This Too Shall Pass

Altered book inside page with morning pages and photogram collage

Do artists write? Do writers create visual art? Does it have to be one or the other or can it be both? For so many years I thought that being an artist meant drawing and painting. If I couldn’t do that, then I couldn’t be an artist so I took up writing instead.

When I finally read Julia Cameron’s book The Artist Way, with its 12 week creative recovery program, I went to TAFE and discovered I could do both, that art could be whatever I wanted it to be.

Writing morning pages was the mainstay of this creative recovery process. Twenty two years and over 8,000 days later, I have a lot of writings in my A4 spiral bound notebooks.. When I started a new journal, the old one would join the others in a plastic tub in the garage until the tub finally got so heavy and full I could barely open it.

This year I felt a strong urge to release the past, to let go of the hard years, the years of personal lows interspersed with bright moments of joy and happiness. Together all of those days had brought me to where I am today and I felt that I really don’t need to be holding onto them anymore. Therein lay the dilemma, what to do with all those notebooks.

Burning was out of the question, being summer. Throwing them into the recycle bin was also a no go as there were things I didn’t want anyone to casually read. I then thought I would turn them into paper.

I tore out the journal pages year by year, stopping at random pages to read what I had written, from daily angst to reminders of what I planned to do for the day, what I did the day before, dream remembrances, arguments, hopes and despair. It became hard to reread and relive the feelings of some of those days. I had to bless them and move on.

Into my papermakers vat they went. The oldest journals were written with an ink cartridge pen as I wanted my thoughts to flow easily like ink. Once in the water, the ink started to run and the pages blended together in a beautiful abstraction of writing. 

I quickly pulled out clumps of pages and put them out to dry on my paper makers moulds in the hot sun. By the end of the day some pages had completely faded to blank. I was astonished, it was as if time had dissolved with the ink, all my feelings washed clean. A blank slate.

I started thinking about life, death and all that comes in-between, the span of years and the nature of impermanence. All the documenting of our lives in one way or another. That in the end, our big and small woes amount to sheets of paper, washed clean. That “this too shall pass”, (an old Persian saying).

What liberation! These now unreadable and blurred writings suggested another way to look at life, leading to a commemoration of writing itself. An altered book project I had wanted to start but didn’t know where. And the perfect book to do it with, the Collins Eyewitness Book of Writing which I had all but thrown out of my bookshelves in one of my decluttering moments. I have the inside front cover done, I’m excited to see how this project will develop.

Five thousand pages and counting…10 years of morning pages soaked and out to dry