embodiment

[pegkerr]

The embodiment community is rather neat. I've been keeping a journal, as I have said, for many, many years, and I've followed pretty much the same process all that time. It has been great fun to see what other people can do with a journal. Pictures! Collages! Wow, what beautiful handwriting. I never thought of doing that.

Hmm. I have written in my journal with nothing but a black Bic pen for years. Decades.

What if I tried something really radically different, for, say a month? Nothing but sketches, with colored pencils? Or . . . ? *ponders*

I have been aware that I need to break out of ruts. Perhaps this is a way I can experiment a bit.

Comments

[jbru.livejournal.com]

You should ask to see the journal that fredcritter writes in. I often see him scribbling away in music circles and such and asked if I could see it one day. It reminded me of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Just gorgeous and fascinating.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have noticed that different colors of ink nudge me towards different styles of journal entry. I don't know why. This is also true when I write fiction longhand: green ink gets two or three times the action scenes I see from my baseline black.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I had a point during a very sleepmaking class (not boring, not anything like that-- but I had a lot of trouble staying in class rather than drifting off somewhere else) where I would pull a bit of fuzz from my sweater and dab it onto the end of my fountain pen. It made weird swirls sometimes, sort of a false calligraphy. The act of writing was fun, and I wanted to do more of it, so I kept taking notes because the letters I made looked pretty, not because the words were passing through my brain at all.
I tend not to use colored inks any more. I'm getting a new pen with a converter, but I'm not certain I'll do more than blue and red. I'm a little OCD on the pens.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lotuseater/]

I'm a member of Embodiment too. Your comment about Bic pens is funny to me, because I just started using nothing but Bics to write in my journal.

[gamps-garret.livejournal.com]

I love that idea. If I felt like I could really commit to writing on paper every day for a month, I would keep a journal entry on a postcard each day. That's something I've always felt rather drawn toward.

For right now, though, with my new study plans and a difficult gym schedule, I'm going to stick with LJ. I'll see about the postcard idea for a time later in the year -- maybe in the late summer, when I can make it part of an evening walk-through-the-park ritual.

I think there's great potential for you to catapult out of a rut, though. :-)

[chamisa.livejournal.com]

Journaling on postcards! What a *fantastic* idea! :-)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Another Black bic pen writer! (Though when pressing became an issue I switched to finepoint marker types, before I stopped journaling altogether in the late eighties.)

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

When I write on paper, I always prefer purple ink, and I especially love purple-ink fountain pens. I even use purple at work! I used to be addicted to green ink, but my prose seems so much more interesting in violet. :)

[blazebox.livejournal.com]

I joined emdodiment as well and it has kept me on my toes really. It helps. it made me go back to my old journals and flip through them but I realised that I had to actually get them out of my system because it felt like a big weight on me and I wouldn't want to remember whatever I had written before. So I tore out some pages and the rest went down the thrash. I felt so much lighter. My new journal starting from this year has been so far much much better. A sign of a good change finally happening.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

The month of "somethng different" sounds very much like fun!

I never could keep a journal at all, though, so i already envy you that discipline, even if you currently worry that it's part of your feeling in a rut.

My attempts as a child and teen are still preserved -- they lasted about 2 months each of entries 7-3 times a week, every couple of years. The last one stopped in the best possible way: The complete entry is (Paraphrased, but darn close): "I've been meaning to write about this for some time, and now seems like the best moment."

[chamisa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting about embodiment previously--I wouldn't have otherwise known about it, and am glad I joined. :-)

I'm also enjoying seeing other people's journals and creativity therin, though I can't begin to keep up with it all. It is indeed inspiring, but I honestly have wondered at times...is that how their journals looked before? or would have looked if they were just doing it and had no knowledge of embodiment? Or is the fact that they're doing this for embodiment--and posting images of their journal to the very visual internet--somehow influencing the way they journal?

I myself have noticed that I've been using more imagery in my 'embodiment' journal...and have wondered if that's because of the community and inspiration from others somehow...but then it's not like I haven't done that before, when I knew nothing about the internet or Live Journal. Normally my journal entries are all words, but sometimes I've pasted in photographs or movie tickets or made drawings in the margins.

Hm. Maybe this would be a good post for embodiment sometime.

Anyway, hope you have fun experimenting, if you do break away from the black Bic! :-)