Tag Archives: morning pages

writing when the writing’s hard

Good morning over there. I’m going to work to get this blog post written before the puppy wakes up and begins poking me with her cold nose. Here I got all accustomed (after ten years I still haven’t learned not to get accustomed) to those sweet warm mornings we were having, and now it’s chilly again. One good thing about living in the Bay Area is getting to complain all the time about the fantastic weather we have.

This morning I’m thinking about writing and the ways we use writing to save ourselves and the way that writing sometimes can become a site of re-iteration, the way that writing can be difficult. A few years ago, I noticed that I was, in my morning pages, writing over and over (and over) about a situation in my life that I was unhappy with. I wrote into it and into it, I told the same stories over and over, I began to discover patterns and understand what I needed to do for the situation to change — and then I hit repeat: write the stories, look at the patterns, see through the words what I need to do to change, but I didn’t do those things. Instead I just kept writing. And the writing began to hurt. I didn’t feel as good after I finished writing. I stopped wanting to go to the notebook. I stopped wanting to hear those stories. Never mind that the writing (along with other voices) was pointing me toward a solution– I wasn’t ready to hear it yet. Continue reading

still learning the muscles required

graffiti of silhouette standing beneath a raincloud, and another silhouette offering that person an umbrellaI’m just beginning the first of many re-reads of Annie G. Roger’s A Shining Affliction — I want to tell you about it, but I don’t know if my words are far enough away from the story to really get into the details yet this morning. I can’t do a book report or a review yet, although I’d like to. I do know that it’s re-sparked my curiosity about and interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis (which got fully opened when I first read another of her books, The Unsayable: The hidden language of trauma, a couple of years ago, and has been lingering and touching my terror of it ever since).

this morning I have story after story I want to tell you, and I am too scared and stuck to open my mouth

What are the languagings for that experience? I’m aware of being badly in need of help, and not knowing why anyone would help me, and, while I’m feeling all this, experiencing, too, that self above the self that watches and is curious about it all: where does that certainty of not being help-able, not being worth helping, come from?

Continue reading

spaces with purpose

black 'n white photograph of a two-lane highway in new mexico, and enormous clouds and sky

(NM, here we come...)

A short post today — I was reminded this morning that setting the alarm is all well and good, but you’re not likely to hear it if you don’t also turn it on. So I had just enough time to do my three morning pages before it was time to get ready for work.

I want to talk with you about creating play spaces (I’m in the middle of re-appropriating a part of my home as a place just for creativity and play), movies about following one’s creative instincts (we saw the visually-stunning Book of Kells this weekend, which I didn’t know was a real object d’art ’til I went looking for more information just now), and roadtrips as regenerative practice.

Continue reading