Fencing Bear at Prayer

I was going to start this post with "Right now, I hate Julia Cameron ," but somehow between walking the Dragon Baby to campus, eating lunch with colleagues at an annual end-of-year party, and waiting on somebody to show up for office hours, I've rather lost the fire. Which is the problem. I do hate Julia Cameron for being so unrelievably perky about how well Morning Pages have worked for her over the years. I mean, I've done M.P. just as she recommends, for weeks, months, even years at a time, but I am still waiting on that big breakthrough that she promises will come if only I open myself to God, Good Orderly Direction, the Muse. Instead, I have this blog. Which nobody (okay, "nobody other than my incredibly loyal readers"--I love all of you!) reads, certainly not the literary agents and publishers whom Cameron promises should be knocking at my door by now begging me to let them edit my work. Okay, okay, so that's not exactly what Cameron promis...

You'd think that I would believe it by now. Here it is, nearly sixteen years since I earned my Ph.D. and took up a position as a professor. My students seem to believe it when they sit in my classes and come to me for advice. Some of them even call me "Professor" when they address me. So it must be true. Why is it, then, that every time my husband helps me update my home page photo , he has to remind me while we're doing the shoot, "You are a highly respected professor at a major university," so that I'll look the part? Ha. I looked at my photo just now so as to put in the link and I still don't believe it. Sure, she might be a "highly respected professor at a major university," but surely that can't be me . So what if it is? How, exactly, is a "highly respected professor at a major university" supposed to feel? I know I feel faintly embarrassed every time someone introduces me for a talk: "Author of such-and-s...

I'm still having quite a lot of trouble with getting this next chapter off the ground. I'm making my quota of a page-a-day (just), but it's been a real struggle this past week. Although I always have trouble with beginnings , I'm nevertheless a bit surprised that starting chapter 3 has proved to be such a hurdle, particularly after chapter 2 went so well. Writing yesterday's post helped a little bit, but more in retrospect than actually at the time. I want so very much for this book to be good. No, not just good; really, really good, and I just don't know whether my writing skills are up to it. Of course, that's the interesting thing about skills: they never are--up to it, that is--not, at least, until you test them. My writing skills weren't up to writing my first book , but somehow I managed to do it. The skills come when we let them, I suppose. If we wait until we're ready to do something, we'll be waiting forever. "Ready...

Elizabeth Gilbert gave a very interesting talk a few months ago about changing the way in which we think about creativity and genius. Rather than, as we have since the Renaissance, insisting that creativity is something that comes from within, as the personal responsibility of its human author, it would be much healthier, she suggests, to think of it in the way in which the ancient Greeks and Romans did, as something that comes from outside, inspired, as it were, by the gods. Or, rather, not exactly the gods (or God), but instead something at once more personal and yet still not ourselves: our "genius." And what is a genius? Gilbert suggests something "rather like Dobby, the House-Elf." Okay, maybe not the image I would have chosen, but it makes the point: not everybody's genius is, well, a genius. As authors and artists, we are dependent upon the inspiration we are given and sometimes, our genius isn't really up to it. So, Gilbert argues, it's r...

"It can be said that our talents are gifts from God and our use of our talents is our gift back to God. The degree of happiness we experience when working well, the sense of rightness and harmony, all argue that creativity is God's will for us. When we create, we work hand in glove with the Great Creator. Creativity is its nature and our own. We think--and manifest--from the mind of God within us. "Artists throughout the centuries have known this and said this. They are not speaking in metaphor. Ours [Western, secularized modernity] is one of the few world cultures that does not routinely honor higher forces, and yet, working at our art, we do experience inspiration, although we may call it an intuitive hunch or leading. Something within us leads, and we follow. Painter Robert Motherwell speaks of the brushstroke taking the next brushstroke. "All artists experience this form of leading when our ego has stepped aside and we follow our inner muse with a child...

I've spent the week going over my notes and making outlines for the chapters of my new book, which probably explains the nightmare I had on waking this morning. I dreamed I was in my office and heard construction outside. When I "awoke" from my dream-nap, I found my office door replaced by a temporary wall that, thankfully, still opened, and people milling around outside talking about how to move walls and make space for the administrative offices they were planning to move to my floor. I found my dean and began pleading with him not to disrupt my work space in this way, but oddly soon found myself comforting him as he broke down in tears. When I got back to my office, it was full of more people, my wood floor was covered with a hideous blue shag carpet and, horror of horrors, all of my books were gone. At which point I broke down in tears and actually awoke, gasping at the effort to try to talk these strangers out of taking over my life. Can you say anxiety dream? T...

It's a confession that I never thought I'd make. I don't really like prayer, not if it means asking for stuff. I'm fine with prayer as praise and thanksgiving: the universe is a beautiful, incredible place and it is a wonder that we are here to be conscious of it and marvel at its glories. I can't imagine not being thankful for being alive--at least, not in the sense of thinking I somehow deserve to be alive, rather than thinking that life is an unlooked for gift. And I'm comfortable with prayer as confession, perhaps too comfortable. It is easy for me to detail my failings, all the things I have done and, even more so, left undone, beginning with worshiping God as I should, heart, mind and soul. But to take all of this and ask for something, for example, that our cat should live, just seems selfish and empty, as if I somehow didn't get the point of how much I already have to be thankful for or how badly I have failed to live up to even my own ideals, ...

What can I say? The demons are winning. I've spent the whole week fighting Doubt and Impatience, trying to convince myself to allow myself the time for my project to develop; so what if it takes me ten years to bring this book to completion? I need--or so I have been telling myself--to find a way to follow Master Han's advice (as reported by Joe Hymans) and give myself time to work towards my goal without setting a limit on how long I will work. But now I'm not sure there is ever going to be any book because, or so I learned yesterday when I went to check my email for notice about a UPS delivery I was expecting, a colleague of mine, inspired by an article I published a few years ago, is going to write it before I do. Blind Panic has now taken the field. No, of course, she is not going to write exactly the book I've been planning, but the argument is very much the one that I had wanted to make, and the methodology--reading the psalms through the lens of Marian dev...