I took this photo this morning after I did my Morning Pages. I am happy to say that I have done my pages every day for six days. I know it’s easy to do one week and much harder to keep it up for twelve weeks, but I am damn proud of myself for this awesome start.

My artist date was Thursday night. I did a whole little ritual with candles and incense, blessing a couple crystals and also asking for blessings on my friends and family. I wrote all about it, with pictures, on my Goddess Circle blog. It was very spiritual and sacred. I still have my candles on the table, and added a pink handkerchief square with a red silky one on top, then set my binder on top last night to be prepared. This morning it was all set so I just had to light my candles and sit down to write.

This morning my MPs were totally insightful, and I know writing at a makeshift altar helped with that. I started by rambling a little about how I liked having the clear quartz crystal there to take any negativity I may put on the page, and that I would move it through the flame of a candle after writing my pages to cleanse it of the negativity it had collected. I wrote that even though I don’t believe the crystal can physically collect negativity, it can do it symbolically just because I place that meaning on it.

That led me to a huge epiphany about the religion I was raised in (Roman Catholic). As a child I struggled with things like the Eucharist. The priest says prayers and blessings over the wine and wafers, and they “become” the blood and body of Christ. When I was little, I didn’t understand because I thought this was impossible. Adults spoke about how after the blessings, the wine was no longer wine. It sounded like magic to me (even though it didn’t taste any different), but the Church is supposed to be against magic.

Today, for the first time in my almost 29 years of life, I finally understood. The Eucharist is symbolic. Whether Jesus actually performed the magic of changing water into wine (which of course the Church calls a miracle, not magic) is something I will never know. But I do know that the priest can’t physically change wine into blood… and if he could, I wouldn’t want to drink it. But the importance in this is the symbolic nature of the act.

In the same way, I don’t believe that I can do Disney magic, like Cinderella’s fairy godmother does with her wand. But I can make my own magic that changes my perspective on things, or that enhances my prayers and intentions. (I think I wrote this out a lot more eloquently this morning, but Julia advises against reading your own MPs for at least 8 weeks.)

I don’t know if this makes a lot of sense without reading through my whole thought process, and I might be missing a step or two, but that’s the main gist of it.

I am working my way through reading chapter one (finally) and just have to point out that it’s really touching me, and I’m still only a few pages in. In particular I’m getting emotional over the part where she says that shadow artists are often too afraid to do what they really want to do, so they work in careers that are close to it. I am afraid to pursue a career as a published author, so instead I am a librarian where I am surrounded by books written by others. So true, and it makes me want to keep working through The Artist’s Way even more, with a goal of finishing the course with a firm plan for revising my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel, and seeking publication.