Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Living stones

In 2001, when I was desperately searching (albeit subconsciously) for some sort of meaning (any!) to my exciting and very full hedonistic life - where I ruled as king and emperor, not giving a damn about anything or anyone - I stumbled across Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.
The first thing she stipulated that needed commitment was the freehand writing, daily, of three foolscap pages first thing in the morning, while your mind still belonged to the night and sleep.
No matter what you did you had to write those pages. It also didn't matter what you filled them with. Just fill them, she said, and don't stop until you're finished. Don't reread, don't edit, don't care about spelling or anything else. Just write.
Ten years later I've scores of A4 folio books filled with wild scribbling. Meeting at the pages just about every morning has saved my life on hundreds of occasions. These books are witness to my personal emancipation, from my selfish, self-centered self. Not that I had a hand in that...
My morning pages have over time become a daily three page direct letter to God. Like clockwork he meets me on the pages everyday. The pages are about everything and nothing. I cannot even contemplate a day not begun in the pages.
The photo is of three new lithops plants that I bought on a street in Melville on Saturday. Lithops, or living-stones, are astonishing members of the succulent family Mesembryanthemum, which has adapted a physiological structure and colouring to survive the extremely dry conditions of it's South African home. These plants inspire me; they remind me of my exile in the desert, when I believed I was king. When I see them, I long for the Karoo... which is my personal soul-space.

1 comment:

francisco Villalobos said...

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