Inclusion
The journal is a realm of contemplation. The benefit becomes obvious as soon as you start. What you’re holding in your hands is something sacred. It has meaning.
Running late. Running back through time.
An argument can be made that… all we think about is the past.
A reader once wrote to me that one of the things he appreciated in my work—perhaps he was speaking of Good Nature or Overflow—was that I didn’t include myself in what I was trying to communicate. In that way, the message felt more universal. And yet, that is not what I’m doing here, nor is it any longer what I feel the reader necessarily needs from me, to remove or obscure a personal mien. I don’t know if it was consciously removed in the first place, except to say that once a particular idea begins to germinate, with additional ideas rushing in, the minutiae of self is not always a predominant factor for me in how I construct various patterns.
This is where the journal enters. Julia Cameron’s infectious The Artist’s Way will have most readers believe that everything starts from here, including me—except I was journaling long before discovering her concept of morning pages. You do have to start from somewhere, and it might not be that a playwright pens the seeds of her magnum opus directly within a screenplay app or template.
As a poet, creating my own chaos on the page has almost always started in the journal. When the moment strikes, I take a chunk of that morning writ and fire it off on its own. To the rest of the world, it’s as if that more personal material never existed.
Poetry is a language of its own. It can rhyme or do whatever it wants. It will intoxicate the writer into a mirage: “This is the only way I will ever write...” I went through phases where I thought I would give up all other forms for haiku. It is sometimes tempting to remove the I. Yet the memoir verses are stacking up.
Open Thought blew up under my fingertips, starting at the MLK library in 2023, and the titles gradually came for each volume—Tiny Leaps, Moving Pains, Changing Boats, A Closer Look at Nothing, and Only Now—as if they were my children.
Everything
will weave in.
The journal is a realm of contemplation. The benefit becomes obvious as soon as you start. What you’re holding in your hands is something sacred. It has meaning.
I have some reading and meditation to do. More conversations about meditation spring up and I realize this is something I desire. Talking about meditation can generate more of it. As I watch the talking die out, writing takes over. So I’m dancing around on the page—noting where my head is these days.
I’m starting to think maybe I should write later in the day when I’m more awake. I’m just so used to doing what I do here in the morning, as a ritual. Can it be any other way? This used to be out of necessity where I’d write early in the morning before work—it would be the thing that woke me up and I could feel more like a human being through the day. Now, my time is a lot more open. This morning is some vulnerability to admit I fall in and out of flow states and in falling out, doubting myself can be incredibly destructive to my mood, confidence, and productivity.
Mind training is to heal my thinking process.
Woke up and started adjusting some automation scripts right away. Fell asleep cracking up to some comedy. The humidity has started to fall. Straighten the back. Positive adjustments. Get to the heart of the problem. When does the writing really begin? Will I delete all of this in an hour from now? How bad is my handwriting? Who am I?
Yesterday, as I was getting off the train, again, I could see that I was in a holy moment. Unsure exactly what it was. All of this. What is this? This is so much bigger than us. Kill the timers and word counts to write strictly from an internal landscape.
When you come back to something years later, an old life flashes in front of your eyes, for better or worse. Sometimes I wonder who my mother would’ve been if she kept up her journal discipline. I wonder who I’d be without it. Would I still be here?
I will experiment with a standing desk or write more often in a standing position. I will be at home more, writing from home, or somewhere in the building.
The tea shoots into the blood.
The bartender threw together
an experimental cocktail
that tasted like an allergy shot.
This should be enough to go through life with a sense of urgency when you can go from 60 back down to 0 in split seconds. Is it old age? Am I living on borrowed time? Is it meant to be? I write a little more about anger, for my own clarification. In the end, I might be lashing out at nothing at all. Venting or processing the mechanics of anger isn’t the same as being harmed by it. Get a closer look, then you can let go like letting go of the in-breath. You don’t get all locked up in there. Life goes on. Life expands and contracts. Let it all breathe on the page. When you realize a tool is getting in the way, exhale.
★
Theft on Lilac: It was a cold attack dead of 10 o’clock. Up goes our garage door with the push of a button and the door into the hallway stands wide open. Our headlights shine into the pitch-black home invaded by a van. Men came in breaking the back window, contents turned up on their heads, drawers pulled out, drapes torn down, parts of the dining room scattered into kitchen, with kitchen island tipped.
A crack in the ceiling revealing swamp waters.
And now whoever can come crawling across
this broken seal and reveal themselves here
for here is human desire converted to despair.
Whoever deserves it most
no one knows
how we barbwire the psyche
but we know to expect it
and respect
expecting it.
★
A woman on Reddit is asking for advice about journaling because her husband is asking her to quit. “It isn’t helping things,” he says. She only writes what’s upsetting her and refuses to write about the good things in life, to write from gratitude.
First thoughts: You can’t insist on any one thing. You have to put it down exactly how it’s going. Don’t come at me telling me how to behave in my zone.
There comes a time when you start to work on yourself in the journal, but it happens as a result of sticking with it, spending enough time with it. Spend enough time and you’ll be shocked by what leaps out.
Other users chimed in and said the husband was an abuser who wants control over her means of emancipation.
Write the journal out how it feels right for you.
Let no single living soul tamper with it.
Be into the journal for the long game,
the big picture.
Eventually, the day will come
when you want to look back
and you can judge for yourself
the good and bad, the highs
and lows, and you’ll see
how far you’ve come.
Comfortable walking along to an extent all the way home from Chevy Chase where I met with a Buddhist group and meditated with them. Maybe we can do some good in this world. Sometimes it feels too late. It’s a big ball of confusion. Images flash to mind of unrest in the streets, the country falling apart, everything getting increasingly worse. I continue the struggle to stay afloat as a writer who monitors his mind and the world around him.
As I sit in the group, my stomach is turbulent with a racing heart. Everything will be able to settle as I continue to meditate with them more. The power is in persistence, much like here, though I continue to transform into something unknown. The writing presses up against the unknown. I turn on a video game and dominate the space for a good hour and a half. When I turn it off, my eyes are blurry. This is when I think it through—“If I take a nap now, I should still be in okay shape for meditation…” I hop on a bus. I get there early. I walk around the neighborhood for a bit. Keyboard patter. Why is everything so bland now? A video shines light on current times and how the flavor of life has been drained out of modern culture. Depressing to wake up at the beginning of the week with this circulating with other dark thoughts of societal imbalance and unrest.
★
Sitting in one of the unforgiving hardwood cafe chairs. I’m of a sharing nature but start to second-guess myself. There’s a version of myself in my mind that I’m trying to fix and correct. Is this version a mirage? Should I correct an image that isn’t correct?
The mind can ignite trouble. Self-image is shaped and reshaped through neighborhood, school, post-school, culture, subculture, and many other factors. Rise into big positive energy and fight for what’s right. Cling to images at your peril.
And we wonder why
the youth are getting restless.
I watched the latest Mad Max movie
after meditation.
Irony is firing on all cylinders.
Are we inevitably heading
towards a deserted
post-apocalyptic future
with all hardwood furniture
and chairs?
I prefer footsteps over pavement. I don’t own a private jet, helicopter, or electric scooter. These news items can easily be re-written into haiku. I leave it alone only because I’m not moved enough to do so. There’s a lethargy in my bones these days. I write through it just barely, by being here, present on the the page, accounted for. The journal is my alibi. I don’t know what’s coming next. Something about how a sentence will enter unpredictable territory—barely do I scratch the surface of what a sentence is capable of, for the love of it, I enter myself into a humility, and wonder if there will come a time of Miller-infused determination, to dedicate 8-hours a day…
This is a time of reckoning with self.
Go internal and work from there.
Virtual reality space isn’t
the answer, either, if a poison is
gnawing at your heart and
you’re tumbling, spiraling, unraveling…
Where does American democracy go?
I wonder if I will look back on these times
like a quiet before the storm…