Middle Passages Who?

Some of my regular readers will recall that I am slogging my way through The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. The daily requirement of this process is to write three stream-of-conscious pages each morning, first thing. I give myself a "B" with regard to my dedication to this practice. Though I don’t get to my morning pages every day, when I do, I love them. It’s self-indulgent and over-the-top rewarding to write whatever you want for a half-hour each day. And while I give myself a lower grade, say a "C-," in completing the ongoing lessons in the workbook, I’m OK with that too, because regardless of how my report card reads, the coaching still gets to me.

For example, today I was playing catch up with the assignments in Lesson Five. At the end of each chapter, we are supposed to reflect on the week's progress. During this check in, the first thing the author wants to know is how many days we completed the morning pages. At the end of this chapter though, she tagged the following language onto that query:

“Have you discovered the page-and-a-half truth point yet? Many of us find that pay dirt in our writing occurs after a page-and-a-half of vamping.”

Curious, I flipped back three pages and read what I had just written. At the page-and-a-half spot, here is what I found:

“I owe so much to Middle Passages. It pulled me up when I could have crashed way down. It kept me going when I had no idea what to do. It’s funny though, to talk about a blog like it’s a third party – when, in fact, Middle Passages is me. All me. I wrote it. I dedicated myself to it. It is by far what led me to were I am today. But here's the thing. It wasn’t some other person who wrote all those blog posts – it was me.”

I do, in fact, think of Middle Passages sometimes as living, breathing being, so it's helpful to remind myself that the one in charge of the inhaling and exhaling is me. Middle Passages didn’t keep me going. I kept me going. As my daughter used to say when she was small: “I do mom. I do myself.”

Like a toddler, I still struggle to make sense of this new life of mine. But similar to my then little girl, I’m figuring it out because "I do."

Oh, right.

Note to self. It’s me on the other side of them-there fingertips.


How about you? When you write stream-of-conscious, do you discover a page-and-a-half truth point?