Hi fellow journalers! You’ve cracked the spine of your nice new notebook and begun to capture some experiences. How does it feel? New to the challenge? It’s not too late to start. Get all caught up here.
I recently picked up an old copy of Natalie Goldberg’s classic Writing Down the Bones at a used book sale. It is one of those iconic books on the craft of writing that I have somehow never managed to sit down and read. Don’t let the slim volume surprise you; it is packed with Zen wisdom and creative insight. In the preface alone Goldberg quotes a few of Jack Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” which I think, given our monthly challenge, are quite apropos:
- [Be s]ubmissive to everything, open, listening
- [There is n]o fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
- Be in love with yr life
I would include one more:
- Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
And with that I will leave you with the final words of Goldberg’s preface: “Now, please, go. Write your asses off.”
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Day 2 – A Watercolorist’s Journal
One of three things will happen the first time you paint with watercolors: (1) you will make a mistake and give up; (2) you will make a mistake and start over, repeat this process until you’ve wasted a lot of expensive paper, sigh in disgust, and then give up; or (3) you will learn acceptance.
You will accept that the beautiful blue color you’ve mixed on your palette looks dark and muddy on the page. You will paint a dark and muddy scene. You will accept that there is no remedy for the drips and drops of water that have just ruined your beautiful swishy-sherbet sunset wash. You will turn the drips and drops into a misshapen cloud and (okay, screw acceptance) hate that cloud with an intensity all out of proportion to the situation. You will accept that your attempts to “fix” things result in sodden, buckling paper, furred and clotted with little abused paper particles. There is no “fixing” things in watercolor painting. There is only acceptance. And moving forward. Or giving up.
If you choose acceptance, you may begin to notice some things. That muddy denim-blue-lavender color is the color of anything, anywhere, in shadow. The hidden crook of a plant, where leaf meets stem; the underbelly of a bonfire-bright goldfish; the silhouette of a mountain range in the mist; the thin, reaching shadow of a thorn thrown against a cactus paddle at sunset. And just imagine, you learned to mix that color–that indispensable, depth-giving color, you learned the secret recipe, Cobalt Blue with touches of Cadmium Orange and Amazonite–on your very first try.
You will notice that the ugly little misshapen cloud is the best thing you’ve painted all week. And the more you stare at it the more you’ll want to clip it from the poor, dull sunset scene you’ve placed it in and transport it somewhere cosmic and surreal–to an acid-green sunset on the surface of Venus. You’ll want to give it twelve hundred brothers–an armada of weird little clouds, and call it all the moment the rain stopped in Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day.” You will never again try to “fix” a mistake in your painting, you will tell yourself. (But of course you will, you’re only human, and your great, lumbering human brain tramples where it likes.) You will instead wait patiently for the page to dry, for the alchemical changes of the evaporative process to take place. You will have faith in what is to come. You will practice acceptance.