When we are angry or depressed in our creativity, we have misplaced our power. We have allowed someone else to determine our worth, and then we are angry at being undervalued.
What is focus and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?
From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour, and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.
Leap, and the net will appear.
I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.
The clock is ticking and you’re hearing the beat. You stop by a museum shop, sign your name on a scuba-diving sheet, and commit yourself to Saturday mornings in the deep end. You’re either losing your mind – or gaining your soul. Life is meant to be an artist date. That’s why we were created.
My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.
Beauty, you’re under arrest. I have a camera, and I’m not afraid to use it.
When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty to them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has almost the embodiment of a prayer.
Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing and regrouping.
Perfectionism doesn’t believe in practice shots. It doesn’t believe in improvement. Perfectionism has never heard that anything worth doing is worth doing badly – and that if we allow ourselves to do something badly we might in time become quite good at it. Perfectionism measures our beginner’s work against the finished work of masters. Perfectionism thrives on comparison and competition. It doesn’t know how to say, “Good try,” or “Job well done.” The critic does not believe in creative glee – or any glee at all, for that matter. No, perfectionism is a serious matter.
In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do – spiritual sit-ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery.
Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.
When we seek daily spiritual guidance, we are guided toward the next step forward for our art. Sometimes the step is very small. Sometimes the step is, “Wait. Not now.” Sometimes the step is, “Work on something else for a while.” When we are open to Divine Guidance, we will receive it. It will come to us as the hunch, the inkling, the itch. It will come to us as timely conversations with others. It will come to us in many ways – but it will come.
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. SENECA.
The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain – the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, “unutterably alone.” More than anything else, attention is an act of connection.
Our tears prepare the ground for our future growth. Without this creative moistening, we may remain barren. We must allow the bolt of pain to strike us. Remember, this is useful pain; lightning illuminates.
Listening to the siren song of more, we are deaf to the still small voice waiting in our soul to whisper, ‘You’re enough.
When we forget ourselves, when we let go of being good and just settle into just being a writer, we begin to have the experience of writing through us. We retire as the self-conscious author and become something else – the vehicle for self-expression. When we are just the vehicle, the storyteller and not the point of the story, we often write very well – we certainly write more easily.
Every time you don’t follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness. SHAKTI GAWAIN Blocked.