“Building a book is like building a nest. I think we learned to make books from birds,” said Paulus Berensohn in a mini-documentary, Soul’s Kitchen.
He was a dancer who pivoted to pottery. He wrote a popular book called Finding One’s Way With Clay.
He teaches a journaling workshop.
For him, a journal is not so much a way of diarising one’s life, but a portable studio, a place where you can hang out with your imagination, your intuition, and your inspiration.
Paulus Berensohn said:
“When I started teaching Journal workshops I would give the first assignment to my students to find a way to be in the journal that’s extremely pleasurable. Something that they really want to do. For some people, it was making lists. Some students made lists of birds. Some made lists of trees. He would say to bring the question into the journal — who else is here? When they notice a mole, they write down the mole. Just to acknowledge that there is a mole living right outside their front door. But some people didn’t know how to begin. Then he would suggest to them they try doodling the day. On days when He thought he didn’t have anything to say he would open his journal and start doodling. And invariably, something would come.”
In this digital age, thoughtful and sensitive people are in danger of losing touch with their inner lives. We are constantly busy doing, while carrying so much fear, anxiety and unprocessed grief.
I wouldn’t have made it through the life I was given without the steady companionship of my journal. It has been the place where I have celebrated my joys and carried my sorrows.
That, to me, is what a journal is for. It gives us a place to sit quietly with the questions we carry. Especially the ones for which we don’t yet have answers.
“I was right in the middle of my twenties and I was struggling to understand who I was going to be and what kind of contribution I was going to make to the world. It [A Journal] gave me permission to explore. And to be creative. And the journal was just one way. It was just one facet of that. One container. One place. But the journal was THE kitchen table. We found the space for ourselves where we were home for a moment.” — David Perrin, one of Paulus’s student
Debra Frasier, the author of On The Day You Were Born attended Paulus’s Journaling workshop,
She appears in the documentary and explains what Paulus taught her:
“That you have this antenna that knows where you’re going before your body knows where it’s going. So if you have this journal space, and you allow yourself to trust whatever is drawing your attention and put it into that journal, it gives me a way to magnetise the question, be alert to the answers, and have a place to store it.”
I have been journaling for more than twenty years now.
I have several physical journals, but this space is also a kind of journal for me. It is where I share my thoughts, ideas, observations and experiments. Many of my books have originated from this space.
This place is the field from where I picked the twigs to make my books.
But I have neglected this space for some time.
Lately, I have been thinking about coming back to it.
Not with any grand plan, but simply to write here more regularly, follow my curiosity and see where it takes me.