Catching the Whispers
Exploration 1 This is where it starts —
Welcome to Catching the Whispers!
This new version of the course invites you to listen to the whispers of your intuition that suggest joy and hope are waiting for you. It helps you to catch the whispers as they pass, attend to them, and let them become your guide to a richer, more poetic life.
You’ve heard the whispers sometimes, when it all stops – perhaps on holiday when you wake up early before everyone else and slip out to walk on the beach. Or perhaps when you’ve finally given in to the cold that keeps coming back, and taken to your bed with ginger tea. Snoozing under the duvet, you catch a distant whisper of possibilities - that course you wanted to take, the holiday you dreamed about, the music you wanted to listen to, the exhibition you really wanted to see. Or perhaps when you’re on the train or driving to work, you find your mind slipping back to some lines from a poem you once loved.
If you’re like I was for the first three decades of my life, you scarcely pay attention to the whispers. I had been well trained not to listen. First my ‘daydreaming’ was discouraged. Daydreaming – sitting while thoughts spring up, mingle, linger, or pass by – like fishing, but with less determination. From the outside, it might look like doing nothing, being lazy. On the inside, it’s gently buzzing with what if… and I wonder whether… and perhaps…. Sitting doing nothing was frowned on in our house – it was interpreted as being rather selfish and lazy. There was always work to be done: housework, school work, knitting, sewing. Doing nothing could be positively dangerous – after all, ‘the devil makes work for idle hands to do’, as grown-ups said to children back then. And I am pleased that I learnt how to do all those things, like cooking and keeping a house clean and organized, and knitting. I just wish more daydreaming had been possible so that it might have spilled over into life choices and paths taken.
the whispering whimsical drawing that offered a new kind of bliss
Then, because of all that hard work, I was successful in school and university, and became a teacher and then a professor. All this time I was being trained to use logical thinking rather than intuition. Except, of course, intuition crept in and refused to be silenced. As an area of research, I chose metaphor, fascinated by its refusal to be tied down by any research paradigm or scientific method. More and more admin was pushed my way. The harder I worked, the less fulfilling it became. And when things got really bad, my body would protest – a cold would turn to sinusitis and require me to stop. Just stop. Cancel trips and conferences. And rest. And there it was – a little space for the whispers to make themselves heard. “This isn’t a good way to live, making yourself sick. Why are you doing this to yourself?”
And then I found art, or it found me. At first, in line with my training in hard work and logical thinking, I tried to keep it to learning rules and practicing drawing, but an exercise to make a ‘whimsical’ drawing let the intuition out again. The feeling I had that day in front of my easel was a new kind of bliss, an insistent delight that spread a quiet energy from my hands through my body. Once I started painting with colour, the battle against intuition reached a turning point, and I set out to recover and to learn how to work with the whispers I had ignored for so long. Years later, I suspected that the art tutor was being dismissive of my work when she spoke of my ‘intuitive sense of colour’, but to me that phrase signalled success – I was at last allowing the whispers to guide me.
How strong it must have been, my poor intuition – ignored, dismissed, put down, buried, locked out, refused for so many years, and yet still pressing on, still whispering.
Catching the Whispers offers tools and tasks that let you choose to listen and explore how you might shift your life towards the poetic. By the end of this five weeks of exploration, you will have dusted off old dreams and enchantments, and opened up new possibilities. You’ll have gathered a joyful collection of delights, of possible projects and resources for moving forwards.
At the centre of your exploration is something very simple, that will become very rich: two notebooks. For the whispers to land. For them to be made visible, to be excavated, and explored, to open up new possibilities. Each notebook has its own purpose. The two notebooks may remain separate, or they may begin to interact as you go. Together your Poetic Life Notebook and your Morning Pages notebook will become maps of where you’ve been and where you want to go, sources of inspiration, reminders of what matters, landscapes of possibility. You will use these two books often over the next 5 weeks, and hopefully beyond that, so selecting notebooks that give you pleasure each time you open them is a good investment of time.
Let’s get started.
How to use these Explorations
Each week you’ll get access to a new Exploration that includes reading and videos or images, and several Tasks for you to do. This week there are 4 Tasks, including a new daily practice of about 20 minutes. The Tasks are designed to build on each other, so please complete them in the order they are given. You can do all the reading and Tasks in one go if you want to set aside half a day for them. Or you can complete the Exploration across the week. If you do this, I suggest you split them like this (times are approximate):
Day 1: Tasks 1 and 2 (60 minutes)
Day 2: Task 3 (30 minutes)
Day 3: Task 4 (45 minutes)
Have a read through the materials now, and then decide how you want to use your time to do the Tasks. It’s really good if you can do Tasks 1 and 2 soon because they set you up for the rest of the course.
Task 1 Finding your notebooks
Time: an hour, or longer if you want
Watch the video and read the suggestions below. If you don’t have anything suitable tucked away in your home, you are invited to go online shopping, just for this purpose, just for yourself.
The video password is:
Whispers 1-1
The Poetic Life Notebook is a really special one, to reflect the positive choice you’ve made to undertake this work. Give yourself time to find it.
I really urge you to go for a notebook with plain pages - no lines, no dots, no bullets…
And I really urge you to go big, as big as you dare or is convenient. I want you to feel there that this notebook holds space for you, offers the poetic the space it needs in your life. A large notebook echoes this intention.
Check out which of your favourite notebook-shopping places is selling online - that gorgeous stationers, or your local bookshop, or maybe an art shop. Online art suppliers like Jacksons or GreatArt stock a range of sketchbooks that would make excellent Poetic Life Notebooks.
Don’t worry if you have to wait for the online order takes a few days to arrive. You can do the tasks that follow on sheets of blank paper and stick them into your notebooks once you have them. Re-visiting your work in this way will only add to the process.
In the Poetic Life Notebook, you take your time. Many of the tasks we’ll do in this course need time on the page. Time for whispers to land and be explored. I expect that the tasks will call you back, prompt rethinking and adding, perhaps taking a new page to go into more detail. You may open it each day, or keep it open so you see it as you pass by and add things as they come to you. It’s for slow thinking and emerging ideas.
You can also order, or buy in the supermarket, a cheap exercise book for your Morning Pages. Any sort will do. And stock up with your favourite kind of pen for writing your pages. Mine is a cheap ballpoint. I buy six at a time and change when they go blotchy. You can, if you prefer, treat yourself to a special pen, but the point of the Morning Pages is to write fast each morning without stopping to think too much and to cover the pages.
Some other resources you’ll be using in the weeks ahead, that you may want to get ready, or buy, include:
sharp scissors
a glue stick or paste
pens and pencils in colours and sizes that appeal to you
highlighter pens - pink and green as minimum, more colours if you wish
an eraser
a pencil sharpener
(optional) a small set of watercolour paints
You have completed your first task when you’ve written your name and Catching the Whispers on the first page of your Poetic Life Notebook.
You are ready to begin exploring —
If you’d like to post a photo of your Poetic Life Notebook to the Facebook group, we’d love to see it!
Task 2 Starting your Morning Pages
Time: 20-30 minutes when you wake up, with or after breakfast
You’ll need: your Morning Pages notebook and a pen
Morning Pages are simply pages of quick writing — not special, composed-for-an-audience writing but just-as-it-comes-out-of-the-end-of-your-pen writing.
Quick writing in your Morning Pages is where you dispose of the mind clutter that holds you up and fogs your thinking. The dross pours out and can be left here. Plans are checked, details and logistics worked out, necessary steps noted. Problems are explored and solutions tried. Physical aches and pains are registered. My Morning Pages are where I realize that a current unease can be traced to my critical inner voice and to old stories, and where I call them out. It’s where I try out other stories, alternative framings of what’s going on in my life.
I’m encouraging you to start writing Morning Pages tomorrow morning, and to write them each morning for the next five weeks. Just do it, as an experiment. See what happens – decide at the end of the week 5 if you want to continue. It’s a kind of magic that has worked for me and for thousands of other people who’ve tried them. Something good happens when you empty your mind of all the stuff that blocks the whispers. When you see it on the page, you can also see solutions or see how you’re wasting your precious energy or see how the answer is right there.
The key points about writing your Morning Pages:
write early
write every day
write 3 pages (= 2 pages of A4) — or thereabouts
write fast, no dwelling, no overthinking — if you don’t know what to write, write: keep writing, keep writing until the next things pops up
there’s no need to read them afterwards
Morning Pages let us realize how often we come back to the same causes of despair or impatience, and finally let us admit they need to be addressed. Morning Pages, especially after the first page or so, produce possibilities and new ways forward.
I also find that, now I live alone, Morning Pages have an important role as witness to the small happenings in my daily life and as conversation partner. They keep me going from day to day, let me remind myself of what matters.
Also, from my experience:
If you wake up miserable or tired, that’s when it really matters to write Morning Pages. They clear your head and revitalize you for the day ahead.
When a useful thought or idea appears on the page – something to do, buy, think more about – I mark it with an asterisk so that it’s easily found when I look back.
I write with a notepad next to me, where I jot down things that pop up in my head and need doing that day: buy bubble bath, call the dentist, finish the book
Morning Pages were invented by Julia Cameron and this is how she introduces them in her wonderful book The Artist’s Way:
Begin your practice of writing Morning Pages tomorrow, if you can wait that long. If your mind is busy offering you reasons why you can’t possibly do this, remember that you signed up for this course because you want to shift something in your life, and find ways to make it happen — go to a quiet place straight after breakfast and write them, set your alarm half an hour early, take a cup of tea or glass of juice back to bed and write them there… The world can manage without you for half an hour — you can’t manage without you.
Let us know in the Facebook Group how it’s going!
Please keep your Pages for the next five weeks, even if later you choose to burn them or throw them away. In week 3 we’ll review the pages you’ve written.
Online, you can find many people describing how Morning Pages changed their lives. This is one of my favourites (his other columns are worth reading too):
Task 3 Starting your Poetic Life Notebook
Time: 30 minutes
You need: Your Poetic Life Notebook, scissors and glue stick, pens
In the beautiful space of your carefully chosen Poetic Life Notebook, you are going to create a wild garden, a library, a mirror, a wise advisor, an art gallery. It is a kind of studio-in-a-book, just for you and completely relevant to your life and no-one else’s.
Creating your Poetic Life Notebook happens page by page, and then, quite quickly, it will take on a life of its own and become a key to growing a poetic life and a creative practice.
Walk around your living space and pick up a leaflet or magazine or postcard, anything with pictures. Find a picture that catches your eye in some way. There’s no need to work out why you like it at this point.
Cut it out (or copy), and stick it on the first page of your Poetic Life Notebook – stick in the middle, or at one edge, or wherever it wants to sit.
Now stand and look at it. If any thoughts come to you, write them somewhere on the page - scattering ideas across the page becomes a practice of exploration.
That’s it. Your Poetic Life Notebook is open!
If you want to do more on these pages now or in an odd moment during the week, you could choose a colour in the picture that speaks to you and play around on the page with that colour, doodle, draw.
You could draw your own version of the picture alongside, or of a section
You could find a shape you love in the picture. Draw it, tracing on top of the picture or next to it.
You could add other images that relate.
You could do a google search for some aspect of the image – who made it, where was it, who’s in it – and jot down anything fascinating that you find out.
Incorporate whispers from the last course that you identified in Task 1 as still full of energy for you.
Be listening out for whispered thoughts as you play and look. If you catch any, capture them on the page.
These questions may work as entries into wondering and reflection:
What is this about?
What speaks to me here?
How does this connect?
Where does this take me?
What does it tell me about what I want?
Over the next week:
Make your Poetic Life Notebook your companion
If you have space and privacy, leave it out, leave it open. Stop and look at it every so often – there’s no need to write anything, unless there’s a whisper to catch.
Do some more pages in a similar way
When you come across a meaningful picture, quote, article, or poem, or just a thought … add a new page in your Poetic Life Notebook.
Copy it or cut it out and stick it in
or write it out directly on to the page
Let your eyes and mind wander around it and wonder.
Allow ideas to surface. Allow connections to suggest themselves.
Catch the whispers before they float away, and add them to the page.
Why not share one of your discoveries in the Facebook group? it could inspire others!
Task 4 Whispers from our Pandemic Times
Time: 45 minutes
You need: Your Poetic Life Notebook, pens, anything you can find to decorate your pages
The last year and a half really has been a life-changing period – sickness, isolation, changes in where and how we work, worry and new levels of anxiety, risk management on a daily basis. And of profound growth for each of us, learnings and re-learnings. This task explores the impact of this period on our poetic and creative lives, collecting what we’ve learnt so we can apply it to making choices for growth in our lives.
I recently came across a poem by Lisa Jarnot called Marcus Aurelius Rose that beautifully lists a set of learnings. You can read and listen to it here. Notice how she includes all different kinds and scales of things: ways of moving and ways of looking, philosophical ideas and physical feelings, historical facts and in-the-moment facts, across the whole range of human experience. Notice how the poem is so very personal to her, and yet somehow universal too. Let the poem raise your awareness of the many ways the pandemic may have changed your understanding of yourself and your world.
In your Poetic Life Notebook, first divide your personal pandemic experience into ‘chapters’. For example, I was in New Zealand when it all started and we went quickly into a six week lockdown, allowed only to leave the house for exercise in our local area. That was an intense chapter, full of worry and yet with sparkling moments walking with my then three year old granddaughter in the autumn leaves. I returned to the UK, to a quarantine chapter marching round my garden each day. Then there was a chapter in an extended household bubble with my brother and sister-in-law, isolating on the island. And a summer hiding from holiday makers. And now whatever this on-going chapter is …
Describe each of your own covid chapters - places, people, events, how it felt
and use colour to highlight any realisations around your poetic life - what happened to those deep connections to art, music, landscape, poetry, the richness of life and relationships; to beauty in all its forms in this difficult, damaged world? Maybe you turned to music or poetry more often, or maybe you felt differently about what you thought you loved. If you have a creative practice, did it intensify or dry up? did it change form, e.g. from painting to photography?
On a new page, capture your own learnings over these chapters that will go forwards with you into whatever comes next. You could write them as a list, or work them into a poem, or turn them into an image or collage. I used the pattern of the poem to list my learnings:
From the reopening of the cafe, I learned the necessity of coffee and how many different ways there are to make it.
From walking my garden, there is a spot with a view of both the loch and the mountain.
From the terrible Trump times, that truth matters.
From reading Iris Murdoch, that moral philosophy may serve, that we are allowed to talk of the good.
From planting roses, it’s worth trying…
If you’d like to share one or more of your whispers from the pandemic, we’d love to see them.
At the end of this week
These two whisper-catching notebooks are now part of your life. They are the foundations for your poetic practice and for shifting your life when you want to do that. More immediately, they are sources of inspiration for small changes you can make now.
Hopefully, a set of Morning Pages is accumulating and is becoming a habit. Have you found the best time and place to write the pages? Is it helping set the tone for your day?
The Poetic Life Notebook has some colourful, intriguing pages that you can add to when called. Have you found a good place to leave the book open and whisper to you as you pass by?
Are any whispers becoming clearer or louder? Highlight and doodle around them. Write about them in your Morning Pages.
Are there any small actions around these that you could take very soon: something to find, sort, get out, buy, order, book, wear, arrange, do?
Congratulations - you’ve completed week 1!
