Week 1 has gone by really quickly!  It’s also been a very successful week, I think.  I purchased two new Moleskine journals to do my Artist’s Way work (yes, they’re pricey, but they’re so nice to write in, so why not?) and I’m using the light pink one for morning pages and the dark pink one for exercises, tasks, and check-ins.

The theme of Week 1 is “Recovering a Sense of Safety.”

Morning pages: 7/7
The morning pages are three pages of longhand, stream-of-conscious writing.  It doesn’t matter what you write about: just that you write something.  I completed the morning pages all seven days, and even found myself waking up naturally 15 minutes before my alarm clock to do them.  I’ve found the morning pages have been very useful to me to be able to get out all my thoughts and basically do a “brain drain” and start each day with a fresh and clear mind.  I’ve also made some personal discoveries (some really obvious ones too… for example, how nice it is to live in a clean and clutter-free home… duh!) and thought about creative plans and goals for the future.

Artist date: completed
The artist date is basically time you give yourself to re-fill your creative well.  It needn’t be expensive or elaborate; it’s meant to give you time and inspiration.  For my artist date this week, I attended a performance of Under Milk Wood performed at Procunier Hall at the Palace Theatre.  I have a number of friends who worked on the show, and wanted to support them.  As well, I was unfamiliar with the show, and was interested in seeing something new.  It was presented in readers theatre style, which was really interesting to see.  I also got a glass of wine with my ticket.  Bonus!

Thoughts:
I completed some, but not all, of the exercises in this chapter, and I also adapted some of the exercises.  I worked with affirmations, remembering past champions of my creative self-worth (nice memories of friends and family), and practicing turning negative statements into positive ones.  My favourite task was “5 imaginary lives” (if you had five other lives to lead, what would you do in each of them?).  One of mine would definitely be a detective.

Doing the morning pages has helped inspire me to go back to my two youth theatre plays and start fixing them up so I can put them on this website for people to purchase performance rights to!  They’re good plays, and they’re not doing anybody any good by just sitting and gathering dust in a drawer.  Eventually I want to turn my murder mystery play into a trilogy.  I’ve started brainstorming some ideas.

Looking forward to Week 2!