Show Me the Money, Julia!

The Artist's Way Week Six: Recovering a Sense of Abundance

I’ve got to be honest: Week six is the first week of the program that feels like false advertising to me. In the teaser for the chapter, Cameron promises she’ll talk about money, but then she basically reprises last week’s lesson about baby steps by tiptoeing right past any real financial talk to sing the praises of small luxuries.

While I wholeheartedly agree with the idea of embracing small luxuries, I can’t help but feel that Cameron is waving her hands at the issue of money as a creative block like she’s either never worried about money or can no longer remember how worrying about money actually felt. In the section where Cameron talks about welcoming luxuries—details about how to pay for them be damned—she follows up an anecdote about a woman who bought a single daisy to remind herself that “her life was abloom with possibility” with a personal anecdote about the time she bought herself…a horse.

As one does.

It’s not that I begrudge Cameron her equestrian pal—I don’t—but I do think that during a pandemic-induced moment of unspeakable inflation that has most of us blinking at prices in the grocery story, a story about woman splurging on a flower resonates with more of us than a story about a woman splurging on a horse.

The first time I read The Artist’s Way, I was newly free of the credit card debt I’d racked up during my years as a community newspaper reporter so grossly underpaid I had to charge my weekly groceries. Even though I was making slightly better money working as an editor at a magazine, my morning pages were filled with handwringing about how quickly it would take to save up a year’s salary because I never wanted to feel like I was one lost credit card from going hungry again. So instead of buying whatever my version of a horse was, I bought myself the peace of mind of a safety net, one saved dollar at a time, and I made lists of free things I could do to have fun—reading and writing and walking on the beach were my nerdly top three.

I understand that Cameron’s trying to make a point about how we can’t expect to feel like we’re in flow as artists if we’re curled up in a ball terrified that we’re one financial misstep from ruin. But Cameron needs to understand that when people are actually curled up in a ball terrified that they’re one financial misstep from ruin, finding flow is probably not their highest priority.

It wasn’t for me, anyway.

But all that time curled up in a ball did teach me to appreciate the free things in life:

It cost nothing to take the prettier of my two walking routes, or watch the clouds swirl across the sky or wave at waving kids hungry for someone to wave back.

It cost nothing to read or write or pause long enough in a busy day to take a few deep breaths.

It cost nothing to let myself dream.

These days—thanks to decades of savings and some luck dodging unemployment—I probably could buy a horse if I wanted one, but because of the days when I couldn’t buy groceries I’m more likely to buy a daisy than a horse. It’s cheaper. It’s prettier. And it certainly produces a lot less horseshit.

Horseshit aside, I’m still a person who watches clouds.

Right now my favorite walk is a two-mile loop through the marsh near my home, and I love to stop for a few seconds on the boardwalk bridge to look out at the scraggly trees under a sky full of ever-shifting clouds.

But what do clouds have to do with my writing?

Not much if you’re the type of person who would so cruelly point out that the two weeks I took off from my novel in progress over the holiday has turned into three as I traipse through the marsh and snap photos that have nothing to do with the subject of my book, thank you very much.

But if we’re to believe Cameron, those clouds have everything to do with my novel in progress because they’re helping to fill my well. Sure my break has turned out to be a smidge longer than I’d planned for it to be, but by starting the new year off by remembering to push away from my desk, look up at clouds, and sigh, there’s a better chance that the way those clouds make me feel about the world—that this world is full of beauty and there’s time enough to breath deep and watch closely—will be woven into the DNA of my book’s heart and soul.

And what about you? What daydreams and little luxuries are filling your well these days?