Julia Cameron and creativity

"The flow off creativity is a constant. We are the ones who are fickle or fearful. I have learned that my creative condition and my spiritual condition are one in the same. Making art is an act of faith, a movement toward expansion. When I am stymied in my work, I am stymied in my spiritual condition. When I am self-conscious as an artist, I am spiritually constricted. I need to pray to lose my self-centered fears. I need to ask for selflessness, to be a conduit, a channel for ideas to move through...It is time to let Something or Somebody write through me. How the ego hates this humbling proposition! And yet, great art is born of great humility."

from FINDING WATER: THE ART OF PERSEVERANCE by Julia Cameron, author of THE ARTIST'S WAY

I have had difficulty believing in a god, moreso, difficulty being spiritual, having faith, seeing beyond what is visible and tangible. Yet, Cameron's books inspire me. I bought the following books yesterday:

THE ARTIST'S WAY EVERY DAY: A YEAR OF CREATIVE LIVING

TRANSITIONS: PRAYERS AND DECLARATIONS FOR A CHANGING LIFE

FINDING WATER: THE ART OF PERSEVERANCE

all by Julia Cameron, and I also bought Nietzsche's THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA.

Probably should hold on to money now as I will literally have none for 6 months to about 2 years, but I find the books helpful and they will give me something to do with my time that will hopefully inspire me to write. I also want to paint, but I can't really afford paint. My mom may give me some of her oils/acrylics. I can at least sketch and hopefully sketch poems. But there's something to the quote above about spirituality or as one person called it: mysticism.

I am thinking about S today again and recognizing the toll grief can have on us. Grief is the path to renewal? In any case, I have grieved a long time. It's time to move on and stop holding others into being subconscious representations of S. She was a good woman, a blessed friend, and she's gone now. I need to say goodbye? But I carry her image still.

S most definitely thought creativity was tied to divinity, not that we are makers and creators, but that IT works through us. P was/is an atheist. I think I let the atheism lead me to think belief in the divine silly, too hopeful. And just like the movie THE INVENTION OF LYING, I tend to see god and the divine as a big lie, made to comfort us in the vast emptiness in which we exist briefly like the grass. But S's belief in the universe as the universe seems to work for me. But the fact of the matter is perhaps the lack of spirituality leads one to a place of apathy or disinterest in the movements of that universal dance of energy S believed in so adamantly.

It is the reality of weakness, of injustice and inequality that make it difficult to believe that there is some divine justice, some strange mechanism or flow at work that resolves these apparent conflicts. It seems focusing on injustice and weakness and power can lead us to be stymied in our writing, and death, god, that makes us stop and recognize our own fragility, our own doom.