It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.
Ursula K. Le Guin
If there is one cosmic law I know the consequences of ignoring, it is this one: you cannot create from an empty well. Your creative center, the place where the artist resides, must be fed. She must go spelunking in crystal caves, gorge herself on gory fairy tales, sip 1908 vintage port and curse like a sailor, sleep in a three-hundred-year-old white pine tree, exult like one-hundred-and-three-year-old potter Beatrice Wood, and imbibe succulent art and fresh perspective for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Taking time on retreat or creating a retreat solely to feed your artist, to pamper your muse, sends a powerful message to yourself: “I am a creative person. I see life creatively. I am worth being recharged.”
Prepare
Gather art experiences that delight, stir, excite, and recharge you. Photographs of Camille Claudel’s sculptures, a recording of a Cajun concert, tickets to a Wendy Wasserstein play, directions to a maze garden, a guidebook of nearby architectural sites, a video of Picasso at work—anything that is feasible and animates you.
Your journal and a pen.
See Resources.
Meditative music.
An offering to your muse.
The energy to be outrageous.
Perhaps drawing materials, dance music, drum or rattle, or clay.
Immerse Yourself
If you ever took a good art class (by art I mean writing, film, pottery, weaving, jewelry making, most creative pursuits), you probably have experienced being immersed in your art form. When I was at film school, I would often see two films during the day and another at night. Somewhere in the midst of all that sitting in the dark watching, the deluge would begin. Ideas. An image for a short film, a bit of dialogue for a screenplay, a character’s name. But more important, I would feel creative tension building, the urge to do something, until I could contain it no longer and would have to create.
This practice is about total immersion in the creative minds of others. This means viewing, touching, reading, hearing, swimming in someone else’s mind besides your own. Do not work at any creative endeavor when doing this. Fill yourself up so you can work after your retreat. Pull together a range of arts to gorge yourself on, then work out the mix of what you will do when. If you love movies, watch videos or go see movies you don’t usually consider, perhaps foreign films or documentaries. But also visit three art galleries in a row, eat an arty lunch of French onion soup, tart apples, and wine, then check out a huge pile of art books from the library and some Native American mythology, visit a sculpture garden on the way home, and when you get there curl up with all your books for feasting and musing.
This practice takes a bit of preparation. You will need to assemble a surfeit of art, choosing what will make you swoon and what will irritate you as a grain of sand irritates an oyster, and how you will partake of it in a way that fits your intention and the style of retreat. As always, start with a few questions:
Don’t be upset if you don’t have many answers. Many creative people don’t put much thought into what recharges the grace of creation. We don’t want to look too closely at what works, superstitious that if we do, it might stop. We duck our heads and just get on with it, hoping all will be well, then later wonder why we have run out of energy or worthwhile ideas.
Artist retreats fit well into all four styles of retreat. Retreats in the world are especially common, because to feed your muse you may find yourself strolling through a historic courtyard, attending a museum show, or visiting a public garden. What is important is to have your emotional container in place.
See Where Will You Retreat?: Your Emotional and Physical Containers.
Searching for what you will immerse yourself in can become a wonderful mini-retreat. Carve out an hour for yourself, breathe deeply, and before you start, remember your intention, your holy question, and let it guide you.
Obviously, where you live and what style retreat you have in mind will shape what you immerse yourself in. If there are no art galleries for five hundred miles, if poetry is a dirty word, and the library is closed from lack of funds, you are going to have to search harder for an art form to luxuriate in. But almost everywhere there is a video store. Perhaps they have a hidden section (not near the action-adventure aisle) where you might find videos of art, documentaries, or classic films. Perhaps there is a bookstore or library in a nearby town, with shelves of glistening fiction and poetry, children’s books, and journals by artists-at-work. There is always some kind of architecture and history to discover, a local artist to meet and perhaps watch work, people to watch at a park, the shapes of rocks and trees to study. If you live in a city, the challenge becomes not finding what you want to gulp but choosing carefully from among the riches. Again, your intention acts as an effective filter.
Avoid the intellectual. If you love reading literary criticism or history, avoid it on this retreat. If you tend to be intellectually snobby, read comics, watch a little TV, change your perspective. Also, you do not want to approach this as study, as learning more about your medium. For example, if you are a poet, don’t study poetry. Read it differently than you usually do, quicker or slower, or read poets you poo-poo as beneath you or think too lofty for you to grasp.
When you start to get creatively excited, when ideas begin to surface, do not work. Do not sculpt, paint, or take a photograph. You want to be filling up and holding in the beauty, the passion, the terrible truth of others’ work. When you start to feel like you have to work, that means your tank is filling up. This is one time you do want to top it off. Hold on to your ideas. Build the pressure. If you must make notes, make very brief notes.
If you can, wrap this retreat around a night or a nap, so that you can incubate a dream. Before you go to sleep, ask for a dream. Be ready to catch the fertile dreams that bubble to the surface by keeping a pen and notebook handy.
For All You Nonartists
I’ll bet almost everyone reading this section is thinking, “I can’t do this practice because I’m not an artist. This is only for people who have talent, who can do more than paint by numbers.” To this nasty voice, I can say only that if you continue to treat yourself this way, you will never live. No matter who you are or what you do, if this is what you yearn to do, do it. There simply isn’t enough time in life to play it small.
A Partial List of Mediums to Get You Percolating
See Resources.
Books: Journals by artists, biographies of courageous women, novels about the immensity of life, crisp short stories, incandescent poetry, historical tales.
Films: Classic videos, interviews with visionaries, documentaries about women, your favorite films of all time.
Theater: Community, on video, Broadway, off-Broadway, reading plays aloud, radio dramas, NPR.
Visual Art: Murals on a street corner, Picasso fragments of faces, visual history of art, children’s drawings on a library wall, formations of stones, the turret on the downtown bank, display windows, quilts, hats, costumes.
Sculpture: Museums, sculpture gardens, bowls in your home, sand on the beach, woodworks, landscapes, plant shapes, trees.
Dance: Modern, ballet, Sufi, on TV, on video, in a theater.
Storytelling: At the library, on tape, at a storytelling workshop or festival.
Music: Bach fugues, Telemann symphonies, gospel music, trance dance music, Tibetan bells, Thelonious Monk, the Beatles.
Calling the Muse
In Greek mythology, the Muses were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the Goddess of memory who knew everything that had happened since the beginning of time. The Muses were patrons of the creative arts. As archetypes, muses represent the inner source of exquisite energy that artists dream of having flow through them when producing (hopefully effortlessly) a creative work.
Developing a relationship with your muse is another way of recharging your creative center. This practice is about familiarizing yourself with and then kneeling down to the part of you, or the part of the Divine, that inspires your creativity.
Center yourself however you choose. When you are ready, bring your muse into your mind’s eye. What does she or he look like? Spend a few moments sensing details. What is she wearing? What does she smell like? What is she surrounded by? Notice the details. Perhaps she takes your hand. Does the muse have anything to say? Does the muse demand anything from you?
See Good Ways to Listen: I Am Enough and Opening Ceremony.
Draw, write, sculpt, sing, dance what you saw, sensed, or felt about your muse. Work through worries about whether you have any ability or whether this is a real encounter and the feeling that you have nothing to say. Develop a relationship to this side of you. It may be a struggle. It may take a few tries. That’s okay.
Create an invocation for your muse. It could be a chant, a prayer, a poem, a dance, or a drawing. You may want to dialogue with your muse, asking her what will help her flow through you. This is an invocation you can carry back with you, to use before you create.
End by making an offering to the muse. How can you show her you honor her? Build a shrine in your backyard, bury your litany of doubts about your artistic abilities, mail the check for that series of drawing classes, or teach a child how to play the piano. This offering must speak to your intention to honor the ineffable grace of the muse. “To imagine the muse is to bring spirit into form. Every activity of the creative process requires that we bring spirit into form, that we create a vessel—ourselves or a work of art—that can hold spirit,” writes Deena Metzger in Writing for Your Life. This practice was inspired by her writing about the muse.
Be Outrageous
Routine parches the artist. Sameness breeds cookie-cutter creativity. Devote all or part of your retreat to being outrageous, the definition of which in this context is “extremely unusual or unconventional; extraordinary and beyond all reason; and extravagant or immoderate.”
Kind of daring, isn’t it? How far can you go? Does being outrageous fit your intention? How will it work on a retreat? What is your point in being outrageous? What will it serve? Sometimes the only way to learn is by doing and seeing how it feels. Does it feed you or just terrorize you? If you feel fear, of whom are you afraid? Or perhaps being outrageous reawakens a playful joy, a moment of weightlessness, free from propriety at last!
What will you do? Paint your body blue? Sunbathe naked? Eat ice cream with your hands? Sleep on a different side of the bed? Eat seaweed for lunch? Bake cookies and eat as many as you want for dinner? Stay up all night and read erotic fiction? Leave a gift for a friend and never tell her who it is from? Write a letter to a friend who hurt your feelings (whether yesterday or ten years ago), telling her why you are hurt? Experiment in an artistic discipline you absolutely know you can’t do and not care how it comes out? Walk in the desert and scream? Start a project that you don’t think you’ll live long enough to finish? Wear a cape? Live in silence for a week? Be alone with nothing to do for two days? Sleep naked?
What does your artist need you to shake up? What will wake you up? Sometimes even subtle shifts feed your creative center. Note: for those of us with addictive personalities, this is not an invitation to drink a gallon of vodka and invite a boat full of Russian sailors over or to take a new credit card out for a romp. Moderation can still be present. This is healthy outrageousness.
See Good Ways to Listen: Shadow Comfort.
Stories
Here is Deena Metzger’s story of how she came to take a year off to retreat and write. It is from her extraordinary book Writing for Your Life.
A year after we imagined a year off, my dear friend Barbara Myerhoff died. Alerted to the suddenness of death, I regretted how consistently I had subordinated the inclinations of the imagination to more practical concerns, and I determined to take time to redefine and recommit myself. Despite difficulties, I quickly arranged to take an extended leave from my work. For the first time in my life, I had time to write, and the writer within, who had always had second-class status, became a full citizen with a newfound ability to determine the course of her life. Priorities and considerations that had been determined previously by the roles of mother, breadwinner, and teacher were reconsidered and renegotiated.
Before the retreat, I did not know that I could maintain two absolute commitments; afterward, this seemed possible.
For Retreats in the World
You may often find yourself in public on this type of retreat, doing all or part of your retreat in an art gallery or movie theater or while looking at architecture. Planning takes on a more important role: to avoid disappointment (a closed museum) or stress (getting caught in rush hour). Give some thought to where you will go when. Get directions, call to see if places are open, choose off times to visit. Also, designate a way to maintain your retreat container. This protects you from the enervating influences of things like rude clerks, smelly bathrooms, and crowded buses, which can rob you of your intentionality and the depth of your sacred time.
See Where Will You Retreat?: Creating Emotional Support.
See Retreat Plans: A Two-Day Artist Retreat.
For Long Retreats
Although these practices were not written with a working retreat in mind, on a longer retreat in which you wish to jump-start a project, one way to approach it is to spend the first two or three days immersing yourself in outrageous, playful, liberating behavior, art of all kinds, and the invoking of your muse. All the while you feel the tension of wanting to work arising, but you hold, hold it until you absolutely cannot hold it anymore. At that point you allow yourself to entertain in your mind’s eye (or ear) only—not on paper, canvas, piano, or cloth yet—what you will do. Again, hold the tension until the painting you want to paint, the piece of music you want to compose, the mathematical equation you are trying to unravel becomes clear in your mind. It will not appear all at once, complete. What does appear may not be the beginning. It will be part of what you are searching for. Hold that until it gets too big for your mind and until you are sure you will lose it. Only then make notes: write, play, paint, compute to capture it. When you have recorded your idea, go back to some art immersion or muse calling or other play, and build up some more tension. Tell yourself you cannot work until the next part of your work is clear in your head, like a movie, soundtrack, or giant billboard. Then record that part. Continue this way throughout your retreat.
If you try this process, an inner voice may say discouraging things: “You’ll forget something important.” If you feel an idea slipping away, stop wherever you are, take a deep breath, let go of your grasping fear, and relax. The voice will also say, “This is too much playing, this isn’t productive. You could be getting so much more work done.” Perhaps true, but probably not. Either way, working is not the point. The point is, you are on retreat. This is not your usual world. This way of working requires radical trust in your own imagination, in your worth as an artist. Do you deserve to be fed?
For Mini-Retreats
Calling the muse works well as a mini-retreat, as does doing something outrageous. If you have only an hour or two, be sure to give yourself an art experience that really curls your toes with delight and newness. To feel a real recharging, you may need to do several mini-retreats close together. The more time you can grab in a row, the more you will experience the spell of this practice.
See Retreat Plans: A Half-Hour Jump-Starting Your Creativity Retreat.
For Retreats with Others
You can support one another on this quest by planning your immersion, enjoying all or part of it together, and not discussing it afterward except in terms of feelings. This is not the time for intellectual art dissection. Instead, talk about how the poem made you feel. What images came to mind? What memories? How does your body feel? Also, if nascent ideas begin to come to you, do not share them with your friends. Nothing will fritter away the inspiration faster.
A friend can be helpful on this retreat in two additional ways. First, if you choose to go out into the world for your art, you can act as containers for each other, maintaining a silent and inward attitude. This is often easier to do with someone than alone. Second, you can read aloud to each other, especially poetry or plays. This helps these mediums to come alive.
When doing an artist retreat with a friend, beware of catering to her tastes or she to yours. If she wants to watch twelve Audrey Hepburn movies in a row and you want to watch only one and then see some Kabuki or leaf through a bunch of Ansel Adams photography books, then please, separate.
If you are working with a larger group that shares the same interests—for example, a group of potters—you might be able to gain access to an experience that an individual couldn’t, like watching a master potter work or being alone in a pottery exhibit at a museum after hours. After sharing your art immersion, gather in a circle. Place a candle in the center of the circle, darken the room, and invite each person to call out feeling and sensory words she felt when viewing the art. As each person speaks, a web of beauty is spun overhead, deepening and expanding the experience for all.
Another way a group can be supportive is to help you move from the feasting stage into the working stage. For example, if you are part of an ongoing writers’ group, each of you might retreat alone on a particular weekend, doing whatever you wish to feed your artist, then come together as a group, not to share your ideas but to voice your commitment to what you will do next with your work. “I will write one short story based on my thoughts in the next two weeks.” “I will honor my need to feed my artist by doing this retreat again this weekend and not working until I can’t bear the pressure.”