The Change Artist brings Carla Rieger's powerful recipe for mastering self change into a compelling story format.
The story begins with the troubled relationship between an adult daughter and her dying father.
In an era when only the “creatively resilient” among us are surviving it helps to remember that all of us have this ability. To be a Change Artist is simply to reconnect to the archetype of the artist within us all. As Pablo Picasso once said, “”Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
Or, as David Whyte says, “When you neglect your creative energies they work away at you and almost blacken the inside of you like creosote. One of the first steps is to simply create a sense of spaciousness, to give you room to take flight.”
Here is a TV commercial you have probably seen from the 1990’s called “Think Different”. The concepts bears revisiting because this is a time in history when we all need to recapture the artist within to reinvent our personal lives, our work lives and our organizations.
This was an advertising slogan and TV commercial created for Apple Computer. The one-minute commercial features black and white video footage of significant historical people of the past, including (in order):
Albert Einstein
Bob Dylan
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Richard Branson
John Lennon (with Yoko Ono)
R. Buckminster Fuller
Thomas Edison
Muhammad Ali
Ted Turner
Maria Callas
Mahatma Gandhi
Amelia Earhart
Alfred Hitchcock
Martha Graham
Jim Henson (with Kermit the Frog)
Frank Lloyd Wright
Pablo Picasso
The commercial ends with an image of a young girl, Shaan Sahota, opening her closed eyes, as if to see the possibilities before her.
“Remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall — think of it, ALWAYS.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Creativity and innovation without integrity is, by universal law, unsustainable. We see this throughout history with investors like Bernie Madoff, or companies like Enron, or political leaders like Hitler. They impress people at first with their “innovative” way of changing things for the better. But if the innovation isn’t based in integrity then it cannot be sustained and eventually the leaders self-destruct and those that follow them lose out.
The Change Artist within us all is the archetype of the dreamweaver. It’s the part of us that can re-program our virtual reality movie. However, have you noticed that it doesn’t always create a rosy picture of health, wealth and happiness? Sometimes The Change Artist attracts challenge, loss and hardship into your life. Maybe these are opportunities to grow, to learn how to live more in harmony with universal laws, to make ourselves right with the world again. You cannot learn about integrity unless you transgress it from time to time and most humans have done that in big ways or small at some time in their lives. Like a child learning how to walk, we take a step and fall, then get back up and try again.
The suspense novel, The Change Artist, was recently reviewed by Clare Swindlehurst in her Blue Archipelago book blog in the UK. The novel explores how three people in three different generations of the same family deal with change, creativity and integrity in their own lives. The story goes back and forth through time and spans from the early 1930’s to the 21st century, and is inspired by true events of those who have suffered great loss but then found their way back to creativity with integrity.
The Myth of Hades and Zeus is fascinating because it explores the light and shadow sides of the male archetype within society and the individual. According to Jungian theory, archetypes are, “Universal patterns from the collective unconscious”. They show up in stories, religions, mythologies, legends, and fairy tales.” They also show up in our dreams, visions, and day dreams.
The Greek myths of Hades and Zeus struck me as central to the characters of George, Jorg and Jiri in The Change Artist. Separate identities but also part of the same individual. In ancient Greek mythology Zeus was the God of the upper world and Hades was the God of the under world, they were brothers and sons of Poseidon.
Human instincts are one manifestation of an archetype. According to author, Jean Shinoda Bolen, the ancient Greeks used a deity to mirror every state and capacity, every mood, thought, act, and experience of the human being.
