Morning Pages

One of the ways I've found to deal with depression, confusion, frustration, anger, and a variety of other potentially harmful emotional states is through writing. For some reason when I put pen or pencil to paper and start writing whatever comes to mind, the waters of my mind grow calm, the mud settles, and things get a little clearer. I've even found that writing is, for me, a way of praying in ink.

Unfortunately, life sometimes has a way of short-circuiting the very things that make life livable, the things that keep us more or less sane. Jobs, children, weather, sickness, depression itself--there are all kinds of factors that make it hard for me to keep writing. I've been trying to use my lunch hours to work on a story that's been ping-ponging around my head for a couple years, but I find I still need the unstructured dialog between myself and a blank page for the sake of my mental health. Enter morning pages.

Morning pages are an idea promoted by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, and her idea has been picked up and propagated by all manner of writing and art teachers, bloggers, and other creative types. You can read a pretty good description here, but the basics are pretty simple:

• Sit down every morning and write three pages longhand.
• Keep writing, letting your thoughts (or lack thereof) tumble out stream-of-consciousness style.
• Don't worry about style, punctuation, or even making sense. Don't stop, edit, or correct.
• The goal is to unload the clutter, confusion, and baggage from our minds so that we can enter the rest of the day with clarity and unobstructed creativity.

Of course, most of us have encountered this idea somewhere in school as "free-writing," a technique I have made use of off and on throughout my life for the purpose of brainstorming, journaling, or working through something. The idea of morning pages is to use free-writing as a daily practice. If free-writing is going to the mechanic when your car overheats, writing morning pages is performing regular oil changes and checking the coolant. Being, to use a complimentary term, a "free spirit," I am not much good at anything that requires a daily practice. Even so, I am going to attempt to establish this daily practice of morning pages, for the sake of myself and my family.

I see this intimate time with my thoughts as my own version of meditation, letting me breathe onto the page, focusing on the breath, observing what comes, nurturing it, letting it be transformed. It is my medication, written Prozac, free therapy. It is my connection to the creativity within, clearing the passages that allow that creativity to flow into the visible world, to birth something bright and alive. I may or may not ever make a living by writing; but it is enough if, by writing, I can live.