I got stuck this week, not in the way you are thinking. 

This is week seven of my reflections on Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. For my reflection on week six and the discussion on money and the artist click this link here. 

This week Cameron offered us deep subjects to dig into: jealousy, connecting, listening, taking risks, perfectionism — all of which might need their own week of meditation. But no, my brain was stuck on a phrase from week 6, where I was asked me if I had discovered any creative luxury in my morning pages.

Two days later, I am still thinking… what the heck is creative luxury?

Let’s discuss.

What is Creative Luxury?

Let’s start with luxury. 

A luxury item is a purse or clothes or watch or apartment. They are high end, expensive and certainly an indulgence. You do not need luxury to survive. In a design, creating luxury means using gold, deep rich colors, gemlike tones, shiny, vibrant, classy and queenly. So a Luxury is …

Wealth. Richness. Quality. Grandeur. Opulence.

What about creative poverty? 

It is a drought, 

emptiness

lacking 

avoiding 

lethargy

mindlessness

auto play

scrolling through a feed

surfing down the rabbit hole that is the internet.

I feel terribly familiar with creative poverty. It is exactly what I’m trying to avoid. Last week we spoke about money and the artist and asked ourselves what does wealth mean to us when creating? Well, we can focus instead on creative luxury. This means indulging your inner daydreamer, taking a trip to Ireland in your mind, imagine eating at cafes, Irish breakfast tea, riding the trains, hiking the countryside. The next step would be to start actually planning your trip, finding where you’d stay and where you’d eat. For now we’ll just indulge in the daydream. Creative luxury is giving yourself the time to do the daydreaming. Because its not about buying things, having better tools, more paintbrushes, but more about doing things.

“Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite — getting something down.” 

Julia Cameron, the Artist’s Way

Also, It is not necessarily about entertainment, not passively at least, not watching your shows or twitch streamer. It is about engagement on a deeper level, a mindset of fun. It is focused and yet carefree. Artist dates are this way too.

It’s playing creatively. You’re going into a game, like Elden Ring, and instead of following the rules, you pretend to live there. You go on a walk, meditate on the beach, ignoring the monsters. Pretend to have conversations with the guy by the fire who is trying to kill you. Imagining why he got to be this way. So immediately hostile toward you. Does he remember the one time I snuck up behind him to kill him first? But he comes back to life. Does he resent me for that one time? Does he remember me? Can we work it out without using our weapons? This world only exists in my head, or if I draw it. 

Where else can we find creative luxury? 

It’s shopping like you’re on a game show.

Recording your day-to-day life and making it into a dramatic movie trailer.

Dressing up to sing and dance in your living room.

These are great ideas for artist dates, by the way. I’m in. Are you?

How to take creative risks

This is week the Artist’s Way encouraged us to take risks, because we often “deny ourselves” and “talk ourselves out of risk”. We may feel “stifled, smothered, despairing, bored” but “we do feel safe”.

My first thought about risk leans towards recklessness: bungee jumping. skydiving, zip lining down a mountain, traveling far away to countries by myself, where I don’t speak or read the language. These are hard to do spontaneously. Do I ever take creative risks?

Do I try to draw something or design or create, knowing it is an enormous challenge and I will fail spectacularly, but then doing it anyway? Is this about putting your voice out there, writing a book that may not have a message people will like? Talking about things no one else does in your book, but you want to. Submitting a query to an agent. Asking someone to read your new book, or critique your drawing. These sound like creative risks. You’re risking your inner artist, your creative child, being rejected and hurt by them. But the Artist’s Way has taught us how to accept the hurts, the past criticisms, and heal from them. So maybe now is the time to take on some creative risks. 

How do we do that?

Maybe we take an information diet. Its a idea proposed by a new book by Nathan Anderson, called In Emergency Break Glass. I might just need to put this on my reading list. You can read an excerpt at this link. Give up some technology for peace of mind. What an idea! Give up YouTube and make my own animations! Crazy! Play games without a guide or knowing how to beat this boss or solve this puzzle! What insanity!

We can take creative risks by avoid the perfectionist in our brain “who is never satisfied”, who is that little voice “the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough — that we should try again.” Don’t listen to them! Instead, we’ll start by “accepting that anything worth doing might even be worth doing badly.”

This is what it means to follow the Artist’s Way. 

Actual check in, week seven

Morning pages: Every day this week I daydreamed, sometimes about my stories or other stories, but none of them were very risky. Mostly I was striving for creative luxury, so I took a trip to Ireland one morning.

Artist Date: This is cheating, but I made the collage for this week as my artist date. It was tricky since I didn’t have real magazines. I used the library app called Flipster, and I took screenshots of my favorite pages. I cropped them into squares and made this collage of favorites. Maybe next week I’ll do something risky. 

Moments of synchronicity: Yes, I reconnected with an artist, friend, Nikki Kinkaid, and she is going to start following the Artist Way more closely. Interestingly, she first suggested I look into the book, and my enthusiasm for it has inspired her. I was hoping to discuss this with someone and now I can.

Other breakthroughs or significant insights: When I’m focused more on my health and recovery and not doing all the tasks for the week, I feel like I’m missing out. Like I’m being left behind. I needed to spend more than one week on this week. Seriously!