On navigating

My thoughts in recent days have become terribly difficult to unravel. I seem to lurch from one extreme solution to the next; I am in something of a wilderness and it is much of my own making. When I play the bones of my predicament to friends, someone will always say, "You should write about this" but that has proved impossible. It is as if real life has to cool down a little before it can be turned out from its tin without damage, before I can "eat it" and benefit in any way not only as a writer but as a human being. The thought of using my present situation as material seems plain wrong. But I know that writing is my way through things. It is NOT therapy and I'm adament here. Therapy is hitting a tree with a baseball bat (thanks, Darcie) or eating ice-cream by the half-gallon with a teaspoon...or arranging crockery into sets and colors in second-hand stores.

But these times have to be caught if only to enable me to return here in the future and see the arc of this situation--to see its beginning and consider its wild trajectory.

While I was in MA, I came across a booklet called "Recovery Instructions" by Jim Weigang. He outlines, among other things, a principle called Early Morning Journaling. I began the practice in June while I was away and have continued it religiously ever since. It creates, for me, a kind of daily footprint in the sand of my thoughts. Without writing this down each morning, the footprints would be lost, sucked into my current life's quicksand. I hope Jim won't mind my outlining the principle here:

Grab coffee if that's what you need, but apart from that, wake up and take a notepad somewhere quiet, preferably outside or within sight of the outside. Take three deep breaths to quiet yourself and then try to let your mind open up to whatever thoughts come its way. Write down that thought and then let it go. Breathe, listen and then write the next thought. There is no requirement for connection here. In fact, disconnection is preferable. So, breathe, open your mind, write the thought, breathe, open your mind, write the thought...and so on.

I continue until I have filled a page in a subject notebook. Sometimes there are just one or two seemingly unrelated words on a line. Sometimes, a la Ginsberg, my thought runs across two or three lines. I follow Jim's advice and don't allow myself to rant or complain or to catalogue things I need to do that day.

Try it for a week or two. It's fixed now in my meditation and I can't imagine beginning a day without it. Some quotations cribbed from Jim's booklet that explain better than I am able the power of this process:

Of all strange and unaccountable things this journalizing is the strangest: Thoreau

and my favorite...from Kafka.

You do not need to leave the room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

My journalling won't solve the problems I find myself tangled in today, but I think I might learn something from it tomorrow.