Day two. This is always how it starts out. How many morning pages around the world are like this? How many get past day two? This feels like a vacation thing. I'm not waking up thinking about all the stuff I need to do, how I want to get started on them early, or anything like that. So much harder at other times. Just like meditation. And that's pretty much dead at the moment.

I was thinking of just posting the image since it took a long time to get it. Took a lot of shots while the water was warming and then ended up using a crop from the first shot. Maybe I just need to leave it at the first shot. Take it, and move on. What's the goal with the image? Why am I taking them? So far, it seems like I should and maybe thats good enough. No, there's something else. It captures my surroundings and captures my eye. It's nice to look back and see those things. But if that's the point, then the quality of the shot should be allowed to suffer a bit. What I found this morning was that I ended up time-boxing the photo-shoot. Meaning, as soon as the water was ready, I stopped taking shots. This seemed like the right way to go. Let myself take shots for 10 or 15 minutes and then stop. Go from there. The photo process shouldn't damage the writing process.

Had some good sex yesterday. Kinda came out of the blue and it could have kept going but I found myself stopping it after it had already been "good enough". I still don't know why i'm doing this, but we talked about my impulses to say no and not wanting to go there for the first time and I think that helped have a good experience yesterday. Getting some of these thoughts out of my skull lightens the mood. It feels so heavy when it's sitting inside, reverberating off the walls. Even now, I feel myself brooding and being a bit heavy with this writing. The first page is light because it's not a commitment, the second page is the first indication of a pattern and suddenly you need to perform.

Reminds me of an anecdote in Bean's Art and Fear book. It talks about a person who decided to start taking dance because she thought she would like it. She did and after a while got fairly good at it. At some point her teacher took notice and asked her to be in a performance. The student's dance then became stifled and difficult. It lost all the qualities that came from just enjoying the experience of doing without judging the product. (Back to the journey and destination confusion?)

This brings up that I'm posting these messages to someone's service. They aren't private like notebook paper in a binder at home. I have to obfuscate names and be purposely hazy about some of the more personal aspects of my life, because I have to assume that someone could read this. This definitely taints the quality of the morning pages and perhaps damages an important aspect of them. For now, these aren't morning pages, these are something else inspired by morning pages. I already break some other rules and re-read paragraphs I've written before. I go in an expand on ideas I only fleetingly mentioned. I clarify points so that later (years from now) when I'm reading I'll understand what I was talking about. I like this a lot as I feel I more fully get thoughts out.

I'm done, but I'll include the following, because it is awesome. From the best dictionary ever (New Oxford American Dictionary) while looking up the word pithy:

THE RIGHT WORDIf you don't like to mince words, you'll make every effort to be concise in both your writing and speaking, which means to remove all superfluous details (: a concise summary of everything that happened).Succinct is very close in meaning to concise, although it emphasizes compression and compactness in addition to brevity (: succinct instructions for what to do in an emergency).If you're laconic, you are brief to the point of being curt, brusque, or even uncommunicative (: his laconic reply left many questions unanswered).Terse can also mean clipped or abrupt (: a terse command), but it usually connotes something that is both concise and polished (: a terse style of writing that was much admired).A pithy statement is not only succinct but full of substance and meaning (: a pithy argument that no one could counter).