Morning Pages: 10:05 am writing very fast. This is the first day of truing ot do this. Writing this stream-of-consciousness stuff is not new for me. i ahve quaite a few notebooks full of exactly that. There are a couple of differences with this. First and foremost, these morning pages are a way to begint the day. The real test of this process will begin tomorrow when i attempt to rise early enough in the morning to complete this exercise before I go to work. I am very anxious to see if this is the "practice" that breaks me free of my "stuck" palce and -- well and I don't know what. One of the main reasons that I am stuck, I think, is that moving at all will take me around a corner and I have no idea what is over there in that new place. Very scary. The second thing about these morning pages that makes them different from my journaling in the past is that in some sense I always viewed that effort as a development of "product". That is, the words I lay down needed to have value in an of themselves. Morning pages (from The Artists Way, by Julie Cameron, 1982) are a process. These words themselves specifically do not have value. They are put on paper only to indicate that the process is moving along, until the 3 page mark is reached. I suspect that if this works I am going to start to working on these in a laptop because it hurts my hand to write this much in longhand. But the longhand process is what we are told to use in the book. It flashed into my mind that this act of rapidly collecting throw-away thoughts that no one sees is a very good technique to use in a creative JAD-like session. I'm going to read up on those next week. Th third key point about thse morning pages is that they are a reminder that creativity and good ideas do not come from the stream of word-based left-brained thoughts that spill out of the pre-frontal cortex. These word clusters are primarily mini-moviesl those scripts that the mind keeps on file and runs on request from the emergency management center. They are little rote-based connectors of memories that the left-brain keeps on file for assisting in emergencies. They are used to: soothe distress by presenting the familiar, tie-up thoughts and so to surpress incoming input from outside-- like pain from the body or visuals that are terrifying, and to create emotional states and impulses to action that are rehearsed and efficient. Right-brained, creative ideas waft into the mind as complete metaphors, as new connections of disparate parts, very much like a Picasso painting, and they arrive having no baggage- no connections to emotional content, no direct impulses to action, no connection to family, tribal, personal history, especially of trauma. Is art the act of liking the two in a deliberate fashion? Do creative ideas only have value when this is don by teh owner/possessor of the idea? So we have a well of images that make new thoughts when we pull one up from the well and put it to use.
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Twelve weeks - Artist's Way + walking again + 20 lbs
Task Classification: * Really attracted to doing this one, X really resisting this one, -- Neutral
weeks run from Sunday to Sunday. She recommends end-of-week check-in on Saturday. I may do Sunday. 20 mins for review-> tasks done? Feelings?
Week One Tasks:
* 1 Morning Pages
X 2 Artist Date
* 3 Blocks- 5 years-life negative self-worth
X 4 Write horror story
X 5 Letter from my wounded child -- her voice
-- 6 Champions of self worth
X 7 Letter to mentor who encouraged me
* 8 Imaginary lives - 5 of them
-- 9 Turn blurts from negative to positive
* 10 Take your artist fro a walk to absorb images
Showing posts with label Memoirs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Memoirs. Show all posts
Monday, December 18, 2006
Present - Very First Entry - 12/17/2006
Project Management RPG: I'm trying to convince my sons who are both skilled at various complex games played by young people that the world of project management and delivery (and portfolio management and related blah blah) should be modeled as a pastiche for a role playing game and the conduct of the project as a single game. I can't decide if this would work best as a simulation merely to meet training objectives or as a background information source for practitioners on the job. They are skeptical. It seems that they believe the exercise to be pointless and/or too boring and trivial a case for all the work that would go into creating a game. I can be a bulldog about ideas that I really believe in, so I may keep after them about this. I want some useful conversation on exactly how one would go about creating this.
The Web: I recently went to an entertaining lecture by David Weinberger and immediately went to Amazon and ordered Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Most well written books end up changing my whole world view in some way, and this is no exception. I am working to fit his key theses (as I understand them) into my current work, life choices, entertainment, conversations. My entire interior life is a crazy borg structure where I have assimilated any book that has struck me as meaningful. Except that the whole is not a neat polyhedron, just an endless collection of things slapped on top of each other. Kind of like the web.
Bio Pix: I am 51 years old. My two sons are adults (just) and off and running on their own lives. I have a job that is interesting and presently pretty rewarding. My husband is a nice man and we get along better every year. It seems to be easier to find common ground and comfortable compromises on things. All this adds up to a kind of empty space. During my long walks (for exercise and contemplation and solitude) I plot out novels I would like to write. In addition, I develop lengthy arguments about things. All kinds of things. I craft an opinion and go over it several times until I get the words I want just right. Sometimes I speak these thoughts aloud and this is awkward when I am not alone on the hiking trail. In recent years, this is as far as my writing has gone. I do not think that this makes me a writer, but the compelling urge to design stories in my head has to mean something important. To my life. I have tried numerous strategies for addressing the blank page and none have worked very well. Except that I have a pile of little spiral notebooks that contain journal like entries, most of them only partly complete. So this web approach I am presenting to myself as no more arduous or anxiety producing than my journals but also a stepping out into a new place. [All the hits for "empty nest" have a sort of self-help flavor. I was looking for something a little more ascerbic. No links.]
About Past Entries: I have the present ambition to transcribe the journals from my past into this journal here as well. I want to see what I was thinking about and who I used to be. I have a lot of trepidation about this. First, my impulse to journal in the past came when things were not going very well. The entries are a pretty whiny and discouraging view of my life. They are a truthful, but not complete account of my life. When things are going well, I am in the flow of my life and not inclined to document the details. Even worse, some of the facts about my past don't show me in a very admirable light. I would like this blog to be a dispassionate view of myself -- when the subject is my own life and not my ideas and interests. I am ok with passion about ideas. Anyway, the transcription of my journals will carry my biography back to when I was about twelve years old. I have not yet figured out what to do about the dates for these historical entries, but I have decided not to be to particular about this structural issue.
I have a lot of passion about the brokenness of the health care system. I have only recently started feeling optimistic about things getting worked out. I want to mention this as one of my interests for this maiden entry, but I am not of a mind to say anything about this subject today.
I enjoy travel more than almost anything except reading books. I don't have any philosophical positions about travel and I find travel commentary a pretty boring read, but I hope to find something worthwhile to say about places.
Listening to Music: I used to believe that I really love music. I still enjoy going to a club to hear blues music now and then. But most of the time now I prefer silence to most kinds of sound.
Bio Pix: One of the facts about me that I am not really comfortable about is that I am addicted to romance novels. I read voraciously and have consumed lots of books on many subjects, but I always return to my favorite types of romances for comfort and escape. I had a dream last night and Nora Roberts was in it. She was a little supercilious to me. This has never happened before, but isn't it strange that it happened at all?
Bah Humbug: In the past I was very Scrooge-bah-humbug at this time of year. I am feeling mellower now about the whole christmas thing, but I still wish there were some way to do without it altogether. I like my tree and the strange little ornaments the boys made as children and this and that little ornament gotten over the years. But that is about the only thing in the plus column about christmas. [The web has lots of spots with bah humbug themes, but none I really want to link to. The Slate article was amusing, though.]
Family Issues: I don't really want to deal with anything very painful tonight. So there are a few specific topics I will skip over including family health issues and my sister in law who was killed with her children in Afghanistan and this will be the first christmas without them.
About Really-Future Entries: In addition to sticking in this blog all my old journals, I am also planning to create entries from an alter ego who lives one hundred years in the future. Her name is Anne. I have some notes on her life. She lives in the Florida Keys, but she has a job that takes her all over the globe and the next big crisis will be in South America. I don't know where yet, but she really isn't inclined to go. I think her ex-boss will appeal to her vanity and her idealism, so she will get sucked in. She has a job that is very difficult to describe in terms that make sense in our current world. I will let Anne speak for herself soon.
I think I will post one historical journal entry, just to get a flavor of how this works.
The Web: I recently went to an entertaining lecture by David Weinberger and immediately went to Amazon and ordered Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Most well written books end up changing my whole world view in some way, and this is no exception. I am working to fit his key theses (as I understand them) into my current work, life choices, entertainment, conversations. My entire interior life is a crazy borg structure where I have assimilated any book that has struck me as meaningful. Except that the whole is not a neat polyhedron, just an endless collection of things slapped on top of each other. Kind of like the web.
Bio Pix: I am 51 years old. My two sons are adults (just) and off and running on their own lives. I have a job that is interesting and presently pretty rewarding. My husband is a nice man and we get along better every year. It seems to be easier to find common ground and comfortable compromises on things. All this adds up to a kind of empty space. During my long walks (for exercise and contemplation and solitude) I plot out novels I would like to write. In addition, I develop lengthy arguments about things. All kinds of things. I craft an opinion and go over it several times until I get the words I want just right. Sometimes I speak these thoughts aloud and this is awkward when I am not alone on the hiking trail. In recent years, this is as far as my writing has gone. I do not think that this makes me a writer, but the compelling urge to design stories in my head has to mean something important. To my life. I have tried numerous strategies for addressing the blank page and none have worked very well. Except that I have a pile of little spiral notebooks that contain journal like entries, most of them only partly complete. So this web approach I am presenting to myself as no more arduous or anxiety producing than my journals but also a stepping out into a new place. [All the hits for "empty nest" have a sort of self-help flavor. I was looking for something a little more ascerbic. No links.]
About Past Entries: I have the present ambition to transcribe the journals from my past into this journal here as well. I want to see what I was thinking about and who I used to be. I have a lot of trepidation about this. First, my impulse to journal in the past came when things were not going very well. The entries are a pretty whiny and discouraging view of my life. They are a truthful, but not complete account of my life. When things are going well, I am in the flow of my life and not inclined to document the details. Even worse, some of the facts about my past don't show me in a very admirable light. I would like this blog to be a dispassionate view of myself -- when the subject is my own life and not my ideas and interests. I am ok with passion about ideas. Anyway, the transcription of my journals will carry my biography back to when I was about twelve years old. I have not yet figured out what to do about the dates for these historical entries, but I have decided not to be to particular about this structural issue.
I have a lot of passion about the brokenness of the health care system. I have only recently started feeling optimistic about things getting worked out. I want to mention this as one of my interests for this maiden entry, but I am not of a mind to say anything about this subject today.
I enjoy travel more than almost anything except reading books. I don't have any philosophical positions about travel and I find travel commentary a pretty boring read, but I hope to find something worthwhile to say about places.
Listening to Music: I used to believe that I really love music. I still enjoy going to a club to hear blues music now and then. But most of the time now I prefer silence to most kinds of sound.
Bio Pix: One of the facts about me that I am not really comfortable about is that I am addicted to romance novels. I read voraciously and have consumed lots of books on many subjects, but I always return to my favorite types of romances for comfort and escape. I had a dream last night and Nora Roberts was in it. She was a little supercilious to me. This has never happened before, but isn't it strange that it happened at all?
Bah Humbug: In the past I was very Scrooge-bah-humbug at this time of year. I am feeling mellower now about the whole christmas thing, but I still wish there were some way to do without it altogether. I like my tree and the strange little ornaments the boys made as children and this and that little ornament gotten over the years. But that is about the only thing in the plus column about christmas. [The web has lots of spots with bah humbug themes, but none I really want to link to. The Slate article was amusing, though.]
Family Issues: I don't really want to deal with anything very painful tonight. So there are a few specific topics I will skip over including family health issues and my sister in law who was killed with her children in Afghanistan and this will be the first christmas without them.
About Really-Future Entries: In addition to sticking in this blog all my old journals, I am also planning to create entries from an alter ego who lives one hundred years in the future. Her name is Anne. I have some notes on her life. She lives in the Florida Keys, but she has a job that takes her all over the globe and the next big crisis will be in South America. I don't know where yet, but she really isn't inclined to go. I think her ex-boss will appeal to her vanity and her idealism, so she will get sucked in. She has a job that is very difficult to describe in terms that make sense in our current world. I will let Anne speak for herself soon.
I think I will post one historical journal entry, just to get a flavor of how this works.
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