Silent
Silent provides the tools for seekers to recognize their path and enables self-reliance for spiritual and magickal growth.
Seekers gain insight from his work and find their inner calm from his ability to listen and help others reflect.
Creating Your Journaling Discipline
Silent • December 12, 2021
Four Writing Prompts - Just Start Writing
Journaling is a discipline that allows you freedom of expression without judgment. You can express your inner concerns and reflect on those things that may not be directly conscious to you. It is a great self-care, reflection, and mental health exercise.
There are many styles and goals for a journal. Find one style or mix and match:
- To-do list
- What is the day to day or perhaps larger goals (clean the basement, write a book, track a life event)?
- Day’s events journal
- My personal favorite. A great recap and a way to think through the events of the day.
- Log your dreams for later reflection.
- Keep separate business and personal journals. This doesn't need to be expensive.
- Stream of consciousness
- Write it down, write it all down. You can sort through it a day or week later.
- Food journal
- Whether you are a foodie, tracking it for lifestyle or health reasons this is a creative way to get started
- Fitness journal
- Like a food journal whether you’re just getting started or prepping for your next triathlon this is the place to organize your thoughts
- Sketch journal
- Draw your thoughts and tap in. You don’t need to be artistic. Start with anything.
- Specialty
- Have a hobby or interest? A great place to record thoughts, ideas, or projects. Full disclosure, I usually have four journals going at once
The Practical
A journal is a series of pages and a writing instrument. There are very fancy and elaborate BuJos (Bullet Journals) out there. Keep it simple, otherwise it may create a barrier to entry for some due to cost or the daunting amount of tasks associated with it.
Use what works for you. Start with a few sheets of paper, an inexpensive notepad and your favorite pen. You can always add more. Some people journal on their computers. Date every entry and highlight key words or thoughts.
A text editor, Microsoft OneNote, and many other programs are available. Personally, I prefer the tactile feedback of writing and often draw in my journals. Always do what is comfortable for you. You are more likely to stick with it.
Whether you journal daily or less frequently try writing at the same time every day. It will be easier if you set aside time for your practice
Writing Prompts
The call to action is… “write.” Don’t worry so much about what you write but that you do it. Start with whatever is on your mind and don’t worry if it seems random or trivial. This is building a habit to journal your thoughts daily. You are creating an environment to let out creativity, needs, frustrations, triumphs, and a range of personal emotions. Editing, if desired, can come later. Stream-of-consciousness is generally very honest and cathartic for you.
Writing prompts are another way to get started.
- How did the day go?
- What were your successes?
- Challenges?
- What did I learn today?
- About myself?
- About others?
- What do I plan to do differently or the same in the future?
- Whom did I interact with and what happened?
- Is there someone I need to update?
- Someone to thank – You can do this everyday 😊
- Share some feedback
Bonus Tips
I'm known for having a very detailed memory. Some of it is genetics, some training and discipline. I credit a lot to writing things down. I am an efficient note taker (this is a form of journaling) with my own shorthand and methods. I find that once I write it down, I seldom need to review it. When reviewing notes or journal entries, there is often inspiration.
Do you have favorite methods or techniques? New to journaling? Write to me after your first 30 days, I'd love to hear about it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walk into any forest in the Cascades and you are standing on the dead. The fir that fell forty years ago is now the nurse log feeding a row of saplings. The salmon carried uphill by an eagle became the nitrogen in the cedar's needles. Nothing in that forest is wasted, and nothing in it is afraid. We have built an entire industry on pretending we are exempt from this. We drain the body of its blood, fill it with preservatives, seal it in lacquered hardwood, and lower it into a concrete vault—as if the earth were a contamination to be defended against rather than the place we came from. Cremation, for all its simplicity, burns fossil fuel and sends the body skyward as carbon. There is another way, and it began here in Washington. Human composting—the law calls it natural organic reduction—was legalized in this state in 2019, the first in the nation. The process is unhurried and honest. The body, unembalmed, is laid into a steel vessel and surrounded by wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. No chemicals are added. The microbes that already live on the plant material, and on us, do the work they have always done. Over eight to twelve weeks, the body becomes soil—about a cubic yard of it, dark and alive. Families may take some home for a garden or a tree, or donate it to forest conservation land. What was a person becomes, quite literally, ground for new growth. I have sat with the dying, and I can tell you that the question underneath most deathbed fear is not what happens to me? It is did I matter, and will anything of me remain? The Hávamál answers plainly: cattle die, kin die, the self dies too—but what one leaves behind endures. We usually read that as reputation. I have come to read it more literally. A body that becomes soil leaves something behind that you can hold in your hands. Something that feeds. For those of us who keep the old ways, this is not innovation. It is restoration. Our ancestors were returned to barrows and bogs and burial mounds, given back to the land that fed them. The vessel and the alfalfa are new; the covenant is ancient. The earth gives, and the earth receives. Every harvest festival we keep is built on that exchange. It would be strange to honor the cycle all our lives and then opt out of it at the end. This choice is now legal in a dozen states and counting. If it speaks to you, say so—out loud, in writing, to the people who will one day carry out your wishes. Death plans left unspoken become burdens; death plans spoken become gifts. A leaf falls. A seed sprouts. The tree does not grieve the leaf, and the soil does not refuse the seed. When my own time comes, I intend to be useful one last time. That, too, is a kind of prayer.  —Silent
For the Pagan and Contemplative Community
There is a grief that arrives before the death. It does not announce itself. It does not have a name that anyone uses at the dinner table, or in the waiting room, or in the parking lot of the care facility where you sit in your car for a few minutes before going in, gathering yourself. It lives in small moments. The first time they didn't recognize you. The day you realized you were making decisions for them that they would have hated. The night you caught yourself hoping — just for a second, just once — that it would be over soon, and then spent the next three days punishing yourself for the thought. This is called anticipatory grief. And it is real, and it is heavy, and almost no one will name it for you while you are living inside it, because you are the strong one, and the person you are losing is still here, and grief, we have been told, comes after. It doesn't always come after. Sometimes it comes alongside. Caregiving is one of the most demanding things a human being can do. It asks you to be present to someone else's diminishment, day after day, while managing your own fear and your own exhaustion and your own sadness — and while the world around you continues as though nothing unusual is happening. You go to the grocery store. You answer emails. You show up. You are praised for your strength, which is a kindness people offer because they don't know what else to give you. What you actually need is someone who will let you put the strength down for an hour. Not fix you. Not give you a plan. Not tell you that you're doing a great job, or that they couldn't do what you're doing, or that everything happens for a reason. Just someone who will sit with you in the weight of it. Who will not be frightened by what you are carrying. Who will let you say the unsayable things — the anger, the ambivalence, the love that is so tangled up with loss that you can no longer tell them apart. That is what I offer. I am a death doula and spiritual director. I work with caregivers who are in the middle of it — not at the end, not after, but now, in the long middle stretch where the grief has no official start date and the world has not yet given you permission to feel it. We meet, usually by video, for an hour at a time. I listen in a particular way — not for problems to solve, but for what is actually present beneath the exhaustion and the competence and the careful management of everyone else's emotions. You do not have to have it together when you come into this space. That is the point of it. A few things I will not do: I will not tell you how to grieve correctly. There is no correctly. I will not rush you toward acceptance or silver linings. Some things do not have silver linings, and pretending otherwise is a small violence. I will not give you more to manage. You are already managing too much. What I will do is be present — fully, unhurriedly, without an agenda — for whatever you bring into the room. If you are a caregiver and you are reading this and something in you recognized itself in these words, that recognition is an invitation.  I have a small number of spaces available for caregivers who are navigating the approach of death alongside someone they love. The intake questions at tokeepsilent.me are where we begin. Or you can reach me directly. There is no script for this conversation. We simply start. — Silent