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Volume 1
Issue 5
November 1998
Iris
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Who Comes
to Visit in the Middle of the Night?
Who Comes?
- In the middle of the night, when the world gets as
still as it ever does, sometimes a visitor will come.
You'll wake, maybe from a dream or even a nightmare, and
slowly you'll realize going back to sleep will be delayed
by the visitor. You can get angry at the visitor and
demand that it to leave, but it is often unresponsive to
that request. But, perhaps, it is this visitor who is
bringing you some help or news that you need and you
ignore it to your own discomfort.
Often the visitor seems to be just a lot of thoughts that are jumbling around. They are too hard to understand and make sense of, or they are irritating, reminding you of things you want to forget. The more you ignore the visitor, the more it gets more and more agitated. Your frustration level increases because it seems this visitor will never leave and you spend your days in dread of these nighttime visits.
But, what if you don't ignore the visitor? What if you decide to invite the visitor in? Bring it a cup of tea and maybe a cookie if it wants. Then sit down and find out what it wants to tell you. In order to do this you'll have to be creative and willing to do all the writing, talking or drawing. This visitor doesn't hold a pen or read a book, but is usually happy to have you do so.
The visitor often asks you to read or think about things that you are ignoring during the day. Maybe you're needing to write in your journal and sort out an emotional situation, maybe you've been putting off reading a book that you keep thinking about, or maybe you've been sidelining your creative urges. When you finally do decide to get to know the visitor, the way you know you're getting close to what the visitor is asking is by noticing your own avoidance tactics. The more you avoid, the more likely you're getting close to the truth.
How to Get to Know the
Visitor
-
Journey
Over
Unknown
Roads to
Nothingness
Allowing,
Letting go.
Insight
Nearing
Grace - Journaling is useful for many reasons. People journal
to keep track, to doodle, to write out what is inside of
them, to keep pictures, to list ideas and tasks, and to
create. Journaling can be done in many ways. You can try
a single way or mix and match the ideas and come up with
your own.
- The structure of your journal can also be part
of your self-discovery process. Some ideas of kinds of
journals: three-ring notebooks, coil bound notebooks,
lined paper, unlined paper, clipboards, scraps of paper
filed in a folder, artists sketchbooks, and the many
varieties of blank books that are found in
bookstores.
- Logging: I grew up thinking that a journal was
like a ship's log. You just entered the facts of the day
such as: wind from the southeast and drizzle, at 14:35 we
heard the West Chop fog horn and a school of bluefish
swam by. Translated to my daily life, it was really
boring: "It's too cold to go outside and play, besides
Julie is mad at me. I did two drawings at school and
later my teacher sent me into the closet because I'd been
talking." It isn't necessary to log all the mundane
aspects of life, and keeping track of events can provide
a great resource for family history. One of my clients
brought in about ten pages from an ancestor's journal
during a crossing of the North American continent in the
early 1800's. The entries were usually quite brief,
perhaps a paragraph, or even a sentence or two. But they
spoke of the events and hardships that journey entailed.
The brevity of the entries spoke more than words about
the difficulties.
Reflecting: In her book The Artist Within, Julia Cameron recommends that people take time each morning to write drivel for three pages. This, she says, never has to be reread, but it serves to open up the creative energies. I've found that these also help to relieve me from the mass of confusing thoughts about my life and my feelings. Just the process of putting them on paper releases the mind from having to dwell on it all. Reflecting can be a purposeful activity in which you might list pros and cons about a situation, or just note down your thoughts and feelings about a particular problem.
Drawing: Doodling or keeping track through drawing pictures can be a powerful way to capture a memory, a mood, a thought, or just practice. Many people combine drawings with captions or names or explanations of thoughts and feelings or events.
Pasting: Clipping pictures, words, or phrases from magazines and creating collages or just including them into your written journals can provide powerful ways to express yourself.
Creative writing, stories and poetry: Sometimes making up a poem or a story about a situation can bring in into focus better than pages and pages of reporting style of writing. It's harder to put the feelings into a poem form, it forces you to dig down deeply inside to get the right words and create the right feeling tone.
Letters to real and imaginary people: About 10 or 14 years ago Alice Walker's The Color Purple came and taught me about writing letters, even love letters in my journal. Why, I could even write to God if I had a mind to, after all, one of her characters did, why couldn't I? A tried and true therapy method is to write letters that you don't send. This helps show some of the thoughts and feelings that you have been hiding because they are hurtful or inappropriate. Then rip up the letter. No one says you have to keep everything you write! Writing to imaginary people gives you the opportunity to really let your imagination take off. When your imagination is loosened up, your journey to find out what is causing a problem is made easier, more effective.
Imaginary conversations: Sometimes you may want to make up conversations. You may want to create a dialog between yourself and another person, or even an inanimate object. Or even between two objects - for instance between your bed and your feet. Do not get sidetracked by trying to edit the conversation until you have finished. Often these characters or symbols will have some news to tell you and you can let them do so by temporarily suspending the inner critic long enough to get the message out. Write the conversation as if you were writing a screenplay. Later, after the conversation has been written, you can either invite the inner judge/critic when you are trying to understand what you wrote means, or you can keep it in your journal until some time in the future.
The Inner
Critic
- A word on the tendency to critique your writing while
you are writing: You need the inner critic, it has an
important part to play in making good decisions in your
life. However, there are times that the critic barges in
that it is not only not needed, it actually gets in the
way. Useful, readable writing comes when the critic is
taking a nap. It comes when you can let yourself go and
flow with whatever seems to be wanting to come out of you
and onto the paper. The critic is useful later when you
want to make sense of what you have written, or if you
want to polish it up and show other people or even try to
publish.
Any comments or questions on the material in this article can be directed to the author at Iris Publishing, PO Box 1092, Coupeville, WA 98239.
