Trust the Rope, Part I

It’s a mountaineering thing, this idea that you have to trust the rope.  I’m not a mountaineer, but I was at a house concert a few weeks back with the folkie songwriter John Flynn, and he used the phrase as a song title and I really liked the song and so I’m stealing the title for today.

Trust the Rope

So what is this rope?

In mountaineering, it’s the line you depend on when you kick off and go rapelling down the face of a cliff.  It’s your life-line, and at some point, if you’re going to be a real mountaineer, you have to learn to trust it.

In art and life, the rope is our external support system.  It’s the stuff that’s outside of our immediate personal sphere that makes the process of creating art and living life infinitely more do-able. It’s the stuff we know we can rely on.  Our people.  Our systems.  The universe.

The rope is our faith in all of it.

Because nobody does their thing entirely solo.

We all have help.

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes about the importance of having a Believing Mirror.  Not an actual mirror like in Harry Potter or Snow White, but a person who believes in you and your art, fully and utterly.  A person of honesty who will help you keep your true bearing.  Someone you can trust with the secret desires of your Artful Heart.

That person is a Rope.

At age 13, when I knew without a doubt that I wanted to be a writer, I had a Believing Mirror, an English teacher who returned one of my first papers to me with a note on the bottom that read, “This paper is full of sentence fragments, as I’m sure you know.  I’m not marking them wrong because they are clearly part of your style.”  At 13, I had a style.  And this teacher recognized it, and didn’t try to correct it, or me.

At that point I knew could trust her with my most honest writing.

She became my Rope.

People, Systems, & The Great Mysterious Way of the Universe

If we’re going to grow as artists, there will be times when we have to move into unfamiliar areas, when we’re not sure of our footing.  Having someone in our lives — and all it takes is one — who believes in us and supports our artful dreams is like having a rope in the dark, something to hold on to so we know we’re not lost.

Something to rely on if we stumble, something that will break our fall.

A rope we can trust.

If  you’re not sure you have such a person in your life — and not all of us do, which is sad and unfair and unfortunately common — that’s okay.  Wednesday and Friday I’ll share some ideas about systems and the universe and the kind of Ropes they offer.

One way or another, we’ll find a trustworthy one for you.

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Trust the Rope, Part II