Practical Magic | The Lockdown Artist's Date
Are you struggling to sleep at night, desperately scrolling through Instagram hoping for that hit of inspiration that's going to make you feel alive?
Does your everyday life feel flat and dull and lacking vision?
Consider that your Inner Artist might be starving.
Let me explain. Inside all of us is an inner artist. In Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, she talks about the need to keep one's artist well fed. Just like a child that keeps their parents awake at night because they didn’t get enough attention from their parents during the day, your inner artist needs to be well-fed, sourced and filled with inspiration. You need to have an internal well full of images, sounds and experiences to draw from if you are to live a fully realised creative life.
A Magical Fact
There is an increasing body of evidence that only a minuscule proportion of sensory data – data processed by sound, sight, touch, taste or smell – processed by our unconscious mind actually passes to the conscious mind.
The unconscious mind is capable of processing around 11 million bits per second, a bit being a unit of data. However, the conscious mind is only capable of processing around 50 bits per second.
Consider these two numbers next to each other. Your unconscious mind is collecting sensory data at the rate of 11 million bits per second. Yet your conscious mind, the data that you're actually aware of, is only processing 50 bits per second.
Your senses are taking in a lot more than you think they are.
A Magical Tool
Here's a magical tool to feed and nurture your Inner Artist for pandemic times.
Take yourself on an artist’s date.
I'm paraphrasing Julia Cameron in her book, The Artist’s Way. Give yourself a stretch of time, maybe two hours, half a day, or a whole day, to nurture your creative, unconscious inner artist. Your inner artist is like a child, they want your full attention, so you do not take anyone else on this date. It is you and your inner artist only.
Some of Cameron's ideas for an artist's date include things like visiting a junk shop, seeing an old movie at the independent cinema or going to an amusement park, aquarium or an art gallery. Since most of these things are currently unavailable to us right now, here are a few of my own ideas of how you can start to refill your inner creative well, re-stimulate your unconscious mind, and start to stimulate the creativity that lives within you.
Lockdown Artist Date Ideas
1. Recreate a cinema night in the comfort of your own home.
It's easy to grab your laptop in bed and put on Netflix, but why not set up your lounge like a cinema, make some homemade popcorn, actually plug in that fancy speaker system you have, dress up, pour yourself a cocktail or glass of wine, and choose a film that you wouldn't normally watch. Choose a film that you might snub otherwise, a foreign language film, something that pushes the edges. And remember, don't take anyone else on this date.
Journal your findings afterward. Critique the film, write down scenes that moved you, things that shocked you, and give the whole experience some time and space. Have reverence for the arts that you consume.
2. Take a nature walk.
Rather than rushing through the experience by listening to a podcast or having a phone conversation, take the time to look around you. Collect some interesting items that you find on your way or take photographs of perspectives that catch your eye. Perhaps make some rubbings like you may have done when you were a child; grab some crayon or charcoal and rub the silhouettes of bark, stones or other objects that you find on your walk.
3. Peruse your home selection of photography or art books or visit an online gallery.
If you're stuck at home, why not? Give yourself an hour to peruse your home selection of photography or art books, or go visit an online gallery. Light some candles, grab a notebook and make notes about how different pieces of art make you feel and how they're inspiring you.
Take time for deliberate attention to refill your creative well by interrupting the pattern of the kinds of images that you’re constantly fed online. It's through this process of widening the net that we begin to feel well-sourced and more alive. We start to become richer, more inspired versions of ourselves, and less like the cookie-cutter versions of the people we follow on Instagram.
Your Invitation
I invite you to take your own inner artist on a date this week. Maybe you're not locked down and you can explore in your neighbourhood. Maybe you can make it to a junk shop or do some window shopping. If you're at home, break out your art or craft materials and play.
If you're still experiencing resistance around allowing yourself this stretch of time to indulge your inner artist, I'll leave you with this:
“The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression.” – Brian Sutton Smith
Go refill your well and watch your life become more magical by the day.
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