Writing Through a Mood

“The seed is in the ground.
Now we rest in hope
While darkeness does its work.”

-Wendell Berry

I’ve recently diagnosed myself with a raging case of Februaryitis. My mood lately has been as blah as the weather. The urge to hibernate is strong. Winter brought us ice and snow this week, COVID got us after three years, and some friends and family are going through particularly challenging times, as is our country. In other seasons, sun and warmth and time outdoors burn off this dread and dreariness, but February in upstate New York drapes us in a gray weariness that’s hard to shake.

So what is one to do?

I’ve chosen to do what I know best—to write through the mood. Fueled with coffee, of course.

Get out of that cozy bed, pour a glass of homemade cold-brew, and simply write. About strange dreams where you’re riding a bicycle without brakes down a winding path. About the ominous noises the house made in the middle of the night when the ice on the roof cracked and shifted.

About all of the rushing around you’re doing lately.

About the unsettled weather.

Most importantly use pens and inks that lighten the mood, that lift your spirits, that make you smile. Ink your pens with colors that are the opposite of the season. For me that’s been a cheerful purple (Waterman Tender Purple), a bright red (Levenger Cardinal Red), and a high-sheening green (Birmingham Pens Emerald Fusion), as well as a fresh blue (my last cartridge of Private Reserve Lake Placid Blue). Create a colorful world on the page to make up for the dull scene outside your window.

This is my prescription for this mood. To show up every day. With coffee. And pens. And ink.

To simply write though this season and this mood, knowing that both will pass, and that there are small joys to be found in each day. Like the bright red cardinal at the feeder and a letter from a friend. And pens. And ink.

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final.”

-Ranier Marie Rilke

Flow

I wrote two pages in my Nanami Paper Seven Seas journal yesterday morning, as I always do. Then I took my 2.5 mile walk, as I always do. These two things are a combination that never fails to clear my head so that I go into the day (mostly) calm and focused. Except for yesterday. I felt edgy and agitated as I wrote and my mind ricocheted all over the place as I walked.

WHERE IS MY PEACE?—I yelled, internally, in a not-very-grounded way.

I flipped though my mental Rolodex looking for an answer. Was it Covid, pre-election jitters, sadness over not seeing my dad in his nursing home for eight months? While all those things are possible reasons for how I was feeling, they’ve all been true for months and I’m typically able to shake them long enough to write and walk and find that core of inner stillness.

That elusive, desired core.

Then it dawned on me. The pen I’d picked to write with was one that wrote finer and drier than I enjoy. I even cleaned it and swapped inks in the middle of my journal entry to see if that would help. It didn’t really, but I kept going. I had to press harder to see the wetness of the ink on the page, to catch a glimpse of that red sheen I so enjoy. I had to bear down harder with both my hand and my mind. The pen writes perfectly fine for jotting down notes or even writing a letter, but lacks that good wet effortless flow that journaling requires. My mind felt as tight and cramped as the pen’s stingy line. It choked and sputtered and started pinging around to all of its perceived grievances and difficulties. My mind. Not the pen.

Today I wrote with a broad wet nib and page after page of things to be grateful for flowed out of me. My walk was a bitterly cold one, but I found the inner warmth that I was longing for yesterday.

I found flow. In a pen, and in my mind.

Keeping Them Honest. (And by “them” I mean “me.”)

I love Anderson Cooper’s “Keeping Them Honest” segments on CNN.com where he takes the day’s political stories and reviews the facts versus the spin. I thought I’d do the same for myself, as a way to look back at 2018. Where did I fail? Where did I succeed?

Let’s hit some areas where I fell short.

I believe I declared that I was going to clear out my backlog of notes and stationery by mailing a card or note to someone every day of 2018. That habit stuck for awhile—into March, I think. And I DID send a good number of cards, but lesson learned: you’re not going to do ANYTHING every day of the year*. This basket, I must admit, looks pretty much the same as when I made that declaration. Not only that, but I bought even more cards and notes (at 75% off at Barnes & Noble, but still) so the stationery situation is actually a little worse than when I started. Something to work on in 2019.

I also started scoring my days, drawing the weather, and charting my mood in my Hobonichi Techo. That venture petered out after a month or so. I do like looking back at those pages, but I don’t think I was gaining much insight from the practice, so I just stopped. I’d like to use the monthly calendar pages to track something, but I haven’t given that much thought yet. It’s only January 6th. There’s still time. (A friend suggested, just today, that we get back into running so this might be the perfect place to log those workouts. And my mood. And the weather.)

There are certainly other areas where I fell far short of my goals, declared or not. I acquired more pens than seems healthy, and didn’t dip into my own collection of under-used pens when I had the hankering for something new. Definitely working on this in 2019. Six days in. No new pens. High five!!

So…where did I succeed in 2018?

I started dream journaling.

This isn’t something that I do very often, but I do do it every now and then. Especially vivid or meaningful dreams get recorded and drawn, and I do my best to tease out the significance of the what I experienced or felt. Sometimes what seems like a stressful dream actually delivers a positive message when I sit down and dissect the images and emotions. This is a “sometime” kind of journaling, but it’s sticking. Success.

I finally made it to CW Pencil Enterprise. Twice. LOVED IT.

I’ll do a separate blog post about my experience in the store, but let me just say that this little shop feels like home. It’s warm and wonderful, full of delightful people and pencils. There’s a little bit of magic there. I’ll be returning in 2019. For sure.

I’m still writing my morning pages. Every single morning.

I started this practice in the summer of 2016 and once that switch flipped on, it’s never been turned off. I can’t imagine my morning without coffee (french-pressed cold brew) and my journal.

A few days before Christmas I started my fourth 480-page Nanami Paper journal. That’s a lot of ink and words—a lot of whatever spills out of my groggy head and onto the page. A lot of struggles, doubts, anxieties, pep talks, and precious memories.

2018 was a weird year. Lots of drama and changes (ongoing) with my elderly parents. Very little blogging. 2019 will probably be weird, too, but I hope to do significantly more blogging. And if I don’t, feel free to keep me honest.

*Edited to add: Tina correctly pointed out, in a comment, that I have maintained a daily journaling habit, so clearly I can do something every single day if I really want to. She’s right. Because I’ve scheduled this, and made it an ingrained habit, I’ve been successful at maintaining this streak. Something to think about as I work to make improvements and tweak my priorities in 2019.

In Praise Of Habits

 

Back on January 1st, I vowed to use the Hobonichi Techo I’d finally purchased (peer pressure) to record…

• Appointments, in pencil because appointments often change
• Good things/moments from my day
• What I ate for dinner

Oddly enough, I’ve been recording all of that. Every day. I have the world’s worst record for consistently journaling. The bottom of one of my filing cabinets contains stacks of partially filled notebooks. I used to write a complainy blurb, then let seven or so years go by before I felt moved to record another paragraph. On the plus side, this makes a notebook last a really long time, but, on the other hand, it doesn’t make for insightful or inspiring reading.

The Hobonichi Techo and I just clicked. I worried that the size might be too small, but it’s proven to be just right. Filling up a page doesn’t take long, yet I can get in a lot of detail about my day and all of the good things that happened. No complaining allowed in this book. I’ve also taken to recording quotes that I come upon, usually on Twitter, often by Anne Lamott.

On the monthly pages at the front of the book, I’ve continued to record exercise details—gym visits, step counts, and mileage. Thanks to the Whole Life Challenge, and the support of a very good friend, the gym has become a place I enjoy even when I’m breathing hard, sore, and soaked. For someone who dreaded every moment of gym class in school, this is yet another miracle—another habit that has taken root. I’m learning that habits are like that. Sustaining the first habit makes it that much easier to stick with another one, and another one after that.

Full of quotes that buoy me up, details from my day that I surely would’ve forgotten, little epiphanies, and dinner ideas, the 2016 Techo has already become a treasured resource. I love leafing through it, seeing different inks, and moods, and blessings. I can’t imagine life without one. The 2017 version is already waiting in the wings.

At the end of June 2016, I made a decision to FINALLY get out of bed to sit at my desk to faithfully write Morning Pages. As I’ve said before, this is an idea I’ve toyed with for years, but never put into practice. I was always too lazy, too tired, too full of excuses. Finally I decided to give it a shot. June 25th, 2016—a new habit was born.

Now I can’t imagine my life without this practice. It’s been three plus months and though I have to get up at 5:30 am during the week to get to work on time, I look forward to writing these pages every single day. I dump anything and everything into this Nanami Paper Seven Seas “Writer” journal—dreams, worries, conversations, inspiring moments, petty complaints, joys, and anxieties. There’s not too much of the “we did this, we did that” kind of stuff, though, of course there is a little of that. What’s so cool is that I usually sit down with little idea of how I’ll fill the lines and pages, and yet there are always words. There are always ideas and problems and moods and feelings.

I used to write three pages a day, but I’ve recently scaled back to two so that I have enough time to do ten minutes of meditation followed by five minutes of stretching before I jump in the shower. Meditation? Stretching? More habits? Who am I?

Encouraged by my ability to sustain these writing habits, and with the help of The Whole Life Challenge (I’m currently entering the third week of my seventh challenge), I’m finding it easier and easier to sustain other lifestyle habits. So every morning, I write, meditate, stretch, and drink 20 ounces of water before leaving the house. And you know what? I feel great. Calmer. Lighter. Stronger. (Stretchier?)

The idea for a Jar of Awesome also came out of the Whole Life Challenge. While some on my team found the practice to be “hokey,” I loved it. As I wrote back in June, the thought of having the jar fill up with special moments from the day seemed like a great way to notice how much goodness there is in our lives, much of which would zip on by if we’re not looking for it. So I started a jar and have it sitting on my dresser.

I will admit that this habit fell off my radar for awhile until recently, when I was listening to Elizabeth Gilbert on the “On Being” podcast. She spoke about her Happiness Jar, and I vowed to revive the practice. It takes less than a minute to write down something from your day that made you smile, something that will be nice to remember when you’re having one of those days. So I cut up some paper into strips, and have the strips and a pen sitting right next to the jar. I’m still not super consistent with this habit, but it’s one I want to continue to cultivate. I want to see this jar STUFFED with the tiny but wonderful things that accumulate as we go through our ordinary days. I want to get better at noticing those things even in the days that leave me feeling wrung out and run over.

Habits. I was never very good at sustaining them. But look at me now—journaling, exercising, meditating, stretching, looking for the good in each day. One habit made the next one seem possible, then the next one, and the next one.

Habits. Practiced day by day. Words. Feelings. Recorded letter by letter, line by line, page by page. I’m writing. I’m living. I’m grateful.

Always grateful.

I can think of no better use for my pens, paper, inks, and notebooks than to express that.

I’m currently participating in a weeklong Social Media blackout, the latest Whole Life Challenge lifestyle challenge. I normally post a link to a new blog post on Twitter but can’t do that without losing points. If someone reading this could post a link for me, I’d be…you guessed it…grateful.

 

A Practice: My Hobonichi Techo

When I started learning how to ride my scooter, I quickly learned a valuable lesson. Look where you want to go. This sounds so obvious, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. If you saw me riding in those first few days, you’d know it didn’t come to me naturally. I wanted to turn into the right hand lane, but my eyes would lock onto the cars I was trying to avoid in the left lane and my scooter would head right towards them. Eek!

Life, it turns out, is a lot like my scooter lesson. If you focus on the negative, you’ll find the negative. The opposite is also true, look for the positive and you’ll find the positive.

I started using my first Hobonichi Techo at the end of December and bonded with it right away. But I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to use it. I knew I’d use it to keep track of appointments, but what would I do with the rest of the page- that gorgeous Tomoe River paper page?

I quickly decided to use the monthly index pages to jot down some notes about the day’s weather. My grandmother used to routinely record the weather on a calendar that hung by her back porch door, so maybe this urge is genetic.

I also decided to use the “knife and fork”prompt on each daily page to record what we ate for dinner. Yes, ham again!

But how was I going to use the rest of the daily pages?

Initially I started doing a kind of activity log- we went here, we did this- but I was only a few days in before I started boring myself. Do I really need a record of the errands I’ve run? My daily Field Notes to-do lists fill this niche pretty nicely, so rehashing the day-to-day stuff in my Hobonichi seemed redundant.

The answer to this datebook dilemma was handed to me by a friend. “Why don’t we,” she said, “record three good things for each day? Three things we’re grateful for.” We’d been talking about journaling and how we both suffer from “new journal paralysis” when this idea popped up. “Yes!” I said, and a new practice was born.

On some days, I may jot down a quote that hits home, or a verse or note from a sermon, but I always record my three things. In a world that’s gone haywire, with so much in our lives that’s hard, closing out the day by writing down those small special moments keeps my focus where it should be- on all that I’m grateful for, on the positive.

Keep your eyes focused on where you want to go and you’ll get there. It just takes a little daily practice.