“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I’m still typing yesterday afternoon’s session. Things have been hectic here today, interfering with my painting: Frank Longwell and his brother started work today on the front porch, which is to be glassed in so that Jane can have more room. [In the meantime, she’s moved into her writing room in back of the house.]

To some extent you convinced yourselves that such creative activity was indeed in some respects more work certainly than play. In your own art you worked relatively slowly, measured out your pleasure in a fashion, even thinking sometimes in the past that your talent required (underlined) periods of indecision and difficulty. Often you emphasized impediments. It seemed almost sacrilegious to think that the production of excellent art could involve fun—or worse, an active sense of irresponsibility, a joyful sense of ease, so that if a painting came too quickly you could not trust it.

(I told Jane that the other day the pendulum had told me I hurt the rib as self-punishment because of my resentment of the visit of Tom D’Orio and friends. Whatever—both cases would involve time and interruptions, a threat to what I see as my main course in life these days, painting. And that threat would be the main cause behind my self-injury: guilt at feeling that way. My own bout with using the pendulum had been very brief.