Ritual Journaling
One of my friends’ mother kept 5” x 7” notebooks where she tracked the details of life on a farm in Kansas. Calves born and lost. Cattle bought and sold. Quarts of garden vegetables canned. Money lent and repaid. When she finally left the farm in her eighties, these decades worth of notebooks filled an entire cabinet in her kitchen. For this woman, keeping track of the minutia of her daily life was a way of maintaining a sense of control both in the unpredictability of farming and in her marriage to a hard, abusive man.
Journaling is, indeed, a way trying to bring order from chaos. Therapists often encourage their patients to journal as part of the therapeutic process. Sometimes people keep a journal of their dreams as part of therapy. Keeping a food journal is recommended if you’re trying to lose weight. The thought is that you’re more conscious of what you eat if you write it down, and the journal is an affirming record of your progress. Another friend kept a travel journal as he and his wife visited all seven continents. He’s turning the journal into a memoir.
Most of the writers I know journal as part of their creative process. In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron recommends journaling every morning, what she calls morning pages. You start your day draining your brain of the things that get in the way of your creativity. Although I’ve kept journals off and on since I was a teenager, when I read The Artist’s Way, I started taking journaling more seriously.
It took a while for Cameron’s assertion that journaling every morning would lead to connecting with an inner source of wisdom to become a reality. At first I saw journaling as more of a task that I needed to do to be a ‘real’ writer. Now journaling every morning has become a sacred part of my day. When I don’t journal, things seem a little off. Maybe that’s not a healthy thing, but morning journaling gives me a sense of order and helps me tap into my creativity.
Just as some of my friends start every day by praying or going for a run or working out, I journal. That’s my morning ritual. I pour a cup of coffee, go into my office and journal while I watch the sun rise. If I’m traveling, I might have to forego the coffee and a good view of the sunrise, but I always journal.
Cameron recommends writing in long-hand. I’ve tried journaling on the computer and even a typewriter but come back to long-hand every time. Writing with pen and paper forces me to slow down to make sure my cursive ‘e’ and ‘r’ don’t look like ‘i’. There’s something creative about experiencing the process of a thought flowing from my brain to my hand and onto pages of my journal; something about watching the ink flow across the paper as I shape the letters of each word.
I used to use whatever old notebook I had laying around and cheap pens but over the years I’ve gotten more selective in the tools I use. I’m now writing in Leuchttrum1917 journals with Montverde fountain pens. I could provide rational justifications for going to this expense; the structure of the notebook, the weight of the notebook paper, the eco-friendly nature of refillable pens, the ease of using a fountain pen, and so on. The less logical reason is that since journaling is a sacred ritual of my creative self, the tools I use should reflect that sacredness.