Writing Morning Pages ...

Are you familiar with The Artist Way by Julia Cameron? Last year I began meeting with a group of women ... we call ourselves "Visionary Women." The tagline for our group is: Creativity as a Spiritual Path to God" and we are all artists of some sort or another. Creativity is our passion and deep connection to God. This year we begin another Cameron book called Vein of Gold. Morning pages are an integral part of the process but there has been one large problem for me since the beginning of our group. Morning pages are supposed to be done, well, in the morning! But I am NOT a morning person.

Morning, morning, morning ... what is so great about the morning? Does it count if I do morning pages at one minute after midnight? Technically that IS the morning. I find myself at a place of trying to separate the things that are true from the things that aren't. I wage this battle often within myself as I listen to mature spiritual people say that you must spend time in prayer and devotion in the morning in order to center your day around God. However, I have always found in my own life that is more easily done for me in the quiet of the late night and in so doing, I feel as though I am centering my entire being around God. And so I struggle ... and I wonder if Jesus only called the disciples to "come away to a deserted place" in the morning ...

I am reading Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. Her message about writing is much the same as Cameron's. Set a goal and then just write! Stream of consciousness ... Cameron says: Write for 3 pages. Goldberg says: Set a time and write for that amount of time. Goldberg says the aim is to "burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually see and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel."

Beautiful ... but here I am ... still committed to writing morning pages ... in the morning!