Here is an excerpt from my writing practice, the “morning pages” that I have adopted recently and which I am doing the old-fashioned way, with paper, pen, and a book. A book by the way, that is interlaced with Rumi quotes. (On Amazon: The Poetry of Rumi Illustrated Journal J1-RUM
The paper in this book is so thick it feels precious. Nonetheless I am blasting my way through it now…home to my morning pages as I dump words on the page with no goal other than to start my engine, as if it were 0° outside and my writing is a car from the 1970s.
I suppose there are similarities – they both trigger my concern for waste and pollution. And a denial for “how things work.” One of my “spiritual” goals is to keep remembering we are all safe. I don’t have to live in fear of the scarcity (of clean-air for example) on the planet nor do I have to worry about taking up space with my body or my words. Yes, this belief is not yet automatic.
I fear being judged by some people. It takes so much time to explain the whole of why I believe we are safe and why a mass murderer or an air polluter are still as divine as you and I are. The other so-called problem is that when I write long hand I tend to really like it! It does bring stuff and a style out of me that feels different from the digital[ ] I can’t find a word for “the stuff I write.”
But who the hell is going to transcribe/type this up for me??? Hahaha, that would be me for now or as I would say if typing: #fornow. Hashtag’s look funny in hand writing yet so natural on the screen. My small self is trying to start a worry party over all this “OMG are you going to write long hand or type? How do you know which one is right, which way to write?” Hahaha, it doesn’t matter my dear just write. It will land where it lands.
What is SO COOL, is that I made a grace discovery when I opened the software Text Wrangler to type this up from my long hand. Purely by accident I mean by divine design, I saw a menu item I had never noticed before. It said “Start Dictation.”
So, lucky me, I simply read the words into the computer, and the computer typed them up for me. I am a lousy typist and I love this new way of getting my thoughts into a digital and usable form! I am no longer afraid of paper! Next on my list, is to talk into my computer the oodles of notes I have jotted down and carried around for months. A task I was dreading, I am now eager to begin! (Mind you, Apple computers have had speech-to-text and vice versa for a very long time. It has just never been so easy!)
