notebooks – Page 9

September notebooks (excerpts)

Monday, October 30, 2017

September 1, 2017

[Casa Santo Domingo, Antigua Guatemala.] It is a wonderful strange experience to drive into a place at dark, in the pouring rain, to try to piece together what the place is, but then see it in the full light of the morning…

September 2, 2017

A woman and her son watching the maccaws. Women carrying baskets on their heads. Men driving pickup trucks with the beds full of flowers. Boys carrying bouquets. Schoolgirls standing on the street corner and giggling and eating ice cream…

September 3, 2017

My horoscope told me “Visite la iglesia” so that’s just what I did: wandered the ruins at the San Francisco Inglesia, and threw in a prayer for good measure. Then I went for an avocado ice cream at La Tienda de Doña Gavi (The Store of Mrs. Gavi) and strolled around as the afternoon storm clouds filled the valley…

[Read more…]

Hold thy tongue (and loosen thy pen)

Thursday, June 29, 2017

I shared this doodle from my notebook on Instagram the other day and everyone who commented seemed to assume that it was about Writing, as in, Writing Books, or getting Work done. (See a previous post of mine: “Shut up and write the book.”)

What it was really about was the old idea of having a “loose tongue,” or saying out loud the things that you should keep to yourself. In the home, in the workplace, or on the internet. (Perhaps the phrase needs an update for the smartphone age: It’s our thumbs that get us the most in trouble these days…)

We focus so much on our notebooks as traps for capturing those rare, beautiful ideas that visit us, but notebooks are also amazing cages for detaining what is inside of us that wants so desperately to escape. To write down your rawest thoughts in a notebook is like putting a wild, unknown beast into a holding cell for further observation. Here, you can safely discover what the beast is and figure out what to do with it. Sometimes the beast needs indefinite incarceration, sometimes it needs rehabilitation, sometimes it’s ready for release into the wild, and sometimes it just needs to be put down. But to let it escape at whim is rarely a good idea.

Or, as I’ve said before, a notebook is a good place to have bad ideas.

There’s an old Quaker saying: “Don’t speak unless you can improve the silence.”

Sometimes we need to see the words before we know if they can improve the silence.

Hold thy tongue. Loosen thy pen.

My notebooks

Thursday, February 23, 2017

Photo Feb 22, 12 53 53 PM

Whenever I write about how important keeping a notebook is to me, people ask me what specific brand of notebook I use. I have no less than 3 notebooks going all the time:

1) an extra-small hardcover notebook that I carry with me whenever I leave the house (which is not often)

2) a small daily planner that I use as a logbook

3) a fat, paperback-sized, unruled, flexible notebook, which I use at home and in the studio

Of course, only a crazy person juggles 3 notebooks, so just keep things simple and get The Steal Like An Artist Journal instead.

Guardian spirits

Thursday, February 2, 2017

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I like the idea of starting new notebooks by stationing guardian spirits inside the front cover, to watch over things. For my latest notebook, I went with Emily Dickinson:

In this short Life that only lasts an hour
How much – how little – is within our power

Here’s the original, from the fantastic book, The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems:

A good place to have bad ideas

Thursday, January 19, 2017

Photo Jan 13, 3 16 39 PM

“I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.”
—Frédéric Chopin

Wake is such a perfect word for the moment. Wake: a watch, a vigil, after something has died. Wake: a trail of disturbed water left by some unstoppable craft. Wake: the aftermath. Wake: to stir, to be roused from sleep.

In the wake of all of this, I’ve been trying to stay away from Twitter, trying to visit the bliss station, trying to be alone with my thoughts. But my curse is that I can’t seem to have thoughts without speaking them. I need to speak to think and to know what I’m thinking. This can be potentially disastrous in public, and in private, it puts an undue burden on my loved ones, because conversation is like the mood slime in Ghostbusters: to speak thoughts is to transfer thoughts, and the listener, no matter what, always absorbs something. (Why else are shrinks so expensive?) My wife and I try to save our conversation for the open air on our morning walks, the idea being that most of any bad energy we release will be carried away by the wind. But it doesn’t always work out that way. And, for both of us, as much as we want to stay light, to be the light or reflect it, our thoughts have, not inappropriately, gotten darker in the past months.

So I’ve been spending more and more time in the pages of my notebook. Talking in black ink. Letting the pages absorb any poison. Scratching out thoughts if I can’t stand to look at them. Underlining the thoughts I want to save, to share, maybe even, God forbid, tweet.

It’s a simple idea that I said over and over on the journal tour: a notebook is a good place to have bad ideas. It’s also a safe space to share your secrets. To think the unthinkable. To say the unsayable…

If you’re struggling, too, consider getting a paper notebook. (I’m happy to sell you mine, but any cheap drugstore one will do.) Spend some time with it every day. Fill it with your bad thoughts, your bad ideas. Tell it all the things you shouldn’t tell Twitter. It won’t judge you, troll you, or talk back to you. It won’t spy on you, ping you, or notify you. When you’re done with it, you can burn it for heat, or you can save it for your children, so they know what it was like.