Dreaming and the Artist Within

The poem below arrived in my mailbox today.

EXPECTATION COMES BEFORE ACHIEVEMENT

Your aspirations are your possibilities.
If you want to be big, you have to think big.
Your only limits are those of vision.
The more you can dream, the more you can be.

Don’t ever stop dreaming.
For when you cease dreaming,
you cease living.

Cherish your dreams for they are the blueprints
to your ultimate success.
If you don’t have a dream,
how are you going to make it come true?

The greatest achievements always take place
in the framework of great expectations.
Big thinking will always come before big achievement

–Unknown

In the face of my own myriad aspirations — conquering the technical issues of photography, sewing quilts & quilted bags, knitting brilliantly colored objects, capturing pleasing garden scenes with pen and pencil, creating outdoor living space with a garden, and last but not least, parking my behind at the computer several times a week so that I can give voice to the characters elbowing for novel turf — it is easy to lose vision clarity.

Julia Cameron’s Chapter 11 in The Artist’s Way offers valuable reminder to the artist within. Her observation that creative types get crabby and irritable when they don’t ‘do’ their work struck a chord. I spent three hours on Sunday morning crafting beaded jewelry and was a happier person for it.

The process of working the artist within was what I needed (sorely) to reel me back towards a focused vision of my aspirations as a creative. Granted, I am always at risk for overloading my proverbial ice cream dish (see earlier post about Life Balance). But that’s just me. No matter how many interests one is juggling, it is all too easy to let the demands of daily life and the needs of those we love to come between our inner artist and the work that makes our hearts sing.