I am a firm believer in Morning Pages but that doesn’t mean I use them all the time. Though it felt like a really long time since I had last drawn/painted anything (it probably wasn’t as long as it felt) and I was beginning to feel to quite anxious about starting anything. In truth I was scared to start anything in case it turned out to be awful, in case it revealed me to be the complete hack I think I am.

I sat down at a desk at my local library and told myself I’d just scribble. Scribbling has been a catalyst throughout different times in my life, something about the movement of a pen or pencil with or without conscious thought, without or without something obvious to say, leads to other things.

Over the course of two pages I found I had written the same name five times. Someone I used to know… And a flood of memories returned to me in that instance. Little things imbued with funny meanings that would be lost on the casual observer. I remembered that person’s obsession with Grain Wave chips. I remembered that Timezone photo booth we got our photo taken in. I remembered silly little things that were said. I remembered the in flight radio station I listened to on the flight home.

I think I was so preoccupied with moving on that I had never really stock of what actually transpired.

At any rate I felt this great need to draw this person. So I did. I won’t share it here (or anywhere really) because I doubt this person would appreciate me drawing me and I am no longer in contact with them to ask permission. But the point is I am drawing again and it feels good.

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Today I am cleaning up. I am taking stock – in the most literal sense. I’ve concluded I have enough stationery supplies to last several lifetimes. I’ll have to reign myself in the next time I swing by OfficeWorks…

One of the things I came across in my travels was a book full of morning pages from earlier in the year. It’s funny I’ve never been the kind of person to keep a diary. The idea of recording the minutiae of my every day existence seems like an exercise in tedium (for the writer) that would lead to boredom (for the reader). But I am impressed by the contents of the morning pages I discovered because they’re not mindless lists of mundane tasks so much as explorations of my own most inner thoughts. I joke sometimes that I don’t know what I think until I’ve written it done and read it back, but an element of that is true. You need an opportunity to reflect and sometimes you reflect on the page. That’s the point of the exercise.

Clearly there’s a difference between ‘filling the well’ and filling the space. Part of my current efforts are really about cutting back on the things I own, trying to get back to a functional minimalism. Although I am enjoying painting I am sort of running out of space and am wondering how (and where) to store completed canvases and canvas boards. I’ve sort of stacked them together but even this is problematic since they haven’t been sprayed with fixative agent. (Some of the canvas boards – especially those with sculptural elements or dense layers of paint – can actually stick together, ocassionally ruining one or more pieces of work.) I feel like I need more room to work on my art but I have no idea where or how to arrange that either.

I’m trying to add some individual pieces of flair to the room too. I drink a lot of loose leaf jasmine green tea and the tins the tea come in are absolutely beautiful. I decided to use one to hold some of my ever growing collection of pencils. I also got a notebook printed up with a picture of a sea bird (that I had taken some years ago) on it. Sometimes it’s the small but personally meaningful things that help you take pride in your work.

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In daily use the Morning Pages described in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way serve as brain drain. They help you take all the extraneous detail – the stuff that Cameron insists stands between you and your creativity – and put it on the page. On a daily basis this can be quite helpful, but what can we learn from the pages over time? Armed with two different coloured pens I read the morning pages and noted two things – insights and action items. I can’t begin to tell you what a fascinating exercise this proved to be. The trends were quite obvious. Infact I think they can probably be seen from space. From the mundane (practically every entry started with some variation of ‘Oh my god, it’s so cold’) to the profound, the morning pages had my number.

Killing Me Slowly…
One of the most disconcerting things to be revealed through the morning pages was about my health. I was unwell more often than I was well. Coughs, cold and flu symptoms, small things certainly but scarcely did a day go by that I didn’t make reference to some ailment. ‘I need to eat better, exercise’ was a reoccuring mantra. And at one point I found myself admitting that while I knew I should look after myself, I didn’t really ‘see the point.’

The Proof Is In The Project
I was amazed reading through the pages at how many insights I had about my project Heartbroken and Grieving. I say this mostly because when I would actually sit down to write this thing I felt an overwhelming feeling that I had no idea what I was doing or what I was trying to achieve. It was quite shocking to see the detail I go into about it in the course of the morning pages. It was quite heartening, actually. I’m going to take all my notes, collate them and attempt to piece the project together once more.

Global Confidence Crisis
There’s a lot – and I want to stress a lot – of space devoted to fears about writing, not writing, being creative, not being creative, and not being much of a writer. I (somewhat ironically) write about wanting to write but feeling too terrified to start lest I discover I’m actually more of a hack than a writer. (In a similar vein I wax lyrically about why it has taken so long to start pre-production for season two of the JOJCAST podcast.) But there are also moments where I rejoice at how good it feels to actually write and how I discover that I’m not nearly as awful and talentless as I imagine. Sadly these appear much less frequently.

Action Items = Instant To-Do List!
I often feel directionless. I probably shouldn’t though. My morning pages provide literally pages and pages of things I could (and perhaps should) be doing. I allude to ‘cleaning up’ a lot. (Maybe one day.) There is also a reoccuring suggestion that I should probably get around to banking ‘that cheque’ and all that loose change. There is talk of things I would like to do more often (make web videos, photography) and very specific dreams I have (live in Brisbane for a month, and in Melbourne for a month).

All in all the morning pages have helped me articulate my thoughts and my desires, and build a bit of a map for the future.

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The Morning Pages form part of the basic tools of creative recovery that Julia Cameron describes in The Artist’s Way. She writes:

What are morning pages? Put simply, the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness: “Oh, god, another morning. I have NOTHING to say. I need to wash the curtains. Did I get my laundry yesterday? Blah, blah, blah…” They might also, more ingloriously, be called brain drain, since that is one of their main functions.

I’ve done the morning pages before. I’ve found them to be helpful – and yet when I decided recently that I wanted to reconnect with the practice the idea absolutely terrified me. I am not even entirely sure why. I guess on some level I was worried that through the process of these three daily pages of brain drain I would discover something about myself, perhaps something I didn’t want to know.

When I finally did manage to sit down with those three pages and a pen I did learn a lot of things about myself. But it was much more reassuring than I imagined. While I was anxious about a few things coming up in my life, I came to realise that they were things that are important to me. I am starting to take my creativity seriously. I am beginning to identify myself as a writer. I am slowly gravitating towards my tribe. I got to the end of those three pages and for the first time in a very long time I had this sense that things were falling into place.

Sometimes it is possible to feel like you’re losing even when you’re winning. A little reflection can help put things into perspective. The morning pages are going to play an important part in my life from this moment and I am actually really quite excited about that.

You can download a PDF that goes into more detail about the basic tools by visiting the Artist’s Way website.

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