Sharing the Morning Pages
I’ve been starting my day with 3 handwritten pages off and on for the past 10 years, full-on steady for the past 9 or 10 months. I wake up, walk to the couch, sit down and let the words pour out. It’s a process I initially lifted from Julia Cameron, author of The Artists Way and several other books on developing the Creative Spirit, and which I have over the past 6 months more fully developed into my own thing.
In Julia’s World, these are called Morning Pages, and they are basically a brain dump, useful only as a process, written and then stored away for eternity, recycled perhaps, or used to create a bit of fiery warmth in the Winter. Who knows. At any rate, written and not read.
For myself, they began to shift a bit 6 months ago into what I called Directed Morning Pages, 3 handwritten pages on a pre-determined subject, mostly as a way to explore certain qualities that I wanted to increase in my daily life, specific areas of gratitude, perhaps. More recently I’ve begun reading and even sharing my morning pages, the ultimate taboo in The Artists Way, as I have discovered that going to sleep with a subject in mind can lead to waking up with plenty of words just waiting to slide out of my Pilot G-2, onto the blank pages of my u:create sketch diary, and eventually, via the tip tap of my fingertips, onto the digitized screen that you are reading now.
Scratching vs. Pecking
The immediacy of writing with ink pen and paper is so much more satisfying to me than the peck peck peck that I’ve been using since I first bought a typewriter some 30 years ago. I don’t know if I will ever go back to composing at the keyboard. I love sitting on the couch cross legged, for one thing, and the early morning quiet for another. There is something soothing about the sound of the pen scratching the paper that the tap tap tap of a keyboard can never hope to match.
And mostly it’s just the feeling of directness. When I write by hand there is a sort of magic in the movement. It’s an art by itself, handwriting is: word sketching. Perhaps this is why I write in a sketch book. And the pace seems perfect–not too fast and not too slow.
Piling up a Mess of Words
There’s a Mark Twain quote about typewriters in which he says that they can pile up a mess of words real fast, or something like that, and for me there is something about that pace that gets in the way a bit. I reach many more stopping and waiting points with the keyboard, like I’m waiting for the buffer to fill back up, while by hand it’s just a continuous flow.
Perhaps this just comes from ten years of practice in writing without stop whatever flows out of my hand, which is usually so perfectly synchronized with the words I ”hear” in my head that I’m not really sure which is leading and which is following, or if it really is just some sort of seamless co-creation!
At any rate, it’s a satisfying way to get the words out, to share on this most public of media words put down in such an intimate way…pen to paper, straight from the heart, 5:15 in the morning. Just me and the birds. Peace.
Addendum: According to a recent poll 399 out of 400 people prefer a massage from a real live human being to a massage from a machine. See what I’m saying?
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