91. Structure of Dailies
I love creating the structure of dailies—some things that I do every day (or at least almost every day). For a number of years now I have read the Upper Room Disciplines as I eat breakfast. Then I discovered that I could do quite a lot more than that one day book. So at least right now, I have a Guideposts daybook and a Matthew Fox daybook, plus three other books that I just read two pages of and work my way through them. It starts my day with creative ideas.
And actually breakfast doesn’t start my day because I have an hour and a half before breakfast—for some more dailies. About four years ago I started writing “morning pages” as described in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. This process is to write three hand-written pages every morning—whatever comes to your mind. I don’t do three pages right now because I’m in the middle of a period of time where I am getting up, doing ten exercises, and then sitting back down in bed and using a lap labyrinth, followed by coloring a mandala, followed by a short writing. And this process is blowing my mind. All of them I believe are ways to let my unconscious loose.
I also don’t make myself stick to one of my dailies unless it is working. But I tend to substitute something else instead of giving up entirely. And sometimes I shift because it seems like I’ve worn that out. There was one year that I wrote a shadorma every day with my morning pages and then I shifted into writing a shadorma for each psalm and now I’m writing the psalm shadormas again.
It’s interesting that I used to tell people that I was a night person and definitely not a morning person. Now I find I’m both. I wake up early, sometimes setting the alarm early enough that I can do the labyrinth / mandala / writing before I have to leave for a meeting. It’s a neat way to wake up.
