Walking Through Walls
What tricks have you learned that will help you survive?
What do Will Rogers, John Phillip Sousa, Harry Houdini and Helen Keller have in common?
Among other things, they were the four ghosts featured in a musical we performed in campgrounds across America for 72 nights in a row, icons who came back from the dead to teach us how to walk through walls.
I am not making this up.
As a child, I performed a lot on the road, singing to audiences about how they too could do impossible things.
The ghost of Houdini had a black box with lots of holes about a quarter inch in diameter across all sides. Our musical began with a pre-show, during which the ghostly Houdini would call up two volunteers from the audience to check out the box. The volunteers picked up the box, opened and closed the lid, and verified that it was solid. Then Houdini put someone inside the box.
Sometimes that person was me.
Houdini transported the audience to a world where anything was possible, everything felt real, and the unbelievable became believable. It wasn’t about the illusions or the applause or any real sleight of hand. It was about his ability to make the audience believe in him.
Of course, magic works best when the magician believes the story he is telling to the audience.
Houdini would wave his arms and insert steel rods into the box, in one side and out the other, crisscrossing in the middle. The audience gasped, certain he was spearing the little girl inside, but since no one heard me cry out, no one came up to save me and Houdini continued to insert more steel rods.
A real magician never tells the truth of his magic, but I’m not a magician. I’m not a man manipulating steel rods. I’m just the girl who got speared, so I can say whatever I want.
Here’s the secret: There is no magic in Houdini’s box. I maneuvered around the steel rods by being flexible. It was hard to breathe in there, especially when Houdini would take a long time to insert the rods for dramatic effect, but I could contort myself to fit around them and I could hold my breath for a very long time.
When the box was sufficiently pierced with overlapping rods, Houdini paused and the audience sat in silence. Then as Houdini pulled out each rod, one by one, a trickle of air wafted through the box, and I began to breathe again.
When the last rod was pulled, Houdini opened the lid with a flourish, and the audience braced for carnage. But there I was, standing and smiling, my hands raised in victory, as if nothing had happened.
If you’re reading this, you’ve survived too. You’ve contorted yourself, held your breath, and made it through what once felt impossible.
The trick isn’t in the escape; it’s in the survival. The black box may be riddled with holes, but the air still gets through.
So now I’ll ask you: What have you learned inside the box? What magic have you created in order to survive?
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
~ Tennyson
Art is what we call it when we’re able to create something new that changes someone.
No change, no art.
~Seth Godin
A huge thank you to all of you who are part of this Artist’s Way cohort! The comments section below is designed as a way for you to share your experience this week with other members of our group.
Please answer as many of the following questions as you have time for in the comments section, and feel free to respond to one another as support in our shared journey.
How did it go for you this week?
How many days this week did you do morning pages? How do you feel about this week compared to last week?
How about your artist date? Will you share what you chose to do?
Did you do any of the tasks? If so, which ones? Any discoveries there?
What risks have you taken this week?
Can’t wait to see all your faces next week on Zoom!
Saturday, February 1 at 1:00 PT
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Current Offerings (In-person and Remote)
If you’re in southern California, you’re invited to join me in Foraging for Self-Care: A Nature-Inspired Writing Retreat on March 16 from 9:30-4:30. Reconnect with your writing in nature and in artistic spaces, connecting with an intimate community over a colorful, nourishing lunch. Click here to register.
Artist’s Way group - The Artists’ Way is Julia Cameron’s seminal book on cultivating creativity. There are two main components in her 12-week program: daily Morning Pages (three sheets of unfiltered, anything-goes journaling, written by hand) and weekly Artist’s Dates (solo adventures during which you spend time with your inner artist). Our next cohort will convene for The Summer Solstice on Zoom on Saturday, June 21st at 1:00 PT for 12 weeks of self-directed study and guided support.
Thank you for being on this journey with me. I am grateful for the gift of your presence. Walking this path, knowing so many of you are walking it too, gives me hope. May we recognize our interbeing, with one another and the anima mundi, supporting each other in growth and recovery, like a mycelial network.
Novice to Substack (and to all social media apps): I wrote a weekly check in this morning and appear to have lost the text. Instead it seems I posted the quote from the end of Michelle’s Friday message to the general population responses to her post. Innocuous enough, but now nervous about Substack and the potential for accidentally stepping onto a Substack roller-coaster.
Insipid rewritten check-in for Week 3:
1) yes, MP every day, not always in the morning. I totally fell asleep at the table while writing MP on Monday morning.
2) Artist’s Date (Week 3): created two new sourdough starters by feeding two batches of starter different types of flour (started this project last week, but starters were not mature in time to date them). For this week’s date I made two batches of bread, one made from each starter (overall, a 17-hour process, including the overnight fermentation). Result: spectacular looking bread, tastes delicious, and an interesting experiment: the starters smelled different and otherwise identical loaves smelled and tasted slightly different. The amount of total time the project took dampened my overall enthusiasm and the therapeutic value of this date. Better to stick to shorter projects for now.
3) Did tasks 2-5, but mostly spent my time this week dating my inner sourdough Artist and didn’t put as much effort into tasks (“you get out what you put in” applies). I will do #6 - call a nurturing friend - anticipating that will up the Task benefits.
4) Risks? Getting on Substack currently feels like the biggest risk of the month, although I finally unfollow all weird extraneous and raunchy copious message/email-sending “Stacks” that I unwittingly got enrolled in the first day (does not apply to anyone in this Artist’s Way project - I should follow MORE of you). Additional risk: I called my sister, a big talker-type, and obliged her to hear me out for a change (important family business).
Been thinking a lot about the difference between “artist” and “technician”. I feel like there is about 90% overlap, maybe more. What do you think differentiates the two?
Great post and I love the vibrant imagery of your writing. I can almost imagine myself in the box contorting myself to avoid the rods, but only almost as I have never been that physically flexible. I also find the metaphor of how we contort ourselves just to breathe and survive within the box that we have been put in (or created for ourselves) to be incredibly powerful. It is something I have been thinking about personally and professionally, but also in a cultural context. We all need magic and miracles because that is where hope and inspiration arise from. Yet, I struggle to define and recognize the survival magic that I am already creating.
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Artists' Way
(1) Morning pages - managed to write every day, but this week it was difficult to step into the practice and ritual in a consistent manner. Yesterday the pages were started when I had a break between my morning meetings and completed before I went to bed last night.
(2) I had two artist dates this week. The first was intended as an artist date, but upon reflection it was.
- On Monday, I intentionally and almost completely disconnected from everything, and I took my dad's camera and went out to the coast with only a vague idea of what I was going to do. I visited a lighthouse (my parents loved them), went to beach and took pictures of the ocean, waves, and birds, and on the way back, I came across a weasel playing hide and seek. After that I went to a brewpub where I had about 70 birds watching the beer garden from the power lines, took a hike, enjoyed a sunset, and finished the day at a wine and cheese. The silence and tranquility were powerful, and from the multitudes of photos I shot, I found some beautiful ones (https://www.instagram.com/p/DFKCkOMxBX_/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==).
-On Wednesday, I took myself out to a wine bar in a nearby city (whose downtown I had never spent time in), and spent an hour or so playing with AI tools for image generation. I was pleasantly surprised by what I was able to generate with AI, and the accompanying text that I asked AI to generate made be genuinely chuckle at its humor: https://open.substack.com/pub/foolofatom/p/an-artist-date-with-ai?r=133ypt&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
(3) I did not complete any of the tasks this week, but I do want to go back and tackle some.
(4) I alluded to risk undertaken in my opening paragraph. Lots of introspection on what would be fulfilling professionally and personally. But the real risk was trying to give myself the freedom to focus on the "what" would be fulfilling rather than getting bogged down in either the "why" does this matter or "how" are you going to make this work. To paraphrase/adapt something Michelle shared in a note this week, seeking the thing we need to do to sustain us is a vulnerable journey.