Morning Pages

In The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron describes (among other things) a writing process called "Morning Pages." It's really sort of a blend between a meditative process and a writing discipline, recommended for accessing and encouraging creativity. It's also therapeutic, useful in helping one get to the core of a matter and/or get through stuff. I've used morning pages for all of the above.

It's been a while since I wrote morning pages on a daily basis, but I think I will return to that practice, and here's why: It helped me before, and those pages are interesting to read now. 

I came across a notebook while ago that contains morning pages from the days shortly after Steve's death. I know that somewhere there is another notebook of morning pages for some time prior to and through that event as well (although I'm not quite ready to see those pages yet).

I thought this notebook of morning pages would be much more difficult to read than it has been. In reading it, now, almost two years later, I see how much I was trying to adhere to some kind of routine in order to keep from utterly disintegrating and blowing to the four winds. Even the routine of the morning pages themselves - beginning with the date, a series of affirmations, filling three pages with writing, no matter what - this lent something of a sense of order to a time when my world had gone completely off its axis.

I wrote about the earthquake that frightened me so, and about Muffin the Cat as his health and mentality deteriorated, and about how nice it was to look out the windows in the daytime, but kind of scary at night. There is a great deal in that book of morning pages that, as I read, I can imagine having done, but do not actually remember. Woven into the everydayness of it all are touches of that spiky humor for which I am known among my friends. Not for public consumption, though. I'll keep my morning pages to myself for now, but I will write more of them, yes.

So. Morning Pages.