Month: January 2025

Messy Pages and Plot Twists: Journaling, Cinema and the Creative Spark

A couple of years ago, I revisited the Julia Cameron’s The Artists Way. I have kept journals on and off for the past 30 years and certainly consistently over the past 8-10 years. As Julia suggests, I write 3 pages each day, but I rarely get to do this in the morning. My pages are completed as part of my evening routine.

There is nothing earth shattering within the hundreds of pages I have written. They are mainly trivial recollections of the day with the occasional piece of insight. No historian will ever want to read it. I miss most of the important things that have happened on the world stage. Instead, I concentrate on the minutia of my life. Still, I keep writing and find it a comforting daily exercise.

While I write my blogs on the computer, my journals are all handwritten. I use a fountain pen because I love the feel of the nib as it glides across the paper. My writing is both messy and ‘ample’ as someone once said. I prefer a medium nib that lets the ink flow like my words tumbling out onto the paper. Sometimes I get the first part of a word on paper and part of the next. My hand can’t keep up with my thoughts. But that’s OK too. Nobody will read this, not even me. I have boxes of journals under the stairs which would make good kindling for my funeral pyre.

But writing the three or so pages daily is only part of Julia Cameron’s routine. Another practice she advocates is the artist date. She points out that this is one of the hardest to keep. We create all sorts of reasons why we can’t make time for ourselves. I had forgotten about this until last week. I realized that I had not been out anywhere for weeks, except the shops and my customary dog walk. Something had to change.

On a hot day there’s nothing better than escaping to the airconditioned comfort of a cinema. My favourite place is the Palace Electric in Acton which also hosts various film festivals. There were several films to choose from. I decided on ‘Conclave’ which was a drama centred on the election of a new pope. I was surprised as to how many people were in the audience. I presumed it would only be Catholics or those who had an affiliation with Catholicism who would find the film interesting. It seems it had a much broader appeal. The intrigues and machinations reminded me of ‘The Name of the Rose’, at a smaller scale. The acting was superb, but the characters mainly depicted nationalistic stereotypes. Nevertheless, the film took me on a pleasant cinematic ride. It had one of the best plot twists I never saw coming at the end.

After the movie, I thought about why Julia Cameron advocates the Artist’s date. Yes, there’s the usual ‘you need to fill your cup’ first type answer, but I sensed that there was more. I thought about the experience of walking into the foyer, smelling the popcorn, watching people mingling at the bar, wondering whether I should get a glass of wine (I didn’t), then walking into the dark cavern of the cinema itself. I had to find the row, the seat number, wonder whether people were going to sit next to me. Then when more people arrived, I had to practise equanimity as the talked and talked right through the ads. I hoped they’d stop once the film started, and they did. Then the feeling of watching a film on a big screen, the clarity and immediacy of it. Finally, leaving the theatre and listening to snippets of people’s conversations about the film. The experience brought me into the world and out of my head where I had been stuck for days. A writer has to experience things and Julia Cameron invites us to do just that. Or as Hemingway put it ever so eloquently – ‘In order to write about life first you must live it.’

Ringing Bells and Deepening Breaths: A Practice in Presence

Breathing, such a simple act. An involuntary function of the body that stays with us from the moment we come into this world to the moment we leave it. So why is it so hard to for us to master?

Like many people I know, my breath is shallow unless I pay attention to it. When I consciously think about it, my breathing slows and moves to my belly. At the same time, my shoulders drop, and I feel calmer after just two or three rounds. I am not meditating, just paying attention while I go about my daily tasks. Yet I don’t remember to do this simple exercise often enough.

Today I heard Jonathan Fields talk about the importance of breathwork. He starts his mornings with taking some inbreaths and then exhaling just a little longer. As he repeats this, the breaths naturally get longer, and the exhalation is also lengthened. This has the effect of calming his mind and starting the day feeling at ease. I think this is a worthwhile routine to incorporate into my morning.

The scientific reason why this works is that stress puts the sympathetic nervous system in charge, which activates the ‘fight or flight’ response. On the other hand, when we breathe deeply, we engage the parasympathetic nervous system which slows the heart rate and makes us feel relaxed. As our breath is always available to us, we can use it to help us regulate emotions.

I was reminded of something I always do when I hear bells ring. I stop and breathe consciously until I can’t hear them anymore. In Eastern meditation practices, the bell is always a reminder to return to the breath. This practice was easy to incorporate into my daily life in Europe where church bells often chime on the quarter hour. When I was teaching in a small town in Switzerland, the bells were always there to help me come back to my breath during the day. It made me present to that moment with my students. I miss hearing them in Australia.

So today, I set a gentle sounding timer for each hour of the day, reminding myself to consciously breathe, drop my shoulders and to move my body. I spend too much time in front of my computer and am unaware of the tension I hold. Now, I have an external reminder to bring me back to the physicality of my body and my breath. As Thich Nhat Hanh said ever so simply, ‘breathing in I calm my body, breathing out I smile.’

A High-End Wrap for a Low-Key Lunch

Packing a simple cheese sandwich should have been the easiest part of my day. At the Airbnb where I was staying, I had all the ingredients in a small bar fridge. Once assembled, I looked everywhere for a scrap of paper or cling wrap for my sandwich. Apart from toilet paper, there was nothing even vaguely suitable. While potentially amusing, I couldn’t face the toilet paper option. It reminded me too much of Barry Humphries eating a tin of pea soup out of an airsick bag on a flight to London. Funny but deeply disturbing.

I decided to opt for a more pedestrian alternative. While out for dinner, I went into a Lebanese corner shop which had a good selection of essentials. I walked down the aisle which sold every variety of dried pulses known to humankind and kept my eye out for cling wrap, foil or sandwich bags. I reached the back of the shop and was about to turn back empty handed, when I noticed both cling wrap and aluminium foil on the bottom shelf. Success! All I had to do was choose between them.

As I leant down, I noticed a much smaller packet of aluminium foil than the one I usually bought. I only wanted to wrap a sandwich, so I thought it’d be more economical to buy the smaller one. I was aghast when the cashier charged me $10. Highway robbery I thought, but dutifully paid the amount.

Back at the Airbnb, I made my sandwich for the next day. Opening the Aluminium foil, I was surprised to find it had perforated lines at regular intervals for easy separation. These were roughly the size of toilet paper squares. Perhaps, I should have stuck with my original choice of wrapping, I thought. It certainly would have been much cheaper. Then, I noticed small pin-pricked holes in concentric circles on each of the sheets. Moreover, the foil was quite thick, much thicker than the stuff I had at home. Clearly not meant for a sanga wrapper!

Suspicious, I began to Google the mysterious foil. Nothing on the box gave a clue as to its intended use. I wasn’t getting anywhere. Finally, it occurred to me to take a photo to see if Google lens could assist. And there it was:

‘Discover the ultimate hookah experience with the AHG Premium Shisha Foil Roll.’

I was about to wrap my sandwich in premium shisha foil!

Four sheets were ample for the job. Best of all, I could reuse the foil again and again. The stuff proved indestructible. Yet now that I’m back home, I find the cheaper foil much easier to use. And, as an added bonus, I don’t have to explain myself in the lunchroom the next day.

When a snip becomes a road trip

Every six weeks, I get my hair cut. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about that. Hair grows and if you like it short, it needs to be cut regularly. Nor is it unusual for women to travel across town to visit their hairdresser. Once you have established a good relationship, it is difficult to start over with someone else. It’s a bit like an old relationship where you are comfortable bearing all to each other.

I probably take this further than most. Visiting my hairdresser involves a ritual of driving 270km each way and staying overnight with friends in Millthorpe where I used to live. That’s the equivalent of driving from Milan to Venice or further than Vienna to Budapest. In Europe this would be insane, in Australia just slightly bonkers. We readily acknowledge that we have a different relationship to distances. In my misspent youth, I dated guys who used six packs (beer) as their preferred unit of measure between cities. (Not condoned!) That was before drink driving was taken seriously. I have a tendency to measure distances by increments of towns. Canberra to Millthorpe is three hours; one hour to Boorowa, one hour to Cowra and then one hour to Millthorpe. It’s a rough estimate, but it works for me.

My hairdresser is good but there’s probably 50 equally good ones within a 10km radius from where I live. She knows me well by now and doesn’t bother with social niceties. If we talk, there’s a point to it. She’s a no-nonsense woman who has no need to pretend to be anything else. I like her. But that’s not the only reason I make the trip.

Over the seven years I lived in Millthorpe, I have made some good friends and rekindled some old friendships from a different part of my life. Funny how that works out. When I moved to Canberra, I left some very good friends behind, and it seems a shame to keep losing friends as we age. So, I decided not to let that happen. My hairdresser appointment is a good excuse to visit friends regularly. For I know when we say, ‘let’s keep in touch,’ it rarely eventuates. Our lives become busy, other priorities take over and before we know it, we have lost contact. Getting my haircut is my way of ensuring that I keep up with friends. I now need to come up with a similar strategy to see my friends in Sydney!

How far do you go to keep up friendships?