Chapter 3: Recovering a Sense of Power

If you’ll recall in Chapter 2, my boundaries were pretty clear: I love making art but not necessarily manufacturing art or packing or shipping it, which is why Etsy has been a challenge for me in the past. But offering printables is a great solution. I don’t have to worry about shipping physical products but this gives me some structure around creating art and an opportunity to engage with fellow artisans on Etsy.

Here’s what I got out of Chapter 3: SYNCHRONICITY!

Julia specifically discusses the phenomenon of answered prayers. How does that feel to you? Too weird and woo-woo? (shrugs shoulders). For me, it just happens. All. The. Time.

But just as Julia describes in her book, there’s still a part of me that wants to explain it away. You might share this nihilistic tendency. Is there a God? Why would He-She care about my little life and whether or not I stick with my one little word for 2015 to keep drawing letters by hand?

Julia says we are much more afraid that there might be a God than we are that there might not be. We dismiss incidents of synchronicity as pure coincidence, otherwise we would have to consider the possibility that someone is watching! 😐

There’s actually a bestselling book series called When God Winks that documents such synchronicities.

Okay, here’s my list of my God Winks just from the last month or so…

1) The same week I decided to teach myself the craft of lettering and started scouring the interwebs for an impossible-to-find manual, my friend Sharon found one in her vast collection of ephemera and gave it to me as a gift.

2) Although art school was rather damaging to my artistic career, I decided that I really missed the critiquing process and that I would love to recreate that experience of having people who are all working on similar projects that could offer constructive criticism and push me further than I would push myself. Within a week of writing all this down, I discovered Minted and joined.

3) When I started to collect my art goals for 2015, I decided that winning a Minted Art Challenge would be one of them. Of course, there were 2,540 submissions. What were the chances, right? This is why my last post was so significant.

4) One of my other art goals for 2015 was to be a West Elm artist. Wouldn’t that be grand? Again, the day after I wrote this in my morning pages, Minted announced their challenge partnership with… wait for it, West Elm! This wasn’t necessarily the miraculous part since they’d partnered with them twice before but the timing was. The fact that they had just ended the last art challenge — everyone was commenting that they never have back-to-back art challenges — felt to me as if someone had picked up the bat phone!

5) We’ve already talked about what inspired me to begin reading The Artist’s Way again.

Something is happening that I can’t quite explain away. I must say that continuing on with the morning pages probably helps me notice these things more than if I hadn’t been writing down my “orders to the universe.”

Julia says in Chapter 3, “If we do, in fact, have to deal with a force beyond ourselves that involves itself in our lives, they we may have to move into action on those previously impossible dreams.”

If things are really happening that are somehow connected with me wanting them to happen… whoa! Perhaps I really am finding my power! The good news is that if lil’ ol’ me can ask for stuff and have it happen, SO CAN YOU!

More on Chapter 3 to come….

© Ria Sharon