Here’s a quick update for those who don’t also receive my other Substack, Creativity as a Way of Life. Over the last fifty years I’ve accumulated hundreds of pages of quotes from books on journaling tools and techniques. Fifteen years ago I held a series of workshops on these subjects in which participants would discuss journaling techniques, and then break to write in their own journals. After, we’d reconvene and those were inclined would read some of what they wrote. In preparation for those workshops, and thinking through afterwords what worked, I made extensive notes.

In the last several months, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to present this material. I believe totally in the value that these techniques offer in reaching an understanding of the hidden patterns of one’s life, the myths that may be guiding us without us realizing it, and the potentials, including creative potential, of a human life. The material however can be dry at best and preachy at worst – i.e. this is what you should be doing in your journal. Last week, reading through old journals, I came across the following entry from 2008:

. . .

What is the most interesting fictional character I can create, talk to, journal? Channel?

He tried something big
And experienced both success and failure
Returned to the woods
To a quiet life
To lick his wounds
He liked it so much, he’s still there.

Reading, thinking
Paddling at dusk and dawn
Student of Taoist poetry
Reader of great books
Friends with interesting people
Has lived with Indians in the bush.
Part Sig Olson
In general, he holds humanity in low regard
A lost cause.

A person who has found peace
On the other side of turmoil, struggle.

. . .

Out of that poem/stream of consciousness evolved Archibald Campbell, wild artist. Archibald lives in a tiny cabin in the woods. There he paints, reads and writes in his journal. I won’t go into more detail here, but if you want to read about the history and background of Archibald, visit this page on the Heron Dance website.

Archibald offers me several advantages. I can write about my own life, about experiences that I’ve had, people I’ve known, in ways that I’d be reluctant to share if I was publishing excerpts from my own private journal. I can embellish as necessary in service of deeper truths. And make up stories from whole cloth when important to a subject I’m exploring. I can show journaling in action, and in way more interesting than simply describing techniques.

When it comes to fictional memoirs, readers often think you are talking about yourself. If, on the other hand, you were to write a non-fiction memoir, readers would wonder how much of it is fiction, embellishment, made up to impress or entertain the reader.

Here's an example from Archibald’s journal.

. . .

Journal entry, November 21.

I’ve been re-reading The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman, a Quaker minister who lived in the mid-seventeen hundreds. His life was a testimony to the power of a difficult question asked gently but persistently. In the process, during the thirty years he travelled up and down the eastern seaboard on foot and horseback, he convinced Quakers to free their slaves. This was before the American Revolution and a hundred years before the Civil War. At the appropriate time, he would ask them:

What does the owning of slaves do to you as a moral person?
What kind of an institution are you handing over to your children?  

No arguments, no accusatory diatribes. No holier-than-thou. Some simple questions based on the belief that we hold, within ourselves, the answers to the questions that determine the quality of our lives, even though we’d often rather avoid those questions. In the process, and largely the result of his efforts, Quakers became the first group or denomination to abandon the ownership of slaves.

. . .

The quality of your life is a direct reflection of the quality of the questions you are willing to ask yourself. Who are you? What do you want out of life? What is stopping you? What decisions have you made in the last 5, 10, 15 years have either improved or reduced the quality of your life?
       - Tony Robbins

Who am I?

 I’m an artist who lives in the woods. I’m a good person, but kind of grouchy. I’m overly protective of my time maybe.

What do I want out of life?

I want a deep, loving relationship with wild nature. I want close, loving friendships with people of generous hearts, of deep integrity, of big dreams. I want to read great books, particularly novels, written by authors who probe deep, who probe the true underlying nature of life with courage and wisdom.

What is stopping you?

Time allocation. But I do center my life around those values and objectives.

My life often seems a desperate search for the time to paint more. The images in my mind are elusive. I try over and over and still fail to capture what I glimpse in the corner of my mind’s eye. Friendships, close friendships, take time. And relationships are difficult. We humans are messy. Spending time with a deeply perceptive author’s book often seems a better use of time. But still, great books sit, sometimes for years, on my bookshelf before I get to them.

The older you get, the shorter time gets. Advanced age becomes more and more about reduced options, and loss – the loss of friends, the loss of energy, the loss of health. A quality life in advanced years requires staying grateful, focused on the good things, the good friends, focused on the birds that return year after year to sing their song. A quality life requires focus on all of the beauty of the natural world that surrounds. Perhaps a quality life at any adult age requires those things.

What decisions have improved or reduced the quality of your life?

Improved:

Living in the woods. Walking in the woods every day, rain or shine. Two particularly close friends. Great books. Painting daily.

Reduced the quality of my life:

Working on commission – they always make me miserable. They require that I try to capture the vision in another’s mind, another’s eye, rather than what is preoccupying my imagination. Every time I finish one, I say no more. But the reality is, I only take on one every five years or so. It takes me that long to forget how the last one went.

Working with the Begerian Gallery in Jackson Hole and Webb Smyth, art dealer. In principle, someone who takes off an artist’s shoulders the task of marketing so that we can concentrate on creative work is a huge blessing. In reality, art dealers are experts on what is currently selling. If that’s you, you are their buddy. If it’s artist Joe Blow down the street, you are a forgotten, distant irritation. If they could figure out a way to do what they do without dealing with artists, they’d do it. Artists irritate them. They prefer hanging out with rich people. If they could paint paintings, or write books, themselves, they’d do it. But they can’t. They lack the imagination.

What’s currently selling is rarely work like mine. What’s currently selling is what some rich guy thinks will impress his friends. I’ve met enough of them at openings to know that they actually have no idea what they are buying or why. If it’s bizarre enough, they buy it for big bucks. It’ll shock their friends, but their friends won’t say anything because they don’t know anything about art either. The Wasteland. A life full of inauthentic people who have made it. Status is everything in that world. In my world, beauty and mystery are everything. Well, not exactly. But they should be. Maybe when I more fully mature.

 So I paint, and rarely sell. Which is fine. I don’t need much money.