When we don’t have answers, it’s enough to start with the questions.
As I struggle to absorb the enormity of the US President’s human rights violations and cruelty, I find myself tightening my jaw, my neck, my stomach. My mind folds in on itself. Anger, sorrow, despair cascade throughout my mind and body.
But there is not enough space within my nervous system, my stomach, my head, my heart to contain my reactions to what’s happening.
So I turn to my creative practice of visual journaling where I write my thoughts, questions, take notes, draw what I see, make marks, glue down images – ugly and beautiful, and then I reflect on what the combination of images and words reveal.
The journals I make are not a luxury – they are a necessity.
They extend my capacity to grapple with contradictions between what we we believe and what we do, what goes on in our families and ourselves, and what goes on in our cities and in the world.
Visual journals serve as containers where we may spill, rant, weep, and ultimately help us to see connections, be curious, ask new questions, and see new possibilities.
In these tumultuous times, I want to encourage you to embrace a 15 minute daily visual journaling practice to support you.
If that seems impossible with your schedule, do it once a week. Pick a day and set aside some time to write, scribble, draw and/or glue down images, even phrases from news articles.
We want answers, we want to know how to fix the problems we are facing. But when we don’t have answers, it’s enough to start with questions. Journal your questions.
Make an external space to explore what doesn’t make sense.
Being able to work with contradictions requires creativity, imagination and a space to make visible, manipulate and handle the harsh acidic happenings that burn too hot to hold inside our bodies and minds.
Now more than ever, we must condition ourselves to be able to see, name, talk about, and be CURIOUS about the contradictions between us and within us.
Through a reciprocal process of creating and reflecting in a visual journal, you can expand your capacity to do what poet John Keats described as negative capability, that is the capability of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
It’s not about finding immediate answers or fixes but about allowing the questions and contradictions to coexist.
You’ll find that your journal pages will have a message for you, offering insights you hadn’t thought of or acknowledged, supporting actions aligned with the work you are here to do.
Here are a couple blog posts to prompt your thinking and your creating:
