peace de la resistance

Here it is - my new spot across the way. I've kept up my intention to get over there every day this week. I've ended up writing my pages there, actually. I know it's not ideal not to be doing them first thing, or come to think of it even in the morning, but the spot does seem to foster mindfulness.

I'll get my butt over there again today, I suppose, though what I really want to do is watch TV and eat candy. It'll be 60-something degress outside today. It's sunny, too. The smell of spring is beginning to kick in in earnest. I'm dyin'.

About here is usually where I fall apart for awhile. I feel so sensitive and sad. When I let myself pay attention, I realize I'm also joyful and hopeful. And really quite cranky. I space out and pull hair or worse to try to keep the level of emotional stimulation manageable. I just want to escape, to go to sleep until about September.

I have commited myself to weathering the spring and summer more bravely this year, for the sake of my future child. I want some solid practice at getting through emotionally stimulating circumstances and remaining grounded and present. Today that means going outside and facing the ferocious beauty of sixty degrees and sunny. It also means doing my pages, my yoga and my ACIM practice.

My other practice, the AW, is ending. My feelings about that are very mixed. I know I've made some progress over the last few months, but it doesn't look or feel like creative progress, and I'm not sure how much of it is attributable to the AW. I have enjoyed blogging and connecting with all of you, and I hope to keep up both of those things. Artist Dates and Morning Pages are also clearly helpful to me, and I am staying with them. But if this program has helped me, why haven't I, for instance, picked up an instrument for over a week? Why do I let weeks go by between times spent working on my new song(s)?

One possible answer is that I have found the Artist's Way to be very ambition-oriented, and this aspect of the program has not worked well for me. In fact, it has caused some inner conflict. I have played along as best I could to get as much out of this as possible, but now that it's ending I need to come clean, with myself most of all: I could give a rat's ass about making records or even playing out right now. I want to do it sometime because I don't want to not have done it at the end of my days, but when I think about pursuing that sort of thing now, even casually, I just feel tired - and phony. I wish the AW had been more about letting myself learn to play without the taint of all those friggin' timelines. My only real ambitions right now are to have a child and improve my spiritual practice. I can't quite wrap my head around directing energy toward my musical "career" while all I really want to be doing is rocking a baby and making pies. Thinking about the recordings I'd like to make someday has made sitting down at the piano a stressful rather than a relaxing experience lately. So I've barely done it. Is this resistance?

Yes. Yes, it is. It's resistance because playing, writing and generally channeling my creative energy more productively - letting it flow instead of keeping it bottled up - could only help me, at this or at any time in my life. I don't want to be justifying not playing for this or any reason. However. If this does happen to be the reason I don't want to play now, then I need to clear it the hell out. I just plain don't want to connect those activities to a career plan or timeline right now. And I'm nearly positive that the reason musical ambition and plans make me queasy at present is NOT because I'm afraid, self-censoring or otherwise blocked, but simply that I have other priorities, one in particular, with which I will let NOTHING interfere.

The way I figure it, if I can cleanse my mind of all that career plan crap, I might just start to play again for the joy of it. Then I'll be more likely to feel up to offering and accepting invitations to play with others, for fun. If there happen to be other perks - as in, I'm singing for fun but it happens to be in a studio or on a stage (and that has actually happened more often than you'd think) - great. That's cool, too. I just won't be as likely to get mentally derailed and reblocked if I don't think about it all in terms of a career path right now. I've got other stuff going on. I have made a different choice.

I need to peruse "Walking In This World" more carefully before I commit to it, to confirm my impression that it is more oriented toward introspective work than career moves. (If anyone has any knowledge about or experience with the book in this regard, I'd appreciate hearing it.) Making a commitment I won't keep will do me no good. For now, I think I may just improvise for a couple of weeks and see what happens.

AAHHHHH.