Through Journaling I Possess My Soul

Journaling helps me slow down and possess my soul (my thoughts, feelings, life experiences and perceptions) with patience.  When I take time to record the passing of my hours, I become so aware of how full and rich my hours are.  I am in conscious contact with my life, with my self, with God.  I possess my own soul.  I am aware of hunger in all its kinds.  I am able to sort out true, physical hunger and fulness.  It is so wonderful to be in possession of my own “vessel” and to see it as sacred and to honor it by recording it.

I see that in the long run, it does not matter what happens to the records I make.  I don’t make them to preserve them, necessarily.  That is up to God, also–what gets preserved and what does not.  I write as a tool in the here-and-now, as a tool for staying conscious.

Start Writing--Stop the Spinning

I’m sure I’ve written this somewhere before, but the truth of the following thought is burning in my heart this morning.  Over the last 32 hours, I have taken the time to keep a “log”, and accounting–using my notepad as a place to “return and report” every hour or two or three.  Writing doesn’t diminish or detract from the rest of my life–it gives me the rest of my life.  It restores me to sanity.  It helps me get focused.  It helps me pick out the voice of sanity and reason–of balance and truth–from all the “voices” of worry and fear that are going through my mind almost continually.  When I start writing, I stop the “spinning” around of “opinion” and speculation.  I listen to that voice that speaks true principles–that reminds me of scriptural precedent and example; that “voice” that brings me calm and balance and understanding.  Upon “hearing”–getting in touch with that “voice”–I feel a peace flow through me.

I’ve been reading, lately, about neurochemistry.  I know that that feeling of peace that I feel has everything to do with the chemicals that are being released by my brain.  But, here’s the exciting part–I am living the truth that I am able to influence those centers in my brain to release those chemicals.  Or, at least, Someone is.  Something is.  A Power greater than myself is.

Anyway–back to writing.  Writing does that for me.  It centers me.  It focuses me.  It gives me clarity to identify the “voice” of peace and hope and willingness and sanity amongst all the other voices in my mind.  For this I am grateful.

Getting up this morning is a creative act!

 “Creativity is an act of initiative.” (Julia Cameron, Supplies, p. 1)

Reading this one statement, something in me was awakened.  Creativity–no matter what it is that I may want to create (we’ll get to that in a minute), is an act of personal choice.  It’s an act–getting up and doing something.  (And so here I am, this morning, doing something.)

No matter what the creative act!!  Including just simply making a “better life.”  I am seeing this morning, even more than last night, when I first read this text that “a better life” is actually the main thing I want to create.   I also see that it is the adversary of all growth and of all creativity who is the influence that would have me waste out my life–no matter how much or how little I have left–in inertia. (I’m going to talk in first person, here.  I’ve fallen into the psychic trap of thinking and writing for “us.”) Under his influence I would just sit here doing nothing.  Enjoying nothing.  Hoping nothing. Contributing nothing.  Always dreaming.  Always preparing.  Always starting.

I have to get up and start doing something to create what I want to create.  Make what I want to make out of the privileges and opportunities God has blessed me with today.

 “Archetypes” that are “triggered” in every arena of creative effort.  It doesn’t matter what I’m trying to do.  Everything is a creative act.  Getting up this morning is a creative act!

Learning from One of the Best

Over the last few days I have read Linda Joy Myers memoir, Don’t Call Me Mother.  It has been such a beneficial experience for me–a blessing from God, with intent behind it.

The blessing has been to see several different techniques used and not just expounded about.  Those techniques are:

•                                     alternating happier and sadder scenes, lighter and darker moments.  Interspersing the hard scenes with positive, in other words–giving the overall effect of the reality that life is compound, and that a life has been afflicted, but there have also been moments of a sense of God’s favor, too.

•                                     breaking the story up into scenes–just like in a movie.  I can see how you could have a “story board” ahead of time to give you some sense of direction and sequence.  Maybe the order would change as you write, or other scenes might come into the sequence, but at least I would have a map to start with.

•                                     taking the time to show, using description of sensory details in each scene so the reader (through the power of their imagination) can actually experience the scene with the characters–especially the protagonist/narrator (Which, I think, would always be the same person in a memoir. . . . I’m not sure about this.  It seems like I read that the narrator can focus on another character’s story and being using that character as the protagonist, while they, the narrator stay in the background.)

•                                     Slowing down the passage of time by including more scenes in a certain time frame and then speeding up the time by putting less scenes in a time period.  In other words, in between 5 and 14 years of age, there could be a couple dozen scenes described (as in Myers book), then between 14 and 25, only a dozen.  As she got toward the end of the book, which brings the reader up to her present (when the book was published), the scenes were months and even years apart and some had much less detail.  The “camera” didn’t linger over them.