propellor

yesterday - la nest, my morning pages headquarters avec les gang of Sam & Oliver (Miss D's on her puffy bed in the corner) 

Was it only by dreaming or writing 
that I could find out what I thought
Joan Didion

For so many of us, it is hard to be both large enough 
and small enough to hold the range of life.

Without a spiritual connection to something larger than ourselves, we lose our bearings, our beings, our sense of scale. Of course we do. The human experience is intricate, painful and very beautiful. We lead lives filled with loss and filed with gain. Without a tool to metabolize what we live through–and for me that tool is Morning Pages–and even with it, it is hard to process who we have been and who we have become. So much happens to each of us. It is hard to make peace. Life is like a sea. A wave of memory sweeps in that threatens to overwhelm us and then the wave retreats, leaving us to wonder at what was washed ashore.

The present is big enough to hold the past.

I must let the present enlarge enough to become rich and deep. I must live in it, not just occupy it's time. Morning Pages remind me that while I cannot choose much of what happens to me in my life, I can choose how I respond to what happens. The trick is getting small enough to inch forward. The past is huge. The future may be huge as well. What remains for me, what is is given, is to do the small tasks of the day. First among those tasks is Morning Pages, the daily writing of three pages that draws me into the life I have now, the choice I can make today to find the beauty in what is given to me.

Julia Cameron - from The Sound of Paper

A recent addition to my much loved, much needed daily ritual of lingering in bed while having coffee with my own Morning Pages is doing one of the exercises that follow each short personal essay in another of Julia Cameron's amazing books - The Sound of Paper. The passage I've excerpted above is from the chapter Gaining through Loss and it's message spoke to me so strongly, that when I read it - it absolutely took my breath away - it felt like she had been looking inside of me ... inside of my heart, my life & my soul. She has so beautifully articulated a feeling I've carried with me forever but did not know how to express it - don't you love it when you stumble upon this kind of treasure?

The act of writing Morning Pages each & every day, I'm realizing, has become an essential tool for me on my own journey in life. Through this act of writing I sort out everything. I really do. It amazes me almost every morning what comes up, what comes out - his task, that I've grown to love and look forward to each morning (along with my most delicious coffee) is the thing, it is the propellor that moves me forward, upward & onward.

Today I'm finalizing my 2013 Lil' Owl calendar - it's been an owl collage explosion (below) here at the TTD* ;-)

* teak topped desk