The Dog was checking out one of my sketches and hesitated to give it back. ‘I envy you your talent,’ he said, ’cause it lets you do something few people can… you can bring your dreams to life’.

‘Yah!’ I thought, ‘and if it was that easy…!’

Just then, though, a maddeningly calm voice in my head asked ‘how do you know it isn’t?’ which set off a mental chain reaction that lead to a startling discovery.

Despite all I’ve said about books like ‘Psycho-Cybernetics’ and ‘The Secret’,  and despite having used them to make some of my dreams come true, I never thought to apply their principals to my art. Instead, even before trying to draw again in June I, apparently, decided that the best I’d be able to do now would not be as good as it was when I quit years ago, and that I’d never be good enough to get paid for my art.

Of course, it wasn’t a conscious descision, but once I realized what I’d done… or ‘failed to do’… I recalled two of the common principals of those books… that one must envision themselves as doing or being something in order for it to happen in the real world… and that one must set their ‘will’ aside and allow themselves (their bodies) and their lives to fulfil their maximum potential. That reminded me of the fact that I don’t always know what I’m going to draw and that I’ve often found consciously deciding ‘what’ to draw and ‘how’ usually lead to less than satifactory results, while ‘letting my hand do its thing’ usually got me better sketches, or even showed me I could do things I didn’t know I could.

Then, for perhaps the first time in my life, I set aside what I figured I ‘knew’ and openned my mind to the potentials and possibilities this realization presented, and realized that if I could find a way to apply the same processes to my art as I’d applied to getting divorced, buying a house, and fining love, I might one day find myself living the life of a successful artist!

Now, I’ve just got to figure out how…!