On Friday, February 28 and Saturday, March 1, I’ll be leading two intergenerational Praying in “Colour” workshops on Victoria Island. If you know anyone who lives in Northern Washington or the in Victoria or Vancouver areas of Canada, please pass this information along. Thank you.
Writing, writing, writing for the past two months…. A manuscript was due at the publisher six days ago. It’s getting there. (Do not panic, dear editor.) If the finished book will change my erratic blog-posting behavior, I do not know. March or April will tell.
Two practices continue to inform and enhance my life. I was going to say my “spiritual” life. Separating my “regular” life and my “spiritual” life is an unhelpful split. One day maybe the two will be one.
The two things I have learned are two practices:
1) Staying in bed for five or ten minutes when I wake up. Unconscious and conscious thoughts meet there. Prayers pop up. Answers to yesterdays dilemmas (or take-home math tests in the past) are there. Creative solutions to my writing problems surface. The soliloquy of my emerging nighttime self has things to tell me. I need to listen.
2) Writing three pages in my marble notebook before I do anything else. Even before I pray. (Okay, while the coffee is brewing.) I write anything that comes to mind. Some of those things might be events from the day before. More often they are ramblings, brainstorms, thoughts captured from the 5-minute lie-in before my feet hit the floor. I do this every day, even under the looming, finger-shaking February 1 deadline. The things I need to pray about are in the pages . Ideas for my present book and for a new one are in the pages. Complaints about writing the three pages are in the pages. Feelings I didn’t know I had are in the pages.
If my husband Andy is awake, he knows not to speak to me during this 20-25-minute exercise. It’s to his benefit. I am nicer and saner after I write, as if I’ve been to a Zumba® class or taken a long walk. As if I had my clogged brain cleaned out and plunged free. Writing this way is a spiritual exercise. Fifteen+ years after Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way told me to write three pages every day, I still do. She calls them the Morning Pages. I call them a goldmine.
Advent 2013 Finished Calendar– Posted only 6 weeks late!
