Scrapbooking Haibun

Scrapbooking is highly visual type of journaling. And somewhere between the visual scrapbook and the literal journal lies the artist's journal -- which goes back to Leonardo da Vinci.

Haibun is a Japanese form of journaling popular with poets from Basho to Jack Kerouac. Each journal entry is followed by a 5-7-5 haiku poem, which summarizes or crystalizes the moment.

Haibun can also be applied to scrapbooks. I created a scrapbook for my son's high school senior prom. Besides photos from before, during and after the prom, I included ticket stubs, names of friends who rode in the 20-person limo they all pitched in to rent, and a matchbook from the hotel where the prom was held.

My son had the usual adolescent stops and starts while planning for the prom. He looked dashing when he tried on his tuxedo rental, but the sleeves hovered two inches above his wrists. Within a day the tailor lengthened them and all seemed well, when my son received a call that his date had taken ill and couldn't go to the prom. He nearly resigned himself to attending "stag," when our pretty next door neighbor girl agreed -- the night before prom -- to be my son's date. She was a sophomore from another high school, but her mother was pleased to let her go if I would pick up the couple right after the prom. The girl had school the next day! She already owned a gorgeous blue semi-formal dress which just so happened to match the blue-ribboned corsage my son had ordered for the one at home with a fever. If his former date could only see how lovely the neighbor girl looked next to my son, her temperature would really boil!

Photos in place, I wrote this haiku in the corner of the last page of the prom scrapbook:
Girl next door said yes,
She wore blue in the limo,
You both danced all night.

[haibun][5-7-5 haiku][senior prom] ◦

Scrapbooking Haibun

Dialogue with Societies

As the holidays approach, we're surrounded by a whirl of activity, but more important and if we're lucky, we find ourselves warmly surrounded by friends and family. But perhaps, the holidays might instead open old wounds and unhealed hurts we've experienced with other people, making it awkward to be together. Perhaps the holidays are a time we renew our faith or, on the other hand, wonder how others can be so fervent. What better time to take a look at "that part of myself that is there before I am." Ira Progoff, author of the precedent-setting "Intensive Journal Workshop" made that statement in regard to his Dialogue with Societies concept.

Dialogue with Societies is one of Ira Progoff's six main variations of dialogue a person can experience with a journal. Using Dialogue with Societies means choosing your race, tribe, religion, ethnic group, socio-economic class, neighborhood or extended family as dialogue partner and musing, discussing, arguing or debating how these larger-than-self influences affect you and what role you play in their midst.

As with all dialogues, you take turns on paper. You write -- and the society writes back. What role do you play in a society and how does a particular society embrace or not embrace you. Do you fit in? Do you want to fit in? What type of dreams do you have that involve numbers of people? Can you be part of a society without being part of a crowd? How has a society changed over the years? Is it for the better or for the worse? Can you feel deep faith and be part of a religion without attending a church? Or can you be an active member of a church and feel cut off from your religion? Are the roots of your society in another part of the world, in another decade, or even in another century? These are all questions that can be applied to your journaling exploration of societies. [Intensive Journal Workshop][Ira Progoff] ◦

Dialogue with Societies

Dialogue with Persons

This is the third in a series of posts about using dialogue as a journaling device. Ira Progoff, the father of modern journaling, cited six main types of dialogues in his groundbreaking volume, "Intensive Journal Workshop," published in 1966. Dialogue with Persons is one of these six main types.

By a dialogue, I mean choosing a dialogue partner and writing back and forth between yourself and your "partner." In a Dialogue with Persons, your dialogue could be with a person of the past, present or future, a person living, passed on or not yet born. And you don't need to know the person to have a dialogue. This is not channeling or any other hocus-pocus, but a way for you to cut through preconceived notions to what you may discover is the deeper truth about a person, persons and especially about yourself. Think of it as a letter that can't be delivered, but somehow it is, and somehow you get a letter in return.

For example, you might choose to dialogue with a person you really admire, who may possibly serve as a role model for you, and perhaps you have never had the opportunity to meet. You may initially feel that you can never measure up to the talent or accomplishment of this person. But through your dialogue, you may discover that your partner tells you how hard he or she had to work, how long of a wait and how high of a climb it took to leave an impression. Perhaps it really did. Perhaps it really didn't. But this dialogue may at best give you insight into what you feel you must do yourself to progress to the next level of your life and your personhood! [Intensive Journal Workshop][Ira Progoff] ◦

Dialogue with Persons

Dialogue with Creative Work

I have a day job, but I don't necessarily want to dialogue with it. I may argue with it a good portion of the eight hours I punch in, but I have other avocations that make more appealing partners. One is musical theater writing. I'm currently working on a children's musical and besides dialoging with my actual composer/collaborator friend, which is the most satisfying, my journal serves as an ideal stage to work out the answers to what drives the piece in the first place.

Some of the questions I pose consist of "What does the main character want?" and "What is the musical about?" When I ask what it's about, I don't mean the plot. The plot is what happens, scene by scene. Instead, I mean what deeper meaning is the piece trying to bring out? If it's about belonging, does the character discover that he or she can belong or that it may be impossible to really belong. If it's about connection, what might a character do to continually reinforce disconnection before finding a path to connecting with other people.

If working on a play or musical, you might have a journaled dialogue with your character asking directly what he or she wants, believes, avoids or regrets. You may not only find out your answer, but also find ways to smooth any bumpy parts of the script your characters trip on or redirect their steps when they wander away from where they and your piece are ultimately headed. [Intensive Journal Workshop][Ira Progoff] ◦

Dialogue with Creative Work

Dialogue with the Body

Your body's wisdom can speak to you through metaphor. Writing dialogues in your journal can help faciliate the life lessons your body may be trying to teach you. Dialogue with the body is one of the six main types of journaling dialogues described in Ira Progoff's seminal book on modern journal writing, "Intensive Journal Workshop," first published in 1966.

First, choose a dialogue partner, whether it be a body part or organ, illness, injury or surgery, allergy, your sexuality; a body subpersonality such as thin self, fat self, addiction or habit; foods or nutrition; or pain, which always seems to be an important messenger.

Dialogue in writing, back and forth, with your dialogue partner. You will be writing both roles, of course! Your dialogue can be in the form of a thoughtful and direct "letter" or "instant messaging" back-and-forth dialogue if you thrive on fast-paced banter. If you feel like you're making it up, you're right. You are making it up, but it is a part of you. Don't be afraid of the unexpected or ideas that seem to come out of nowhere.

Having a dialogue with the body can be a form of healing visualization. Whether your dialogue partner is anything from an allergy to dust, a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer or the ache of a twisted ankle to an addiction to chocolate, the fear of hair loss or compulsion to wear too much makeup, your two-way dialogues can help you sort out the real from the imagined, the old you from the newer you, and help you decide what can be changed and how to go about it, or what may be inevitable and how best to face it. [Intensive Journal Workshop][Ira Progoff] ◦

Dialogue with the Body

Haibun Beatnik Style

Jack Kerouac was one of the Beat poets of the West Coast (although he was originally from Massachusetts) in the 1950s. Inspired by the Japanese haiku poets and haibun writers, such as Buson, he tried his own hand at haibun, which is a journal entry followed by a haiku poem. The following excerpt is from Kerouac's book "Desolation Angels."

"the wind, the wind--
And there's my poor endeavoring human desk at which I sit so often during the day, facing south, the papers and pencils and the coffee cup with sprigs of alpine fir and a weird orchid of the heights wiltable in one day -- my Beechnut gum, my tobacco pouch, dusts, pitiful pulp magazines I have to read, view south to all those snowy majesties -- The waiting is long.

On Starvation Ridge
Little sticks
Are trying to grow."

[haibun][beatnik][Jack Kerouac][haiku][Desolation Angels] ◦

Haibun Beatnik Style

Lunar Eclipse Party

I'd like to say that I had a fabulous lunar eclipse party on the balcony of my West Side Manhattan duplex overlooking Central Park, joined by several chosen artsy friends, a reflector telescope and eight bottles of French wine -- one to taste every fifteen minutes while we caught glimpses of the moon as it fell under the seductive shadow of the earth and turned red with anger.

Rather, I only imagined that party, but really didn't have a half-bad real time under this once-in-a-while total lunar eclipse, as viewed from my Chicago deck. Every fifteen minutes my husband and son took turns with me to spy through mini-binoculars we usually reserve for musical performances and plays needed for our nosebleed gallery seat vantage points. I made a salad and looked at the moon. I typed my husband's portfolio materials and smiled at the moon. We phoned friends from around the country and down the street to partake of the moon.

My Chicano husband warned me that, according to tradition, the rabbit in the moon (not everyone thinks it's the man in the moon!) was being eaten during a lunar eclipse and you need to wear a hat when you stand outside so spirits don't land on your head. It was a little difficult to juggle the straw hat on my head, take off my glasses and readjust binoculars to match my myopia. But I'm sure I did it a lot more deftly than if I'd had eight glasses of wine on that New York balcony.

But I did attend two parties at once. The real one and the imagined one. [lunar eclipse][rabbit in the moon] ◦

Lunar Eclipse Party

Letters That Can't Be Delivered

In my journal writing workshops, I guide participants in writing "Letters That Can't Be Delivered," which are letters written to a close friend or relative who recently passed away, to a favorite neighborhood tree, to an ongoing illness or even to a bout of blocked creativity. We can't expect an answer. Or can we? Every good conversation isn't a one-way experience. The best part of the dialogue is, indeed, the answer that comes back. And of course, the answer doesn't really come from the loved one, or the tree, or the illness, but from deep inside. And what we have to reveal to ourselves is often surprising.
◦

Letters That Can't Be Delivered

Gather Your Seeds While You May

I'm not the world's greatest gardener, but I like to borrow seeds, ideas or just moral support from others' gardens to add punch to my own. Last weekend, I took a stroll through a special garden of a friend. I realized I was actually following Julia Cameron's advice in "The Artist's Way," but without really trying -- to make an artist's date with yourself on a regular basis to enhance your writing or artistic expression.

I soon realized the garden's rich pallette of sights, smells and stories stood forth to be preserved before the deep freeze of winter erradicated their beautiful images, leaving a blank slate and/or an empty journal page come spring thaw.

So there I was, among those fortunate enough to be surrounded on a sunny morning, husband in hand, with amazing verdant splendor I didn't think possible at the end of October. A long, leafy plant vined in and out of the fence topped here and there with lovely lilac-colored variegated flowers alternated with plump, purplish seed pods the shade of eggplant. It's a Hyacinth Bean, our friend told us. But don't hyacinths only bloom in the spring? It gets its hyacinth name because the flowers smell like hyacinths, although they're just impersonating them, he said. He let us twist off a couple of pods to dry over the winter and plant in April. Each will grow to about 20 feet, he told us. Not high, but long and curling over land otherwise dirtied with ever-present weeds I longed to push out of my garden and my life. I once wrote a series of haikus about the summer I nurtured a long, luxurious butternut squash vine alongside a rented garage formerly littered with broken beer bottles. I looked forward to the hyacinth bean's own story, starting sometime next spring.

Our friend next urged us to step onto his front porch. Last summer, he said, I told everyone I'd give $500 to anyone who got a mosquito bite. I had no takers, he boasted. His secret? A plant called Tansy that he grew in pots and placed here and there along the porch. He broke off some leaves, crushed them in his hand and raised them to my nose. They smelled deeply and exotically of lemon verbena.

You like it? he asked. Well, the mosquitos don't. He suggested we could grow our own tansy by purchasing small plants at the garden supply next spring, as tansy is rather impossible to grow from seed and doesn't root from cuttings. Just make sure they don't give you pansies, he warned. Spell it out for them. T-a-n-s-y.

Duly noted. If I don't remember come April, that's what this page is for.[hyacinth bean][tansy][Julia Cameron][Artist's Way][artist's date] ◦

Gather Your Seeds While You May

Are You Creative? Take a Quickie Quiz.

If you feel you are creative, you probably are. According to studies, you often tend to display the following traits if you are a creative person:
-- You can enjoy silence.
-- You connect with and appreciate nature.
-- You can remain centered and function in the midst of chaos and confusion. You trust your feelings.
-- You are often child-like. You enjoy fantasy and play.
-- You are self-referring. You have a high trust in your own consciousness.
-- You are not rigidly attached to any point of view. While passionately committed to your creativity, you remain open to new possibilities.

Does any or all of the above apply to you -- at least some of the time?

Journaling helps explore and expand the possibilities which may already lie as seeds within your consciousness.[creativity training] ◦

Are You Creative? Take a Quickie Quiz.

Writing the Seen and the Unseen

Deena Metzger, in her book "Writing for Your Life: A Guide and Companion to the Inner World" suggested, "When you think you have nothing to say, when your life feels dull and tedious, try writing: Things I didn't see today." The things we can't see are often the most important. A Turkish poet who spent a number of years as a political prisoner, Nazim Hikmet, wrote a poem entitled "Things I Didn't Know I Loved," while looking out a Prague-to-Berlin train window.

...night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain...
I never knew I loved the sun
even when setting cherry-red as now
in Istanbul too it sometimes sets in postcard colors...
I didn't know I loved clouds
whether I'm under or up above them
whether they look like giants or shaggy white beasts...
I never knew I liked the night pitch-black
sparks fly from the engine
I didn't know I loved sparks...

As a journal writer, you don't need to write a poem, but simply write your own "things I didn't see today" or "Things I Didn't Know I Loved."

[Nazim Hikmet][Deena Metzger] ◦

Writing the Seen and the Unseen

Choose Your Weapon. Then Write!

Journal as object -- which type you choose is a matter of personal preference. Some are large and scrapbook- or sketchbook-like with unlined pages waiting for random entries, doodles, rubber stamps and glued items. Others have elaborately-decorated or sculptured covers with cooly lined paper inside waiting for heated phraseology. And what could be more kitsch and sentimental than the black-and-white mottled composition books from our childhoods -- with a special magnetism for our pens. Some who like to edit journal entries or add and remove pages might go for a planner-style looseleaf journal with small three-punch pages of every color. And you can always rotate multiple journals -- for personal journaling, creative ideas, or a wine or film log, as examples -- each with its own individual look. For those who love to trade the latest personal sagas with friends via e-mail -- just print all those e-mails stored in your "sent" file and voila, there's your journal. And last, but not least, blogs. Not as private, by a long shot, as a journal tucked inside your nightstand, but what fun! ◦

Choose Your Weapon. Then Write!

Rubber Stamps Add Personality to Your Journal

Rubber stamps can make an individual impression on your journal's pages. No longer merely functional oddities that mark bills "Paid," rubber stamps have now arisen as performance artists in their own right, arriving in every shape, size and theme. These "printing presses in the palm of your hand" are available at paper stores, bookstores, gift shops and through special rubber stamp catalogs and websites. I use oatmeal cylinders covered in Japanese or European art paper to house my growing collection of rubber stamps. Each one seems to mark a particular aspect of my personality. And I usually find at least a couple to match my current mood to stamp alongside a journal entry. Use a single color rubber stamp pad for the stamp itself and then fill in blank areas like a coloring book by using a rainbow of fine markers. You'll transform your journal into a modern-day illuminated manuscript or a charm bracelet of images to admire as you turn your journal's pages. Blog writers can use JPEG art images just as effectively. ◦

Rubber Stamps Add Personality to Your Journal

Revisit the Street Where You Lived

I stopped by the old Chicago neighborhood hot dog stand near Higgins & Harlem, Parse's Red Hots -- one of the places where my elder sisters, and later, my Taft High School friends and I would hang out after attending class or on weekends. This stand, along with the now defunct Canele's Pizza across the street and Bill's Snack Shop a half-mile away, were inspiration for Jim Jacobs' dramatic snack shop in the musical "Grease."

I spoke with Parse's original owner who was still working there, and in the midst of dressing hot dogs with mustard and relish. He was happy to talk about "Grease" and of the decades his place had stood the test of time. He told me how he had rented the flat tar roof of the one-story building next door for a short while. It served as extra seating for Parse's by means of picnic tables reached by a side stair.

This immediately brought back a flood of memories from my early childhood. Yes, I remembered standing with my sisters and seeing teens dining high up on the roof. How I had longed to be in high school, more sophisticated and having such a great time as they had seemed to. I had completely forgotten about the roof garden until the words streamed out of the owner's mouth.

Revisit the streets of your childhood and speak with storeowners, the old timers and other passersby to give your memory an exciting jolt for journal entries and creative writing subject matter. ◦

Revisit the Street Where You Lived

Haibun--A Japanese journaling bento

A haibun is a Japanese form of journaling involving a journal entry followed by a haiku poem. The haiku serves as a distillation, an associated thought or an epiphany to the actual journal entry. The Japanese poet Basho and the beat poet Jack Kerouac worked in the haibun form. Remember, the classic haiku poem is 5-7-5 -- meaning three lines of poetry; five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line and five syllables in the third line.
[haibun][Basho][Jack Kerouac] ◦

Haibun--A Japanese journaling bento