Guidance

Ink Drawing (detail). Click on the image to watch its creation.

You often hear people say they are following their intuition. The ‘gut instinct’ that leads you into decision making that is not always ‘logical’. In Robert Frost’s famous poem The Road Not Taken, two roads diverged in a yellow wood and the author took the road less travelled, which made all the difference.

Perhaps he was following his intuition or received some inner guidance prompting him to take that less travelled path. It’s a great illustration of what artists and creatives in every field do, trust their instinct. It is an intangible, unquantified way of moving through the world which has often been discounted as being ‘unscientific’.

Yet many people have had that experience to a greater or lesser degree at some time in their life. They looked left instead of right and avoided an accident, they chose the right colour for wearing to an event, they found the perfect present for their friend. They were following their noses, trusting their gut instinct, using their intuition.

Julia Cameron writes a lot about G O D - Good Orderly Direction in her book The Artist’s Way, that inner urging to try this or go here, to listen in to what your innermost thoughts are telling you. I’ve followed her advice over the past twenty years and learned to trust in my decisions, no matter how wild and far fetched they may seem at the time.

In her new book Living the Artists Way, she talks about Guidance as the fourth tool in living a creative life. The first three tools being Artists Pages, Artists Dates and Walking. With this fourth tool of Guidance, artists in any field are encouraged to polish up their inner listening skills and consciously ask for guidance. It’s not prayer or entreaty, but a question put to life itself. “What about X?” is a form of questioning with X being whatever issue or decision or direction you are thinking about.

This book has just been published and I’m looking forward to starting the six week journey through its pages. I’ve read the introduction which motivated me to get back into my studio and start playing with what was to hand. Cameron always encourages us to ‘start where you are’ and so I did. I had a new piece of paper and ink at hand. I turned on the video camera to document my process, mostly for myself but also to share.

Now when I watch my confident strokes with the brush, I can feel myself trusting the process. When I put the paper on the wall to see what it looked like, I saw the shape of a mountain and a tree. Perhaps that is what my inner guidance was showing me, something my soul was seeking. A token of nature, a questing direction.

I never would have started playing with the ink if I had that end in mind. I would have felt the need to ‘draw a mountain and a tree’ but these motifs emerged from the seeming chaos. Therein lies the joy of creation.

A selection of my Julia Cameron’s books about leading a creative life