In The Same Vein
Thoughts on Creativity & Becoming
You Already Have the Gold
featuring The Alchemist, The Vein of Gold, and the through-line you didn't know you were following.
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I was twenty-something, a brand-new Broadcasting & Fine Arts graduate, somewhere over the Atlantic on my way to visit my brother in Italy. I had a book in my lap, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho…I had no idea what I was flying toward. Not just Italy. All of it. Who I was going to be. What the degree and the art and the wanting were actually for.
I finished the book somewhere in that space between here and there — between who I'd been and whoever came next. And what it left me with wasn't an answer. It was more like a quiet, persistent question: What is the thing the universe has been conspiring, all along, to help you become?
I didn't have the words for it then. I tucked the question away like a photograph I wasn't ready to look at yet.
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Recently I picked up Julia Cameron's The Vein of Gold, and the student in me continuously underlines every hint I feel. She writes that inside every life there is a vein of gold… an individual, indestructible connection to the divine that is the true source of our creative impulse. And that if the heart has been wounded, the gold can't flow freely. That before we can make our art, we often have to make a pilgrimage home to the self. I find myself in this situation as we speak…almost home.
"Alchemy is a process of transformation. At its essence, art is an alchemical process. By practicing art, by living artfully, we realize our vein of gold."
Julia Cameron, The Vein of Gold
Something about that stopped my eyes from reading on… I had to process it. Not because it was new, but because I recognized it. I'd read the same idea once, on a plane, in different words. The Alchemist tells you that the treasure you're searching for is closer than you think. Cameron tells you it was never lost — only buried.That the work of a creative life isn't to acquire something you don't have. It's to excavate what's already there.
Here's what I've been sitting with: What if the gold isn't something you discover once and carry forward triumphantly? What if it's more like a signal you keep learning to tune into… like tuning into a new radio station… something you lose the frequency of and find again and lose and find (reminds me of searching on the FM dial for the perfect song to drive to) across decades, across seasons of your life?
Because that's been my experience. Fine arts degree into Corporate media into Photography into Motherhood. Years of building something and years of quietly stepping back from myself. And now, somewhere on the other side of forty, I find myself doing something I couldn't have predicted: actively walking back toward my own creative life. Not as a side note. As the whole point.
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Cameron says the vein of gold is located in the heart of your life. The heart is the origin of creative impulses. Which to me says… EVERYTHING counts. The flight to Italy counts. The years in broadcast journalism count. The weddings and newborn sessions where I hold space for a woman in one of the most enormous moments of her life, those count too. Every image I've made of a woman at a threshold. Every time I've said, quietly, through the lens: I see you becoming.
It was never productivity. It was always alchemy.
I think about that 23 yo girl on the plane a lot lately. She was already doing it, already following something she couldn't name but felt right in her heart, already reaching toward a life that felt truer than the one she'd been handed. She just didn't have the language yet.
Maybe that's the gift of arriving somewhere like this… not that you finally know where you're going, but that you can look back and see you were always going there. The trusting in the process is really working out! That the gold was always yours. It was just waiting for you to stop looking everywhere else and start digging.
Cameron calls this process recognizing your original self. Not finding. Not building. Recognizing, as in, you already know this (duh!). You've always known. The original self is vital and vibrant, she writes, not the colorless, lackluster version so many of us have quietly become while living up to everyone else's idea of who we should be. Recovering it means pulling your energy back into your own center. Withdrawing it from the mis-investments. Depositing it somewhere true.
Which is, I think, what Emerson meant when he wrote something I've been carrying around since I first encountered it… something that feels, now, like it was always meant to arrive at this exact moment in my life:
"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men… that is genius."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Your private heart. Not the curated version. Not the one that learned to go quiet in rooms where it wasn't welcome. The one that knew, on a transatlantic flight at twenty-something, that it was heading toward something, even without a name for it yet.
That's the vein of gold. And it was never lost. It's been waiting, this whole time, for you to believe it.
If you're in a season of excavation, of trying to find your way back to something that feels like yours, I'd love to hear about it. What's the book, the moment, the image that reminded you the gold was still there?
With love and Cinnamon buns on a Sunday,
April
April K is a Boston-area photographer specializing in in-home newborn sessions and personal branding photography for women entrepreneurs. She has been documenting women at moments of becoming since 2011 — serving families across Westwood, Needham, Wellesley, Newton, and the greater Boston and New England area.
