Spiritual Journaling

“My question is ‘when did other people give up the idea of being a poet?’ You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?”

—WILLIAM STAFFORD, POET

Opening lines in a book or a poem are what pull you in to read the entire piece. We also have opening lines for our day (our first chosen thought), for when we meet someone (what we say beyond hello),and in our letters. All these opening lines have significant influence on what is to follow. I have learned to really listen to a person’s “hello” and what follows it to gain quick insight into his or her intentions. I looked at first dates as the “opening lines” to that new person and trusted what I heard and experienced on that first encounter.

Each section in this journaling book has an opening line, as does each paragraph. It is this line that gets you to stay and read more, or makes you move on to another part.

“You have a world of powerful teachers sitting on the bookshelves in your house right now.”

—FROM THE OBSERVATION DECK: A TOOL KIT FOR WRITERS BY NAOMI EPEL

“The journey into adulthood is the intended time to claim the Warrior’s way. All the intensity, beauty, difficulty, and questions of the Thundering Years (the teen years) are designed to challenge us to determine what path we are going to take in life.”

Here are the opening lines from a letter I sent to a friend more than twenty years ago. (She kept all my letters and sent them back to me as a gift.) Dear Shannon, I am writing you on a warm and wet October morning. Everything seems changed.

In some African tribes the first sound that a child makes, its cry, is echoed back by all the other children so that the child knows that she has arrived; the child knows that he belongs. This practice reflects the tribe’s belief that without this first call back to a newborn the child will feel lost his or her entire life, searching for a sense of belonging. This cry is the child’s opening line.

“Her parents crashed the illegal party just in time to see Desa put a large bandage on her leg.”

“I’m exaggerating so you’ll get to know me faster.”

—AMY HEMPEL, AMERICAN FICTION WRITER

Off the Page

Jean Reddemann suggests that we start each day with this first thought: “Thank-you, Creator, for this new day. Please take me to where you want me to be.” You too may want to start your day with prayer-like first lines. What would yours be?

Choose some favorite books and copy their opening lines. Write something different—what would you have happen?

“Too many of us get stuck because we think we should know where to start and which ideas to develop. When we find we don’t, we become anxious and either force things or quit. We forget to wonder, leaving ourselves open to what might come. Wondering means it’s acceptable not to know, and it is the natural state at the beginning of all creative acts, as recent brain research shows.”

—FROM WRITING THE NATURAL WAY BY GABRIELE LUSSER RICO, CREATIVE WRITING CONSULTANT

“Trying harder or trying to force a creative idea is highly counterproductive. Do its opposite: simply allow.”

—FROM WRITING THE NATURAL WAY BY GABRIELE LUSSER RICO, CREATIVE WRITING CONSULTANT

Often the best way to write in a journal (as well as in first drafts of books and while brainstorming ideas) is to write quickly, without stopping to think. A sure way to get unstuck from fear or doubt is to move. If you are stuck and don’t know what to do or what to write about, get up and put on some music, move around, breathe … go for a walk, jump up and down.

While journaling, if you find yourself drawing a blank simply rewrite a previous sentence until an idea comes. This helps keep the thinking mind out of the way, and keeps the pen moving on the page. It’s a simple and miraculous way to get the creative juices flowing. For example, you want to write about being sorry. You might write repeatedly, “I am sorry about …” You keep repeating this phrase instead of stopping your pen or gazing off to think. This can actually be a very effective way to write about something. Get the beginning of one line that encapsulates the overall idea and repeat that until you have filled up at least one page.

I don’t want to talk about my friend who didn’t show up at the party this past Friday. I don’t want to talk about how she and I are going in different directions. I don’t want to talk about how my breasts are too big for the rest of my body and how I can’t play basketball because of them. I don’t want to talk about my friends who drink every weekend and I don’t want to talk about how I am not really excited about turning seventeen in two months. I don’t want to talk about the colleges I am supposed to be considering and I don’t want to talk about how I don’t know what I am going to do this summer.

“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.”

—CHARLES DICKENS, VICTORIANERA NOVELIST

What to write? That’s often the question that confronts me when I approach an empty page. But like so many aspects of the writing life, the empty page can show up in other areas of your life besides writing.

Your “empty page” may be a journal page, an unwritten idea, an empty canvas, or it may be this very day that stretches before you. This blankness, this emptiness, can hold such intense power that often we will move ourselves in a direction that takes us away from this emptiness—this Unknown—and into the Known. Personally, I find myself wanting to eat something when the blank page stares back at me. (Those Oreo cookies are calling me right now.) In certain times of our life when we are confronted with a lot of unknowns, a lot of blank pages, we give in to addictive behaviors with food, drugs and alcohol, tobacco, relationships, television, video games. A behavior is addictive when you can’t control yourself and the craving or behavior just takes over. You lose your sense of choice and just give in to the behavior.

When the prospect of the blank page or the empty day, summer vacation or the end of high school, or the dark night looms in front of you, what are your usual responses? What pulls you away from this Great Unknown and the present moment into a routine, or an addiction? What are your favored habits that seduce you away from the creative energy of the empty page or open sky? How do you deal with a big empty page or a day with no plans? Or, after a breakup, how do you deal with more alone time? Do you rush to fill it up?

When you take the time to notice what pulls you away, this awareness can aid in your return to the emptiness, and to the creative response to that emptiness. It will return you to the possibilities inherent in the moment. There is a lot trying to pull you away from the creative tension of the moment. Once we begin a dance with the emptiness by remaining with it, the present moment becomes filled with possibilities, and habitual patterns are at least quieted to a background buzz. (The Oreos can wait.)

“We do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand.”

—C. DAY LEWIS, IRISH POET

“Perhaps the greatest advantage of mind mapping is that by nurturing your unique, individual self-expression it guides you to discover your own originality.”

Mind mapping, or clustering, is a technique used by many writers to help them draw from the creative side of the brain to generate new ideas. It is also used by people in all walks of life (including students!) to tap into a wider range of options for problem solving. Whenever you’re stuck, or just want to stretch your mind further than it will reach at the moment, try this approach. Have you noticed that when you are frustrated or angry it is sometimes difficult to see anything but the bad? Mind mapping opens your mind and gets you out of being stuck and obsessed about what is going wrong, so that you can see what you might do to help things go right.

“In most lives insight has been accidental. We wait for it as a primitive man awaited lightning for a fire.“

—FROM THE AQUARIAN CONSPIRACY BY MARILYN FERGUSON, PUBLISHER OF BRAIN/MIND BULLETIN

The technique is a form of word association that frees up the more creative, intuitive part of the brain (the right hemisphere). It reveals a wider view of the world. Here is what you will need:

Begin by choosing a word. Put the word or idea in the center of the page and draw a circle around it. Then draw a line out from the circle and write the first word that comes to your mind when you think about your one central word. Circle this word. Then allow another thought or word to arise from that word, draw a line from the last word to the new one and circle it. Continue doing this until you feel you’ve come to the end of that particular stream of words. Now return to the original word you began your mind map with and begin another series of associations. Breathe throughout this exercise. Don’t stop to think; write as quickly as possible. Don’t stop moving your writing hand. Always write down the first word that comes into your head.

Remember to let the words just stream out of you, not stopping to filter your thoughts or judge them. This activates the creative part of your brain and awakens your intuitive nature. A lot of what you know sits just below your conscious mind, and clustering allows you to get to it. After mind mapping for a while, you will experience an intuitive shift and possibly a desire to write about what your map displays.

Jerika, age 17, clustered around Next Time. She was feeling unhappy about how she had handled a recent situation involving a friend. She said, “Clustering helped me to be more honest with myself. I need to change how I do a few things in my life.”

“I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.”

—WILLIAM FAULKNER

Off the Page

Read Writing the Natural Way by Gabriele Lusser Rico to learn her unique approach to mind mapping, as well as other techniques for releasing your “inner writer.”

“I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.”

—WILLIAM TREVOR, IRISH NOVELIST AND SHORT STORY WRITER

Make a list of every dream, every idea, every goal, every wish and desire you have had so far in your life. Don’t stop writing until you have come up with at least a hundred different ideas, curiosities, or dreams. Most of them will be somewhat small, and some will be big—like traveling to India and living in an ashram for a year. You have the rest of your life to accomplish these. And chances are you will add quite a bit to your list as you go along.

Lists are great. Lists are a way to allow yourself to get into a creative and natural flow. Write lists in the morning and then go about your day. Lists free you up to create more—sometimes from that list, sometimes something new.

“Life does not happen to us, it happens from us.”

—MIKE WICKETT, AMERICAN SCIENTIST

Ever find yourself driving down the wrong road and ending up in a better place than you planned? Scientists in their research and spiritual students in their search look for accidents—in fact, they understand that some so-called accidents have a purpose. You have probably heard the term “Freudian Slip,” meaning you say one thing when you meant to say something else. But the accidental comment perhaps revealed more truth than what you intended to say. A successful day has at least one accident that leads you down a path you might not otherwise have known was there.

This book, like my day-to-day life and my journals, is full of accidents that led me to something good, and often to something better. I find that accidents always point to something, and I let my attention follow what they are pointing to. Many famous novelists wait for the accidents in their writing, knowing that they will create the ultimate surprise scene. And in our day-to-day life, accidents can point to someone or some new idea that we may otherwise have overlooked. So when accidents happen, don’t curse, don’t whine, but look. Look for the golden key that may lead you to something of value.

There was once a young man who never seemed to have any luck. His parents were too poor to care for him, so he was sent off to live with strangers. Many times the strangers treated him badly. He had no time for friends because he had to work all the time just to keep himself fed.

“I may not know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

—BILL COSBY, AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMEDIAN

One shivering winter’s day he went searching for some wood for the fire. He had no gloves and practically nothing on his feet to keep away the bitter cold. He had traveled far from the house and it was so cold that his hands began to turn blue. He began to fear for his life and decided he could either give up and lie down to die or try to build himself a fire right there in the woods.

As he scraped away at the ice and snow, clearing a space for the fire, he found something—a golden key. Although he knew he might soon die from the cold without a fire, he thought, “Where there’s a key, there’s a lock!” and so he dug and dug with his bare hands through the frozen ground, until he found something again—a box.

He looked for the lock, but he couldn’t find it. It was dark and difficult to see. He nearly gave up when a voice deep inside him said, “Look again!” And so he did, and there it was, a keyhole so tiny you could scarcely see it. Most people would surely have missed it.

He took a breath and put the key in the lock, and it fit perfectly. He began to turn the key, and he opened the box and looked inside. He was so warmed by what he saw that the snow and ice melted around him. And indeed, his life from then on did change for the better.

“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

—GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON JR.

The box opened up into a hallway that led down into the ground. And the boy went in and hasn’t been heard from since. But this is a good thing because he is in the Land of Creation, where possibilities are endless. It is also the place where the Frienders live.

It is just an empty box. But maybe tomorrow it will be full of something magical.

Off the Page

Look for accidents that lead to something better. Notice how accidents are part of the creative life.

“I do borrow from other writers shamelessly! I can only say in my defense, like the woman brought before the judge on a charge of kleptomania, ‘I do steal, Your Honor, but only from the very best stores.’“

I know many teenagers and young adults who are stressed because they feel nothing new can be created. “Everything has already been done,” one fifteen-year-old mentioned to me. “Yes, this is true,” I told him, “but a great medicine woman from the Creek tribe once reminded me, ‘Everything worthwhile is borrowed.’” In school they are often concerned about plagiarism. Borrowing an idea and adding your thoughts, your spin, to it in your journal is not plagiarism. Plagiarism is copying word for word or paraphrasing something someone else wrote with no new input from you.

“I am a writer. I don’t cook and I don’t clean.”

—DOROTHY WEST, AFRICAN-AMERICAN WRITER

I bring this up because these two concerns—worrying about plagiarism and that nothing feels new—can put you between a rock and a hard place.

Everything in this book is borrowed. The originality comes from what I do with it and what experience I glean from it. So, borrow away. Once you borrow some idea or story, make it your own. You add your bit of twist to it. You change the color, or add something, or take something away—and there you have something wonderful. You have something original.

“Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. It doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make, what unhappiness you have to undergo. It is all your material… . Don’t wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.”

As a writer you can draw materal from anything. That is one thing I love about being a writer: every conversation, the dream last night, the broken chair in the alley, the large man getting on the bus, the pencil on the floor—all are material for me to use in my writing.

“Every fire is the same size when it starts.”

—SENECA PROVERB

In Buddhism there is a practice that suggests we be grateful to everything that shows up on our path. This is because everything and everyone can be used to wake us up to our true nature. This writing practice and this Buddhist principle can go hand in hand. Even the difficult stuff can have a place in your writing. You can write just to write, noticing whatever shows up on your path, or you can write because something difficult has shown up. I use the painful and silly stuff to get in touch with my true nature.

In indigenous cultures the art of making a fire was taught to the very young. Instead of hearing “hide the matches” or “don’t touch that,” children were given the skills to make fire on their own. In these cultures a child was given sticks, a knife, and dried grass and then his or her very own hands and breath created an ember that ignited a fire. This simple but powerful process linked the young with their own innate abilities to interact creatively with their environment. It did involve some danger. I am sure some got burned.

”We don’t find what we are looking for at the mall.”

—FROM SEN 24/7 BY PHILIP TOSHIO SUDO, AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST

There are too many skills that we have lost over the ages—skills that used to help keep our creativity and self-esteem activated. These skills include building our own homes, candle making, learning many ways to use a knife, making bread and soup from scratch, writing letters, and archery, to name just a few.

But we still know how to use a few age-old skills. Rub the sticks together—bring pen to paper and light the empty page, and your life, with the fire of your words.

Off the Page

Learn how to make a fire with no matches; make a loaf of bread from scratch; make a candle.

“All I know is what I have words for.”

—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, AUSTRIAN PHILOSOPHER

I do a lot of my journaling at coffee shops. Right now I am at the Starbucks in Madison, Wisconsin, with my writer’s group. In this Starbucks, as at most coffee shops, hangs a bulletin board overflowing with announcements, business cards, notes, and flyers. You can discover a lot about your community, and yourself, from what is posted on the bulletin board. You can also get a lot of ideas for your journals, poetry, or novel from public bulletin boards.

To get a completely random subject for writing, I had my writing friend Dawn pick something off the board for me. It was an advertisement.

HELP!

Dead Battery • Keys locked in • Flat tire Towing • Road Service

We still make house calls.

BOB GOAT ROAD SERVICE

HOME OF THE WORLD-FAMOUS CREW

608-222-2222

Locally owned and operated

Service Day and Night

7 days a week, every week

”In writing, for the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream.”

—FROM WRITING THE AUSTRALIAN CRAWL BY WILLIAM STAFFORD

Off the Page

Go around with some friends to coffee shops and other public gathering places that have bulletin boards and collect ideas for your poetry and creative writing. Take your journals with you.

Create a poster about yourself.

Eavesdropping can be a good thing. You can learn a lot from listening to people talk at a local coffee shop or restaurant. Eavesdrop and find out. I sometimes come up with a scene or idea for my fiction when listening in on a conversation. I once learned the history of the Mega Mall; another time I heard a group of young women pore over biblical quotes. You can learn something about other people’s beliefs and, from your responses, learn something about yourself. The intention for this eavesdropping experience is an important one—to open up to new ideas to write about and to become more receptive to other’s views. Please—no eavesdropping on friends or to be judgmental about what you hear. Simply listen in on a conversation as a writer—as a way into another’s world. Listen, and write.

I am most interested in what boys have to say to one another. The conversations between women are not enough of a curiosity for me. Or maybe it is that I get enough of it in my life with friends. But what do boys visit about? Now this makes me curious enough to be still for a while and listen.

I eavesdropped for a couple hours on a conversation I can say changed my life! It was a group of young men talking about their sexual identities. I was shocked at their openness. They had just left a PRIDE meeting and were very talkative. They might have guessed I was listening only they were totally engrossed with each other. I had so many questions about my own sexuality. I filled up six pages in my journal that night on what I heard and what I felt. This is only the start. What I am thinking and feeling will not go any further than my journal or my therapist’s office until I know more about who I am and what I want.

”The world is full of things, and somebody has to look for them.”

—FROM PIPPI LONGSTOCKING BY ASTRID LINDGREN

I didn’t get all of their conversation but she was clearly less excited about getting together than the guy. She looked at her coffee cup and the table more than at him and wouldn’t answer him directly when he invited her to go out that evening. She was stalling the inevitable. I would guess this was their second or third date and she wanted to end it before it went any further. I found myself feeling sorry for him. And wondered, Why is it so hard for us to just tell someone we aren’t interested? I realized, sitting and listening and watching, that I am very scared about getting into a relationship that I will not want to continue. I am not very good at ending relationships either. She finally did get her message across but I didn’t hear the specifics. He left first and she sat and drank a second cup of coffee, checking the place out. An idea for a short story or article came to me—one where the girl breaks up with the guy in a real obvious, and considerate, way. We could use more examples.