“My wish is for everyone in the world to tap into their creativity and live their lives more attuned to it- in whatever capacity that looks like for them authentically.”

That was one of the first sentences I wrote during a morning pages session last week, and it stunned me because I didn’t know where it came from. If you have a morning pages practice, you’ll likely have experienced something similar: where the words flow from your heart to the page before reaching your mind- like the soul wants to express itself faster than the brain can censor it.

Sometimes, thoughts seem to oppose themselves on the page. In truth, morning pages are not meant to have a clear throughline because they’re supposed to be stream of consciousness— an expulsion of words filling the mind, a way to empty our thoughts and make space for creativity. But seemingly unrelated things can be connected if we try hard enough because writing is a translation of life, and life itself is cyclical— all things connected in the end.

For some reason, that day, the next thing that came to my mind was about how some people throw away their journals because they’re afraid of them being found and read years from now. Maybe I’m an anomaly, though I doubt I am, in that I believe that that’s the beauty of journals in the first place…

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Yes, I’m afraid of my diary, of my morning pages, of my media journal being found by my family. I wouldn’t want them, or anyone close to me, to read them. But the idea of my journals being used as a historical study by people in the future trying to understand and teach how life was for us in this time period or having someone in the far future find meaning and companionship, in my words.. it’s a beautiful thing to me.

Yes, my morning pages are messy and incoherent and probably shouldn’t be considered a literary text. But that’s what’s human about it, right? That fact is ultimately what makes it so compelling.

None of us, try as we may to pretend, are put together entirely and are coherent every moment of our lives to ourselves and others. To be human is to be messy; how can we expect our journals to reflect anything else when they’re meant to be an exploration of ourselves?

We love to read the journals of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, look through the sketchbook of Frida Kahlo, and find immense value in the Diary of Anne Frank. A lot, if not all, of these journals and sketchbooks were not made for the purpose of public consumption, and some could argue they are unethical to read. (A side note here: I can understand that sentiment. There’s a conversation of consent that should not be glossed over within this context, or any context, for that matter). But hundreds, thousands of years into the future, no one we know today will be alive. But if our journals somehow end up preserved in the earth's crust, there is a beauty to that unearthing. (I’m not saying that I believe that’s 100% possible, but I’m a poet, after all, and I like to dream that my words could survive that long).

For me, it’s not about legacy. It’s ultimately about community, the celebration of being alive, and the humanity of it all.

What a tremendous privilege it is to be able to transfer my mind’s thoughts to my hand and onto paper. What a privilege to translate mere ideas into a medium that can be read and used as a tool for communication across time.

So I write in archival ink when I can, and I put away my journals instead of throwing them out or burning them. I send them off with safe travels, hoping that if my words are found in the near or far future, they can help someone feel less alone- because none of us really are anyway.

love,

ella