Swimming with Elephants..

I was recently reading about someone who swam with elephants!  The images that flood into my mind are deeply imaginative, a little absurd and surely playful.  I loved thinking about this.  I love that someone was doing it.  I loved that I wanted to do it too.  I began thinking of how and where I might do this.  I also thought about riding on an elephant once and the prickly dry wrinkle of skin on her back.  Then I thought about summer and breezes and back to elephants.  My friend once did an ink wash on butcher paper that had 13 elephants on it with the words: Thirteen ways of looking at an elephant, a rip on Wallace Steven's poem, "Thirteen ways of looking at a Blackbird", which I then looked up and read aloud. Then I looked out the window and tried to see a blackbird, and then thought about the crow that often wakes me in the morning, yelling at me "Get UP!    Get UP!  Get UP!   which in crow language sounds like   CAWCAW, CAWCAW!!!  Then one of my black dogs climbed into my lap, looking at me, surely saying "I'M HUNGRY."  Then I thought about the way animals talk to me and remembered a friend telling me he liked how I put words in the mouths of my animals expressions.. and so on.

This is a piece of my "Morning Pages"   a concept developed by Julia Cameron who is the author is "The Artist's Way", "Sound of Paper", "Prayers for the Non Beliver", "The Right to Write", "Heart Steps",  and many other books on creativity and writing.  Her idea is to start every day of your life with two sheets of writing.  Stream of consciousness, like the example above, a letter, practicing a description of something or telling a story, are all possibilities.  What you write is not as important as the act itself.  She feels it is a kind of unplugging of our creative juices.  Whatever we are stuck thinking about lays atop the rich vein of gold of our creative energies.  If we can uncap the well we will have access all day to the deeper, richer, wilder stuff that lies underneath.  Our creativity can get bogged down in the business of living and we need to practice setting it free on a daily basis so that it can come out and play.  When we pass this portal, we enter into a zone with less rules and injunctions and negativity.  We are inviting a part of us to come out and in meeting this part of ourself we often find a sense of meaning and body joy that is not always available with the accumulation of success or completions that the world gives us.

Learn to nurture this part of yourself and you will find your outlook is happier and less cranky.




I have tagged three of her sites for you to explore, you can sign up for tweets or her blog or her course, all lively and supportive of the artist within all of us.

Now where are your two morning pages????????

Reflections on the Artist's Way - Julia Cameron

Julia Cameron Live

The Artist's Way at Work: The Official Site

Offstage cues:  Two pages!  Every morning!