The Artist's Way (9 page)

More than anything else, creative recovery is an exercise in open-mindedness. Again, picture your mind as that room with the door slightly ajar. Nudging the door open a bit more is what makes for open-mindedness. Begin, this week, to consciously practice opening your mind.

Very often, a creative block manifests itself as an addiction to fantasy. Rather than working or living the now, we spin our wheels and indulge in daydreams of could have, would have, should have. One of the great misconceptions about the artistic life is that it entails great swathes of aimlessness. The truth is that a creative life involves great swathes of attention. Attention is a way to connect and survive.

“Flora and fauna reports,” I used to call the long, winding letters from my grandmother. “The forsythia is starting and this morning I saw my first robin…. The roses are holding even in this heat…. The sumac has turned and that little maple down by the mailbox…. My Christmas cactus is getting ready….”

I followed my grandmother's life like a long home movie: a shot of this and a shot of that, spliced together with no pattern that I could ever see. “Dad's cough is getting worse…. The little Shetland looks like she'll drop her foal early…. Joanne is back in the hospital at Anna…. We named the new boxer Trixie and she likes to sleep in my cactus bed—can you imagine?”

I could imagine. Her letters made that easy. Life through grandma's eyes was a series of small miracles: the wild tiger lilies under the cottonwoods in June; the quick lizard scooting under the gray river rock she admired for its satiny finish. Her letters clocked the seasons of the year and her life. She lived until she was eighty, and the letters came until the very end. When she died, it was as suddenly as her Christmas cactus: here today, gone tomorrow. She left behind her letters and her husband of sixty-two years. Her husband, my grandfather Daddy Howard, an elegant rascal with a gambler's smile and a loser's luck, had made and lost several fortunes, the last of them permanently. He drank them away, gambled them away, tossed them away the way she threw crumbs to her birds. He squandered life's big chances the way she savored the small ones. “That man,” my mother would say.

My grandmother lived with that man in tiled Spanish houses, in trailers, in a tiny cabin halfway up a mountain, in a
railroad flat, and, finally, in a house made out of ticky-tacky where they all looked just the same. “I don't know how she stands it,” my mother would say, furious with my grandfather for some new misadventure. She meant she didn't know why.

The truth is, we all knew how she stood it. She stood it by standing knee-deep in the flow of life and paying close attention.

My grandmother was gone before I learned the lesson her letters were teaching: survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention. Yes, her letters said, Dad's cough is getting worse, we have lost the house, there is no money and no work, but the tiger lilies are blooming, the lizard has found that spot of sun, the roses are holding despite the heat.

My grandmother knew what a painful life had taught her: success or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

In a year when a long and rewarding love affair was lurching gracelessly away from the center of her life, the writer May Sarton kept
A
Journal
of
a
Solitude.
In it, she records coming home from a particularly painful weekend with her lover. Entering her empty house, “I was stopped by the threshold of my study by a ray on a Korean chrysanthemum, lighting it up like a spotlight, deep red petals and Chinese yellow center…. Seeing it was like getting a transfusion of autumn light.”

It's no accident that May Sarton uses the word
transfusion.
The loss of her lover was a wound, and in her responses to that chrysanthemum, in the act of paying attention, Sarton's healing began.

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. I learned this the way I have learned most things—quite by accident.

When my first marriage blew apart, I took a lonely house in the Hollywood Hills. My plan was simple. I would weather
my loss alone. I would see no one, and no one would see me, until the worst of the pain was over. I would take long, solitary walks, and I would suffer. As it happened, I did take those walks, but they did not go as planned.

Two curves up the road behind my house, I met a gray striped cat. This cat lived in a vivid blue house with a large sheepdog she clearly disliked. I learned all this despite myself in a week's walking. We began to have little visits, that cat and I, and then long talks of all we had in common, lonely women.

Both of us admired an extravagant salmon rose that had wandered across a neighboring fence. Both of us like watching the lavender float of jacaranda blossoms as they shook loose from their moorings. Alice (I heard her called inside one afternoon) would bat at them with her paw.

By the time the jacarandas were done, an unattractive slatted fence had been added to contain the rose garden. By then, I had extended my walks a mile farther up and added to my fellowship other cats, dogs, and children. By the time the salmon rose disappeared behind its fence, I had found a house higher up with a walled Moorish garden and a vitriolic parrot I grew fond of. Colorful, opinionated, highly dramatic, he reminded me of my ex-husband. Pain had become something more valuable: experience.

Writing about attention, I see that I have written a good deal about pain. This is no coincidence. It may be different for others, but pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right. Yesterday the marriage may have ended. Tomorrow the cat may die. The phone call from the lover, for all my waiting, may not ever come, but just at the moment, just now, that's all right. I am breathing in and out. Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty.

The night my mother died, I got the call, took my sweater, and set out up the hill behind my house. A great snowy moon was rising behind the palm trees. Later that night, it floated
above the garden, washing the cactus silver. When I think now about my mother's death, I remember that snowy moon.

The poet William Meredith has observed that the worst that can be said of a man is that “he did not pay attention.” When I think of my grandmother, I remember her gardening, one small, brown breast slipping unexpectedly free from the halter top of the little print dress she made for herself each summer. I remember her pointing down the steep slope from the home she was about to lose, to the cottonwoods in the wash below. “The ponies like them for their shade,” she said. “I like them because they go all silvery in their green.”

 TASKS