A personal note: I am embarking on a six-week course, Journal Your Life: Writing Your Dreams into Reality, offered by Susannah Conway. A first assignment is to write a journal entry about my intentions for the course. What follows is my stab is sorting out what I hope to gain these next few weeks.
The day is drawing to a close. The house is quiet. In the distance I can hear the undulating wail of a firetruck's siren, the distinct attendant rumble giving it away. Not a cruiser. Not an ambulance. A firetruck.
Closer, in our next door neighbor's backyard, the burbling of the water feature offers a contrasting note, constant and calm, soothing. It's time to make an attempt at asking what could be a lifetime's question: what do I intend? For tonight, for right now, though, it's a less heavy endeavor, lots less cosmic. What are my intentions as I embark on this class? As I continue to develop this practice of journaling, what do I hope?
This current bout of regular writing has been going on for several years. It was on December 18th in 2009 that I began working through Julia Cameron's book, "The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity." The required Morning Pages, three-page stream-of-consciousness writing, morphed into (almost) Daily Pages. The discipline involved helps steady me. I use the journal as a way to chronicle by days, keeping up with the who, what, when, why of my life. In other words, it's mostly about the accomplishment, about what I manage to get done. In more other words, I'm justifying my existence, or trying to anyway. That sounds mean. It may be an overly harsh assessment. Perhaps here a the advent of something new it needs to be. I think, I know a jump start is in order. I can continue to keep track of daily life. I want to, need to -- for reasons I'll get into and explore as the days pass. But, ...
What I intend and what I hope for is more honesty, more noticing, more curiosity, more depth, more REAL. There is something in me that wants to break out, to become unbound. I want to be less careful (do not equate that with fool hearty), less fearful, less constricted (and constricting), less likely to settle, to play it safe. As I write each day, then, I want to be more honest, to put down what I really think and want and hope and dream. I want to get myself to the point that I am clear about my own preferences, so I don't always have to hedge my bets. I don't want to make by first concern that I might make a mistake. And, oh, please, I want not to even let cross my mind what somebody else is going to think!
A pretty tall order, huh? A girl can dream. And, a determined girl ... well, just watch.
Closer, in our next door neighbor's backyard, the burbling of the water feature offers a contrasting note, constant and calm, soothing. It's time to make an attempt at asking what could be a lifetime's question: what do I intend? For tonight, for right now, though, it's a less heavy endeavor, lots less cosmic. What are my intentions as I embark on this class? As I continue to develop this practice of journaling, what do I hope?
This current bout of regular writing has been going on for several years. It was on December 18th in 2009 that I began working through Julia Cameron's book, "The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity." The required Morning Pages, three-page stream-of-consciousness writing, morphed into (almost) Daily Pages. The discipline involved helps steady me. I use the journal as a way to chronicle by days, keeping up with the who, what, when, why of my life. In other words, it's mostly about the accomplishment, about what I manage to get done. In more other words, I'm justifying my existence, or trying to anyway. That sounds mean. It may be an overly harsh assessment. Perhaps here a the advent of something new it needs to be. I think, I know a jump start is in order. I can continue to keep track of daily life. I want to, need to -- for reasons I'll get into and explore as the days pass. But, ...
What I intend and what I hope for is more honesty, more noticing, more curiosity, more depth, more REAL. There is something in me that wants to break out, to become unbound. I want to be less careful (do not equate that with fool hearty), less fearful, less constricted (and constricting), less likely to settle, to play it safe. As I write each day, then, I want to be more honest, to put down what I really think and want and hope and dream. I want to get myself to the point that I am clear about my own preferences, so I don't always have to hedge my bets. I don't want to make by first concern that I might make a mistake. And, oh, please, I want not to even let cross my mind what somebody else is going to think!
A pretty tall order, huh? A girl can dream. And, a determined girl ... well, just watch.
RSS Feed