The secrets (of mushrooms & mourning) ...
Mindful Mondays.
What’s on your mind?
I am asking myself that question. And I’m also asking YOU. Let’s call it a writing exercise.
In the spirit of Julia Cameron’s famed Morning Pages, I’m heading into free-writing. (Most Substackers are surely familiar with this. If you’re here more to read than to create, first: Yay! Welcome to the market. And second: Click the linked title to learn what writers around America have been doing for decades to get the creative juices flowing.)
Julia’s video introduction (that’s linked above) is still just as timely nearly a decade-&-a-half since she shared it.
There are 3 points she makes that hit me in my heart today.
If you have read anything else here at
, you won’t be surprised to learn at least two of those points. In total, they are:Cloud thoughts. ☁️🌤
Letting go of negativity. 🌦🌩⛈
Mourning Pages. (See what she did there?) 😶🌫️
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My own Morning Pages pieces from my personal journals look like exercises in flushing out self-criticism. Mostly, I get critical of how I am “doing it wrong,” (it being the exercise, itself——which is meant to be 3 solid pages of free-flow writing, non-stop, first thing in the morning) even though Julia Cameron states clearly again & again that there is no wrong way to do Morning Pages. (Writer friends, do you have the same problem??)
I write things like:
“I’ve been up for over 30 minutes, but I really needed my coffee this morning;” “I keep thinking about what I want to say & I know that’s against the rules;” “Oops, I put my pen down again.” (I’m paraphrasing.)
In her original book introducing the exercise, The Artist’s Way, Cameron shares the goal is to write first thing in the morning (to shake the cobwebs from your head & let the day’s dust settle), ideally with a notebook & pen placed strategically by your bedside; to free-flow write without stopping for 3 solid pages, so that you cleanly capture your stream of consciousness; to let go of editing while you do it in order to let your real writer come out all on her own, in full, sparkling, sunlit glory.
But my inner judge was activated by a former ‘friend’ who didn’t really want the best for me.
In my very first introduction to Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way & the famed Morning Pages writing exercise, I let someone I was just getting to know (& all-too-readily trusting) share my journey through weekly chats. After all, she had introduced me to the concept as a way to polish my writing work into something less vocational & more aesthetic. We shared insights & she asked me numerous questions about my inner process. Very quickly, I realized she was telling me the opposite of Julia Cameron. However, I gave her the benefit of the doubt & reminded her that Cameron stated the best way to do them was to just do them.
My ‘friend’ told me she had private, personal information from a small writers’ conference she had attended with Cameron; that she was letting me in on secrets of “real artists;” that if I ever wanted to graduate from technical business writing to ‘real writing’ as an anointed creative writer, I would have to be more rigorous with myself & NEVER DO IT WRONG.
Ugh. Talk about setting myself up to fail. What made me buy into this madness?
… I know the roots of this mistake in my past——& the generational line of thought that led to this underground bias to hold myself uber-accountable & completely accept another person’s crazy standards. And so it is linked, this exercise, like a toadstool to a tree in subterrestrial codependency: my goal of growth with my enslaved inner desire to “get it right.”
I unearthed this connection a few years ago when I embarked on a group book study of Cameron’s more recent writerly masterpiece (well criticized by our own group, of course, like every writing piece ever written inevitably is), Seeking Wisdom: A Spiritual Path to Creative Connection. In my initial Morning Pages during the group book study, I found myself directly arguing with Friend X through my mental free-flow. Repeatedly. And the insight gifted me the release of some resentment I still held for her & our complicated-though-long-dead relationship.
Today, I am preparing for a funeral.
The images of mold, mushrooms & buried growth are so apt to this era of my life this week. So salient to the mourning I make for this person, my dear & beloved late mother-in-law. Her loss is great even as it was long in the making.
I’m excavating some deep thoughts & doing something I have never done, never thought that I would do: something probably completely unnecessary (that may move no one but me).
I am sharing a private journal entry with you. (Or part of it.)
Here is (most of) my entry from the day before my Mama Jeanie died.
Wed. 7/17/24 (7:00am) - Oh, my heart: the ache is so strong, powerful & pervasive. The joy & the beauty & the wonder of life are still there, still here. But my pain is overpowering.
I’ll be stopping to eat breakfast again today, interrupting my writing flow. It is this morning that I recognize the benefit of putting pen to page without stopping, without correcting, without editing or planning or doing any minute adjustment that gets even in the most incremental of ways in front of my writing flow. I need today to let go, let go, let go …
I have a mouth full of canker sores, surrounding my growing tauri* (or however you spell that bone growth in the bottom of my mouth where my jaw has violently jutted out in my shut-tight inner mouth as I clamp down my self-expression over & over again). I have unexpressed emotion traveling up & down the length of my spine, the information super-highway of my being.
All I want to do is go to bed with the covers over my head. But I have two little boys.
…
Pen paused, down for just a moment as I blow my nose, yet another stuffed-up body part, filled with unexpression, stopped up with grief.
…
The unexpressed tears are so many, even as I actively weep.
*It’s actually spelled “tori,” & pronounced /TOR - ay/ with a long “I” sound at the end. Learn more here.
Even after the ritual of Mo(u)rning Pages, there are other traditions I like to add to my almost-daily journaling. One of those is reading entries in devotional books——ideally, 3 different passages to see any interwoven webs of meaning, a message I can look for & apply throughout my day. On that date, I was asked to turn inside even more as the messages cloistered around dreams; “listening to the wisdom within”; & “Presence” (with a capital P).
This morning——yes, earlier today——I skipped Morning Pages or any reading or writing exercise & journeyed into another favorite meditation style: walking. Earbuds in tightly, I listened to LeBron James share his insights on a winning mindset from a peak performance perspective. (Many thanks to the Calm app & to James, himself, for setting this up to share with the world.) His recap of a moment on the court was a magical metaphor for my week.
He also made 3 wonderful points as key steps to being present under pressure:
Breathe. He likened breath to the electricity that runs our bodies’ well-oiled machines.
Be present. As in: Don’t let yourself be living in the past or projecting into the future with unhelpful worry.
Break it down. Okay, he made more points. But my biggest takeaway was to take even the smallest of moments (after all, James’s anecdote took 12 minutes to break down 1.5 seconds in his life——& the 30 seconds prior to those critical moments that he used to meditate & ground himself) & let each part be a separate life unto its own.
In birth & death, decay & regrowth, I am grateful for mutual support & regeneration.
