Take pleasure in it...
Great advice from my subconscious courtesy of a clowning workshop....
For most of my life, creative training has been a form of pilgrimage.
I’ve sung and spoken, performed one-woman shows, joined improv troupes, danced in pairs and in crowds. I’ve experimented with slam poetry, biographical storytelling, Bollywood dance. I’ve trained in stand-up, rap, creative writing, public speaking, podcasting, clowning.
Looking back, apart from shelter and heat, a creative and spiritual education has been my most extravagant expense.
Reconnecting with Creativity
At the moment, I’m doing The Artist’s Way with a group of friends. It’s a twelve-week course by Julia Cameron, built on a simple, radical premise: creativity is not rare, it is native.
Every Sunday we meet online. We share what we’ve noticed. We try a few exercises together. Cameron asks for two commitments.
The first is the Morning Pages: three pages of unfiltered writing, every day, to clear the mind of its sediment.
The second is the Artist Date: a weekly, solitary ritual of pleasure like colouring, wandering, walking, watching.
These small structures have carried me through a blue-tinged January.
I’m still recovering from surgery, from my insides being quite literally handled by expert hands. My paraplegic gait is off. I work with a brilliant osteopath, but each session leaves me flattened for a day, my body struggling to integrate what he’s done. So the Sunday gatherings, and the quiet architecture of The Artist’s Way, have kept me tethered to something human.
This week, in the Morning Pages, a memory surfaced.
A clowning workshop, years ago, led by Vivian Gladwell of Nose to Nose Clowning. Alongside him was a theatre director — Michael Chase — whose voice I can still hear.
We were moving freely through the space, exaggerating feeling rather than hiding it. And as we moved, Michael would murmur, almost sensually:
That’s it. Take pleasure in it. Take plllleeeeaaasssure in it.
I remember how electric those words felt.
Until then, my creativity had been conscientious, effortful, worthy. It had never occurred to me that it might be pleasurable.
That delight could be an artistic force felt almost indecent.
I had treated my body as a vehicle for my head — the thing that carried my mind around while it did the real work. Even when I danced, I believed intelligence lived somewhere above my neck.
Take pleasure in it.
The phrase lodged itself in me. Slowly, something shifted. I began to notice joy in movement: the quiet intelligence of fascia and bone, the possibility of going large or small, loud or subtle, and listening to what each gesture revealed.
And then, I slid back.
My forties became a decade of endurance. Work losses. Identity fractures. Infertility. Injury. Healing. Limits. Grief. Hunger. Fear. Humiliation.
I hardened.
I tightened.
I endured.
Somewhere along the way, I lost faith in a benevolent creative force. I began to fossilise — jaw clenched, body braced, spirit sealed off from the world. Head down. Get through.
Last week, the whisper returned.
Take pleasure in it.
What if I stopped optimising my suffering?
What if I asked a different question?
How could recovery feel pleasurable?
Where might delight be hiding in rehabilitation?
What would it mean to seek joy? Right now? As deeply as possible?
I can’t control what happens to my body, my family, my life. But I can experiment with how I meet it.
So I am experimenting.
What is the maximum pleasure available in a day spent in bed?
The softest light. The warmest rituals. The brightest food I can manage in ten minutes. The weight of a cat pressed against my ribs. The hush of the house when Pete takes B out and I am left with silence.
Pleasure, I’m learning, is not indulgence.
It is attention. To the miracle of aliveness. Gifted to me and you. Moment to moment.
Where could you risk enjoying something, even in the middle of difficulty?
Take pleasure in it.
Leg over and out,
Erica
PS: I’ve just seen that Vivian and Michael are running this course again this Summer! I will be there - you can join me on this link.