Discovering Big Magic

Last week, thanks to a suggestion from my friend Brooke, I read Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic.  It was one of those experiences where you read or hear something at exactly the moment you need to read or hear it.  Maybe you've been told the same message before but this fifth, twelfth, hundredth time it clicks in a way that it never did before.  That's what reading her book was like for me.  

Big Magic got me thinking about how long I've let creativity live in a shadow world that I was ignoring.  Deciding to write this book about my camp experience was like creaking open a door and peaking into a dark room, uncertain about whether to go inside.  It was a sudden realization that I hadn't given myself permission to cross the threshold.  I hadn't given myself over to writing yet.  

Yes, I have been speaking it into the universe that my goal is to publish.  Yes, I've been doing the work behind the scenes to learn more about craft work and attending writing sprints and talking to Greta and writing this blog and clocking in the word counts, but there was still a finite feeling to it all.  As in, "this will be something I accomplish in my life but who knows what will really come of it, or come of me as a writer, or come of what I'm doing, or if anyone will care, or if I'm really any good, or, or, or..."

But the truth is, writing this book is about much more than I realized.  This is about something that lives inside of me that I'm trying to express.  This is about creativity in the raw and vulnerable places.  It's about curiosity.  It's not just one creaking door but a world full of doors swung wide open to the possibilities that lay beyond. 

And what is beyond, for me, is the realization that I want to live a creative life.  Whatever flows from that, whether inward or outward, will bring goodness with it.  There is nothing finite about creativity, which means of course, that there is nothing finite about me.  The explorer in me is really looking forward to all there is to discover.

(Oh, and I am almost finished with Chapter 5.)

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