The Complete Artist's Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice by Julia Cameron

door.) God bothering to help my own creative recovery? (Slam.) Synchronicity supporting my artist with serendipitous coincidences? (Slam, slam, slam.)
    Now that we are in creative recovery, there is another approach we need to try. To do this, we gently set aside our skepticism—for later use, if we need it—and when a weird idea or coincidence whizzes by, we gently nudge the door a little further open.
    Setting skepticism aside, even briefly, can make for very interesting explorations. In creative recovery, it is not necessary that we change any of our beliefs. It is necessary that we examine them.
    More than anything else, creative recovery is an exercise in open-mindedness. Again, picture your mind as that room with the door slightly ajar. Nudging the door open a bit more is what makes for open-mindedness. Begin, this week, to consciously practice opening your mind.

ATTENTION
     
    Very often, a creative block manifests itself as an addiction to fantasy. Rather than working or living the now, we spin our wheels and indulge in daydreams of could have, would have, should have. One of the great misconceptions about the artistic life is that it entails great swathes of aimlessness. The truth is that a creative life involves great swathes of attention. Attention is a way to connect and survive.
 
Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music—the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
    HENRY MILLER
     
     
    “Flora and fauna reports,” I used to call the long, winding letters from my grandmother. “The forsythia is starting and this morning I saw my first robin.... The roses are holding even in this heat.... The sumac has turned and that little maple down by the mailbox.... My Christmas cactus is getting ready....”
    I followed my grandmother’s life like a long home movie: a shot of this and a shot of that, spliced together with no pattern that I could ever see. “Dad’s cough is getting worse.... The little Shetland looks like she’ll drop her foal early.... Joanne is back in the hospital at Anna.... We named the new boxer Trixie and she likes to sleep in my cactus bed—can you imagine?”
    I could imagine. Her letters made that easy. Life through grandma’s eyes was a series of small miracles: the wild tiger lilies under the cottonwoods in June; the quick lizard scooting under the gray river rock she admired for its satiny finish. Her letters clocked the seasons of the year and her life. She lived until she was eighty, and the letters came until the very end. When she died, it was as suddenly as her Christmas cactus: here today, gone tomorrow. She left behind her letters and her husband of sixty-two years. Her husband, my grandfather Daddy Howard, an elegant rascal with a gambler’s smile and a loser’s luck, had made and lost several fortunes, the last of them permanently. He drank them away, gambled them away, tossed them away the way she threw crumbs to her birds. He squandered life’s big chances the way she savored the small ones. “That man,” my mother would say.
    My grandmother lived with that man in tiled Spanish houses, in trailers, in a tiny cabin halfway up a mountain, in a railroad flat, and, finally, in a house made out of ticky-tacky where they all looked just the same. “I don’t know how she stands it,” my mother would say, furious with my grandfather for some new misadventure. She meant she didn’t know why.
    The truth is, we all knew how she stood it. She stood it by standing knee-deep in the flow of life and paying close attention.
    My grandmother was gone before I learned the lesson her letters were teaching: survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention. Yes, her letters said, Dad’s cough is getting worse, we have lost the house, there is no money and no work, but the tiger lilies are blooming, the lizard has found that spot of sun, the roses are holding