Blissful Silence

I went down to the river today at lunchtime. With the snow not yet melted from the paths, not too many had ventured there. Sitting for awhile in this field to take these photos I became aware of the blissful silence around me. The occasional crow's caw and squawk of a seagull were all that pierced the stillness. It felt wonderful to sit among the silence with the warmth of the sun on me, wondering at the beauty of this tree.

When you experience this type of silence, you come to realise just how much noise surrounds you during your day. Some noises are beyond our control, like the sounds of traffic; others are self-inflicted, such as the background drone of television or radio.

Some people seem to be continuously plugged into some form of sound, even as they walk, exercise or take public transit. My choice is to be in the moment, to listen to what my inner voice might have to say. It's surprising what you discover without the distractions of exteral noise.

Morning Pages

For something close to 8 or 9 years, I’ve lost track exactly, I have been writing morning pages as Julia Cameron suggests in her hugely popular book, The Artist’s Way. She urges people to write three pages a day, every day, first thing in the morning in order to empty themselves of all the issues that can hang around and cloud their day. First thing in the morning was never ideal for me — the household was just too busy getting ready for school and work. So for a time I wrote them upon arriving at work. After a few years, my morning pages became lunch pages. I would bring my notebook with me to a café on my lunch hour and write them then, with a coffee or in the winter a hot chocolate at the side.

At first I used regular school notebooks but gradually chose a fancier journal type to write in. When I brought a digital camera, a photo was glued in each day to accompany my entry. I noticed that my morning pages were becoming less stream of consciousness and more blog-like. Without realizing it I was heading towards blogging. And now that I am blogging I am finding that my morning pages have become very irregular. Probably because blogging is too similar to what my morning pages had become.

It might be time for me to get back to the real purpose of morning pages, to write without editing myself, to get onto the page all the issues that I’m facing at any particular time, to create a place once again where I can puzzle things out, or at least free my mind to get on with other things and hopefully, as Julia Cameron intended, to encourage my creativity in ways which may have become blocked.