How Artist Dates Help You Reclaim Your Creative Self
On how beauty reawakens the parts of us the world tries to harden.
What keeps a creative spirit open in a life that keeps insisting she close?
I have come back to this question a lot recently, seeking an answer.
Last month, on my birthday, I spent four hours at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia (part of the National Air and Space Museum). It is a place where history hangs above you in perfect stillness. Aircraft from every era line the vast hangar, suspended between motion and rest, the way memory sometimes holds a life.
I joined a 90-minute tour led by a docent who used to be an aviation journalist, and for the first time, I saw aviation not just as machinery, but as story. Plane by plane, he walked us through human longing: the first experiments with flight, the daring innovations of the 1930s, the aircraft that helped end wars, the ones that pushed us beyond our atmosphere.
At one point, we stopped in front of the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. I had seen photographs of it my whole life, but standing before the real thing felt unsettling in a way I didn’t expect.
Beauty and terror often sit close together in history. Awe and ache can live in the same breath.
But it was the Boeing-Stearman that stayed with me.
A 1943 N2S-5 Kaydet, the closest model to the yellow biplane from The English Patient, my favorite film. In that story, flight is longing. Flight is an escape. Flight is the ache of becoming someone new while carrying the weight of who you have been.
The plane is a symbol of reaching for a life larger than your circumstances will allow.
Standing beside the Stearman, I understood why I had chosen this museum for my birthday, and it was not just because I love the beauty of a plane. It was because of what aviation represents to me.
I have always believed my future is something I will have to fly toward, and aviation embodies that possibility. It carries the promise of reinvention, the sense that life can lift in a new direction if you let it.
During the tour, the docent mentioned that there is a Flying Circus in Virginia where you can pay to go up in one of these planes. The thought lit something in me. I had not known that was possible. The idea of climbing into a machine like that, open to wind and sky, felt like discovering a doorway into a version of myself I had not yet met. I am already counting down to spring.
And while I walked through that hangar, it occurred to me that this is what calling the creative self back often looks like:
You go where beauty lives.
You follow the pull of wonder.
You place yourself in the path of something that wakes you up.
This is, at its core, the purpose of what Julia Cameron calls an artist date.
In her infamous book, “The Artist’s Way” (which changed my life in 2019…more on that in a future article), describes artist dates as weekly appointments with your inner artist, small acts of exploration meant to restore curiosity and delight. They are meant to be done alone, because solitude sharpens attention. They are not rewards for productivity. They are practices of becoming.
Artist Dates reawaken the parts of us the world tries to harden, inviting us to move through life with openness instead of obligation. They give the imagination something to respond to.
When life grows too heavy or too fast, creativity often slips into the background. It does not vanish. It waits. What brings it back is not force, but beauty. Romanticizing your life is one way of inviting that beauty closer. It is not naïve or frivolous. It is a deliberate way of seeing that keeps the creative spirit alive.
When you romanticize your days — when you go to a museum just because it stirs you, or sit in a theater alone, or listen to music that lifts your whole inner landscape — you reopen the door to the part of you that makes meaning out of the world.
When you feel disconnected from your creativity, begin there.
Pause.
Seek something beautiful (like planes are to me).
Let it rearrange you.
If you are afraid that you are losing your creative self, you are not alone. Many of us feel that fear quietly. But she has not disappeared. She is waiting for you to notice her again. Begin with beauty. Take yourself somewhere that opens your attention. Let yourself wander. Let yourself listen. Let yourself feel the world again.
The part of you that creates is still here.
She is simply waiting for the runway to clear.
This Week’s Journal Prompt:
Where could you take yourself this week — even for an hour — to help you remember the part of you that has gone quiet?