Morning Th(ink)

Morning journal to daily presence.

My alarm goes off. Like every person in the modern Western world, it gets snoozed for that standard nine minutes,that time that's supposed to make us feel better, but we know it doesn't. My eyes open blearily. My middle-aged body aches. My head is foggy. The day is before me.

With a sigh, my foot lands on the carpet. I open the blind to witness the morning. Okay, let's get a cup of tea. The kettle boils while I make my bed and adjust my bedside table for the coming refreshment. My morning journal sits there, and my mind is already racing about everything that’s in my life.

Everything that the day might bring, or might not bring. It’s a storm of “would, should, could” questions, creating analysis by paralysis. This misaligned effort to meet the world with perfect service brings me to the point where I look at that book and say, “I don’t want to write anything today.” But I do. With my cup of tea freshly made, I switch on my noisemaker, a babbling brook, to help ground my soul a bit more in the concrete of the city where I live.

And I write. It always starts with the same sentences about how I physically feel. The first page comes relatively easy, until I get to the last quarter of the page where my mind goes blank. I will tell the journal that my mind has gone blank. At that point, I’m triggered to look around the room or out the window. It's November.

Over the past 20 days, when I’ve got to this section of my journal, I’ve looked out the window at the trees in my garden. Twenty days ago, there was a golden bloom of autumnal leaves there. And every day, I narrated the state and status of that tree.

It kept dropping leaves. I started to connect on how that reflects in my own life, to the point now where the tree stands there in the grey British autumnal weather, bare naked branches exposed to the weather.

But it’s in that exposure to the harshness of the environment that the tree grows stronger. It is only through the jettisoning of those leaves does this tree find upward growth. When I examine the now-bare tree, I observe droplets still landing on the branches, being absorbed by the bark. The tree stands in static acceptance, simply receiving its environment. The rain can be viewed as harsh weathering, or as a living presence finding refreshment, much like me drinking my morning tea and remaining present.

And this is what my morning pages journal has given me, amongst all the other things that are written in there. It allows me to see who I am to meet the day instead of simply letting the day come at me. The repeated latter causes the self to be lost in the demands of our world. When I close the journal, I don't have a to-do list in my head anymore. I stop trying to find meaning and instead think: What can I do today that supports me in accepting the world around me, now? My mind becomes the blank page that waits for me tomorrow.

The method I use is very similar to Julia Cameron's "Morning Pages," which comes from her book, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. That teach us we don’t have to force things out of our heads.

We sit with a warm beverage, with the day outside, blank pages and ink, and write. The connection from the brain to our hand, into that soft space, allows us to truly see who we are when identities are pulled into societal norms. With so much information being thrown at us, it is not surprising people are living a world of persona rather than humanity.

In this simple act of morning journaling, I’m dropping my leaves. I’m weathering the storm. And I am growing upward and inward, to root myself into the Now of being.

Ultimately, this practice teaches us a profound truth: “We need to know who we are when we open our eyes, and we need to respect who we’ve been when we close them.”