Journal

Evelyn: Early morning, her body warm under layers of blankets, her eyelids hesitantly stretching to meet the morning radiance slipping itself into her  bedroom, she reaches for her glasses, pushes the dog aside, and begins the process of making meaning of her days, her sleep, her dreams, her lists, and even her inspirations. Her morning pages, like stretching before a run, or boiling water for a cup of tea, have become part of her commitment to herself to get things down and out. And as she runs with a stream of thoughts, pausing for breath every once in a while, she also gains clarity of her needs, her truth, her hopes. She watches a dance of language, crude, sometimes messy and half awake, practice her voice on thin pages of canvas. It is the rhetoric that summons new ideas, new ways of seeing the world, beckoning to be discovered through the mass of discourse that often swirls and buckles, until the waters are calm, the run has ended, and there she finds "me."

Monica: The theme word I chose for 2011 is "practice"—something I have been needing to do with regard to my writing for quite awhile now. I've made the commitment to sit down and write a minimum of three pages a day in my journal, which is no small feat. Every day is a struggle. I wake up in the morning, glance at my writing desk, and find all sorts of other things I "need" to do: make breakfast, check e-mail, clean house, run into town to go grocery shopping...the list is endless. I remember a time when I couldn't go anywhere without my journal. The world was poetry to me; I couldn't wait to get it all down on paper. Somewhere along the way, I became disillusioned with words and their ability to express my vision of the world. My passion for writing was supplanted by other passions—bellydance and photography. But I've always known my primary art is writing and I've missed it. So each day, I begin to explore the cob-webbed crevices of my mind with three blank pages. Slowly, I learn to see the world as poetry again.