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

despite the heat.
    My grandmother knew what a painful life had taught her: success or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
    In a year when a long and rewarding love affair was lurching gracelessly away from the center of her life, the writer May Sarton kept A Journal of a Solitude. In it, she records coming home from a particularly painful weekend with her lover. Entering her empty house, “I was stopped by the threshold of my study by a ray on a Korean chrysanthemum, lighting it up like a spotlight, deep red petals and Chinese yellow center.... Seeing it was like getting a transfusion of autumn light.”
    It’s no accident that May Sarton uses the word transfusion. The loss of her lover was a wound, and in her responses to that chrysanthemum, in the act of paying attention, Sarton’s healing began.
    The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain—the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, “unutterably alone.” More than anything else, attention is an act of connection. I learned this the way I have learned most things—quite by accident.
    When my first marriage blew apart, I took a lonely house in the Hollywood Hills. My plan was simple. I would weather my loss alone. I would see no one, and no one would see me, until the worst of the pain was over. I would take long, solitary walks, and I would suffer. As it happened, I did take those walks, but they did not go as planned.
    Two curves up the road behind my house, I met a gray striped cat. This cat lived in a vivid blue house with a large sheepdog she clearly disliked. I learned all this despite myself in a week’s walking. We began to have little visits, that cat and I, and then long talks of all we had in common, lonely women.
 
The noun of self becomes a verb.
This flashpoint of creation in the
present moment is where work
and play merge.
    STEPHEN
NACHMANOVITCH
     
     
    Both of us admired an extravagant salmon rose that had wandered across a neighboring fence. Both of us like watching the lavender float of jacaranda blossoms as they shook loose from their moorings. Alice (I heard her called inside one afternoon) would bat at them with her paw.
    By the time the jacarandas were done, an unattractive slatted fence had been added to contain the rose garden. By then, I had extended my walks a mile farther up and added to my fellowship other cats, dogs, and children. By the time the salmon rose disappeared behind its fence, I had found a house higher up with a walled Moorish garden and a vitriolic parrot I grew fond of. Colorful, opinionated, highly dramatic, he reminded me of my ex-husband. Pain had become something more valuable: experience.
    Writing about attention, I see that I have written a good deal about pain. This is no coincidence. It may be different for others, but pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right. Yesterday the marriage may have ended. Tomorrow the cat may die. The phone call from the lover, for all my waiting, may not ever come, but just at the moment, just now, that’s all right. I am breathing in and out. Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty.
    The night my mother died, I got the call, took my sweater, and set out up the hill behind my house. A great snowy moon was rising behind the palm trees. Later that night, it floated above the garden, washing the