Creativity & Manifesting Your Dreams

    

Today, I’m going to share some excerpts from a recent essay I sent with my newsletter, PINK DANDELIONS. Not because I don’t want to write something specific for Type M, but because this is what I’m thinking about this week and anything new I tried to write would probably just rehash all this anyway. 

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower 

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees 

Is my destroyer. 

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose 

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. 

 –Dylan Thomas Lately 

I’ve been thinking about what I call “the creative energy of the universe,” what it is, how it operates without and within us, whether it’s simply a phrase to explain the inexplicable–OUR inexplicable–drive to create, thrive, succeed, manifest, or if it is actually somewhere, substantive, other, extra, above. 

    Can we find ways to connect with it or tap into it or use the force, I wonder? Or is it simply a concept? A wordy way to explain an ephemeral feeling that there must be something out there besides ourselves, or something within ourselves beyond flesh? Or both? 

     I believe in manifestation–tapping into the creative energy to make things happen as you want them to. Manifestation is inspiration (one kind of energy) plus action (a different kind of energy). If you set your sights on an accomplishment and take actions to help yourself as best you can, you end up accomplishing your goal, often through circumstances you couldn’t predict.

    That doesn’t mean something magical happened in the sense that saying a prayer or casting a spell made it happen just POOF! Prayers and spells are ways we focus our intentions. If we focus our intentions, we make certain choices in our actions. Our actions cause reactions, often leading to what we envisioned. 

     It’s kind of simple, really. 

    One thing I’m pretty sure of: You can’t really manifest if you don’t know what you want. 

     Now that I’ve accomplished the goal of becoming a published author, I’m not sure what I want. I have a dollar amount in mind for earnings. It’s modest. I don’t want to be famous, but I do want a loyal readership for whom I can create beautiful, entertaining, and uplifting stories. Also a modest number. What I don’t know is how I want to move toward these goals. 

     Traditional publishing? Indie publishing? Selling on Amazon? Selling from my own online shop? Creating a Patreon? Getting an agent? 

     It’s hard to envision the path forward. I’m in a holding pattern. I’m confused. I’m uncertain. I’m a pool a stagnant water. The force isn’t blasting against my roots or driving the flower of creativity through the green stem. 

     Here are some steps I’m going to use to move forward. 

     First, I’m going to get into a regular exercise, meditation, and journaling routine. Eating fewer carbs–especially sugar and pasta–usually helps with any brain fog I’m experiencing. 

     Second, using journaling and visualization and a vision board, I will figure out what I want my personal life and career to look like by this time next year, the year after, and five years from now. If you don’t know where you want to go, you will end up somewhere you probably don’t want to be. This step is crucial. 

     Third, with these outcomes in mind, I will think up definite steps to take and will work toward them every day. Calendar journals work well for this step. 

     Fourth, I will celebrate milestones and actions taken. 

     With some concrete inspiration and goals plus action steps to take, I believe I can create the creative literary and personal life I imagine. Maybe these steps will inspire you as well. Remember, creativity comes in many forms: art, home decor, cooking, writing. You can even see your LIFE as a work of art, one you create every day, each day a brushstroke on the canvas.

Middle Age & The Madness of Art

At the Bangor Pubic Library in Bangor, Maine 

It’s the first of November, and I’m in Maine watching orange and bronze leaves carpet the scraggly grass of the front lawn. Maine’s seasons come in distinct palettes. Cold, white winters. Mud-brown and tender green springs. Blue skies and lakes and florals of summer. And the warm reds, bronzes, and yellows of fall. 

As I head into the middle-aged, downward slope of my fifties, I’m all too aware of the changing seasons of life, as well. The writing goals of young to mid-adulthood, once seeming so achievable, have either mellowed or have become greatly tempered by reality. Time, which used to stretch so deliciously into the future, shortens. I realize that since I haven’t hit those big goals by now, it’s more than likely I never will. Yikes. 

Fortunately, with age also comes perspective. Wisdom, even. Things change. Life gives you opportunities you never expected but also throws up roadblocks couldn’t anticipate. You learn to take things as they come. 

I’ve decided to approach this time of life as an opportunity not only to take stock of my accomplishments but also come to terms with my youthful goal of being a professional writer. 

I mean, I AM a professional. I’ve been published and paid as a short story writer, a journalist, a memoir ghostwriter, and a novelist. However, I have not achieved my goal of “making a living” by the pen. It’s harder to do so since the advent of the ebook and Amazon/KDP, and if you don’t believe me, check out the recent Write-Minded podcast with Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner interviewing Michael Castleman whose new book, The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing, gives all the stats (plus wonderful historical perspective on the industry.) https://podcast.shewrites.com/optimism-and-pessimism-in-book-publishing/

My dream of being a financially-successful author probably would have come to fruition by now if it was going to, so now I’m forced to contemplate what, if anything, I can hope to accomplish, writing-wise, in the second half of my life. 

As often happens, a book I happened upon addressed this issue exactly when I needed it. While visiting my parents in the central part of the state, I went to the cellar to look at some old books stored down there and rediscovered a first edition of May Sarton’s Plant Dreaming Deep I’d picked up somewhere and forgot about. What a treasure! I devoured it over the course of two days and came away feeling refreshed.

Sarton wrote the book in 1968 (the year I was born!) when she was 55 years old and was going through a similar mid-life shift in perspective. She’d just upped and bought an old farmhouse in New Hampshire. Reading her musings on middle age and writing was like reading my own thoughts only in a 1950’s poetic syntax. 

She writes, “The crisis of middle age has to do as much as anything with a catastrophic anxiety about time itself. How has one managed to come to the meridian and still be so far from the real achievement one had dreamed possible at twenty?” She goes on to say, “One does not give up if one is a writing animal, and if one has, over the years, created the channel of routine.”

Aha! I think. I, too, am a writing animal! Perhaps with a little dredging of the routine channel (which to be honest is a little clogged these days), I can continue, like Sarton, to be “happy while I’m writing.” The poet, essayist, and novelist then muses about how her writing falls somewhere in between the critically-acclaimed literary and the popular fiction of her day, which she thinks hampers her success, and concludes that she’ll just hold out hope that her entire body of work will one day be seen and esteemed as a whole. 

Sarton also quotes Henry James: “We work in the dark–we do what we can–we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” [from The Middle Years]

Oh, May Sarton! Oh, Henry James! Thank you for writing, for sharing your gifts with those of us who came to this writing life behind you. I’ll take comfort in your words and dig my channel of routine and stop worrying about financial success. I’ll build my small body of work. I’ll be that writing animal, burrowing along, doing what comes natural to me as breathing. I’ll revel in the madness of art, and that will have to be reward enough.

Read more of Shelley’s thoughts on art, writing, and life in her author newsletter, Pink Dandelions, on Substack. https://shelleyburbank.substack.com/about