Morning Pages

Ritual is not what you do naturally. Waking up in the morning is not a ritual, nor is having breakfast. Ritual us not synonymous with routine, either. No, ritual is something you compel yourself to do, on a regular basis, something which does not come naturally, nor easy, but in doing so lends your life purpose, meaning, and hopefully, satisfaction.

For years, though not for all my years, I have tried to create a writing ritual. It happened less recently than you might imagine, but in the past five to ten years, I began rising at 5:00 am, so that I would have quiet, peaceful time alone, to write for thirty timed minutes.

Our gas fireplace was repaired in early 2016, and so the ritual during cold-weather months was simple. The fire. The coffee. The bathrobe. Thirty minutes, or three steno pages, whichever came first.

Around the same year, we had our deck rebuilt. And so warm weather months included its own ritual. The deck. The coffee. The robe. The birds and sky. Thirty minutes or three steno pages, whichever came first.

Then came the writing prompts and the one-page plays. What had merely been ritual had become a compulsion; when not doing something is harder than doing it. Once upon a time, for me, that was running. Finally, in my fifties, it is writing.

Social media apps get you hooked by awarding you for checking in every day. You have “streaks.” I keep track of how many days in a row I write my morning pages. Today is the 200th consecutive day I have written morning pages. Today I wrote about writing morning pages as my morning pages. Right now, I am typing that up.

Play a Day: Girl Becomes Bone

Callan Stout

Monday morning I read Girl Becomes Bone by Callan Stout, and available on New Play Exchange.

Science fiction! My first play this month featuring science fiction. Yesterday, docudrama, today science fiction. Or speculative fiction. The wife will set me straight later.

The play originates on the planet Threa, which in an anagram of earth, also a near-homonym with "three" or third from the sun. The name reflects the degree to which its human inhabitants have been unable to emotionally and psychologically leave their abandoned planet behind.

A religion evolves on this new planet, one inspired by the mystical poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. Its tenets and rituals are, depending on interpretation, fixated on an eventual return or the acceptance of no return. At least that is how it appeared to me.

Like Christianity, there lies at the very edge of consciousness the anxiety and terror of having been utterly abandoned by God, which is a kind of perpetual mourning. The insatiable need to comprehend and cope leads to ritual, which, when you are watching someone else do it, appears nothing more than obsessive compulsive disorder.

“Should not our ancient suffering have been more fruitful by now?” Indeed.

Last night I dreamed I walked into a Theaterplex. It was a like one of your suburban "big box" movie centers with popcorn and video games, except inside every theater there was a play going on.

Callan Stout's new work, you do not look, will be presented later this week as part of Columbia Stages New Play Festival.