.
In chapters 4 and 5 of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron helps us recover our sense of integrity and possibility.
Although we missed the chance to check in with you here (and with each other!) about our progress through Julia’s fourth chapter, “Recovering a Sense of Integrity,” rest assured that we did indeed work our way through this chapter with many thoughts and feelings about it. Joy shared some of her reflections on her Substack, which you should read if you haven’t already!
This week, we took on the fifth chapter of The Artist’s Way, “Recovering a Sense of Possibility.” One sentiment we’ve heard repeated from friends and colleagues of ours who have worked their way through Julia’s guidebook before is that, while The Artist’s Way may occasionally cause you to roll your eyes, it does tend to surprise you by, well, actually working. Which is the place we found ourselves this week! More on both our eye-rolls and breakthroughs in today’s episode.
The Rituals of The Artist’s Way
The Artist’s Way asks three main commitments of us as recovering artists: to write our daily morning pages, to take ourselves on a weekly artist’s date, and to participate in the tasks of the chapter at hand each week. One of the most powerful elements of this guidebook as a whole for me (Elena) has been the reliance on ritual — something to do every day, something to do every week — that helps to orient my time.
I (Elena) have been settling into my new apartment and new city over the last few months, and I feel rather confident that I have finally found a coffee shop to call my own — and establishing a routine of sitting there in the mornings a few times a week with a flat white, my morning pages, and my thoughts has been a life-giving, sanity-saving ritual.
We have found ourselves both quite reliably settled into the ritual of our morning pages five weeks into Julia’s guidebook (minus a few sick days for Elena!). More than just settling into a routine, we’ve found together that the structure and shape of our morning pages has shifted and grown the more we commit to this daily process. Much more discussion on this in the episode to follow!
Time for your check-in!
How many days of morning pages were you able to do these past two weeks? Are you finding them helpful, frustrating, exciting, boring, revealing? Did you take yourself on an artist’s date? Have any other issues popped up for you that feel significant to your creative recovery? Share them with us below!
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And, on a final important note: if you too would like to bake Taylor Swift’s chai cookies as I (Elena) did this week in celebration of 1989 (Taylor’s Version), you can find the recipe here.
Much love and talk soon,
Elena & Joy
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