“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that  book is your soul.”

I took the above quote from the NY Times article I linked to yesterday. I had somehow missed this in my first reading but the lovely Miz Sharon Brown sent me an email with this piece of text highlighted and it felt like it was the essence of everything I believe.

I had let my daily journal writing lapse over the last few weeks. It was an attempt to trick myself into working on my book first thing instead.

The good news is that I don’t seem to need to do that anymore. I have been writing and editing and working up a storm. No tricks required.

So now the day is back to the way it’s been for over a decade…three handwritten pages while I drink my morning cappuccino. It has much to recommend it and I feel like I’m back with an old friend.  I think I would like to add something besides writing, perhaps a few drawings or other bits of colour or collage of some sort…

The rest of the day is spent doing whatever it is I do –  but includes one blog post and usually several hours on my novel. When I think of how hard it was to get started on that thing, and now how hard it is to stop, it leaves me shaking my head.

It’s good. I keep surprising myself with how things will look next.