In order to retrieve your creativity, you need to find it. I ask you to do this by an apparently pointless process I call the morning pages. … Put simply, the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness: “Oh, god, another morning. I have NOTHING to say. I need to wash the curtains. Did I get my laundry yesterday?” Blah, blah, blah …” They might also, more ingloriously, be called brain drain, since that is one of their main functions. …
Very often, a week of [morning pages] insights will be followed by a week of sluggishness. The morning pages will seem pointless. They are not. What you are learning to do, writing them even when you are tired and they seem dull, is to rest on the page. This is very important. Marathon runners suggest you log ten slow miles for every fast one. The same holds true for creativity. …
Thanks to the morning pages we learn what we want and ultimately become willing to make the changes needed to get it. But not without a tantrum. And not without a kriya, a Sanskrit word meaning a spiritual emergency or surrender. (I always think of kriyas as spiritual seizures. Perhaps they should be spelled crias because they are cries of the soul as it is wrung though changes.)
We all know what a kriya looks like: it is the bad case of the flu right after you’ve broken up with your lover. It’s the rotten head cold and bronchial cough that announces you’ve abused your health to meet an unreachable work deadline. That asthma attack out of nowhere when you’ve just done a round of caretaking your alcoholic sibling? That’s a kriya, too. …
In twelve-step groups, kriyas are often called surrenders. People are told to just let go. And they would if they knew what they were holding on to. With the morning pages in place and the artist dates in motion, the radio set stands half a chance of picking up the message you are sending and/or receiving. The pages round up the usual suspects. They mention the small hurts we prefer to ignore, the large successes we’ve failed to acknowledge. In short, the morning pages point the way to reality: this is how you’re feeling; what do you make of that?
And what we make of that is often art.
People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.
Transcribed by me from pages 9–10, 75, 81–82 of my tenth anniversary edition of The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity © 1992, 2002, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, NY.
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