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Morning Pages

November 28, 2004

Picture of school mailbox at the Nathional Cathedral School with lots of compartments with rolled up papers inside of them.

I attended a wonderful creative workshop the week before Thanksgiving at the National Cathedral. Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way led the event from the auditorium of the Cathedral School for Girls – a wonderful old building just steps from the Washington Cathedral. Her book is a must-read for any artist, and I was thrilled to meet her in person.

One of her basic tools for getting in sync with your creativity is to write "Morning Pages". First thing in the morning, you sit down and write 3 pages of whatever comes into your head – sort of a brain–drain onto the page. It really does work if you make it a daily practice.

I took a little break from the lecture, and found this interesting student mailbox on my way to the ladies room. Julia had been describing morning pages in depth, and the rolled up flyers and pieces of paper sort of reminded me of them.

The intent of this mailbox is to organize items into appropriate boxes, but despite this, the result looks a bit scatalogical, and even a bit messy – which is sort of the point of the practice of Morning Pages. You just get the ideas down on the page and don't worry too much about what it looks like or how it sounds. Just get the chatter in your mind down, and over the course of time the ideas begin to fall into little piles, and a creative pathway begins to take form.

Posted by vincent at November 28, 2004 07:02 PM

Comments

Hi - Love the site. Was just checking out "Morning Pages" - not sure you mean scatalogical, though. Did you mean "scattered"? (Scatalogical refers to ... ummm ... excrement.)

Posted by: socks at December 4, 2004 06:30 AM

Well, I see your point, but the papers do kind of looked "dumped" in there, don't they? The morning pages offer a way of getting the "poopy" stuff out of your brain, so the good stuff has a way of getting out.

Your correction is well-taken, and I could have used the word in a better way... or not at all. Thanks for checking up on me!

Posted by: Susan Preston at December 4, 2004 09:51 AM