A thousand days of morning pages
I’ve been writing morning pages for 1000 days.
When I started this experiment on Christmas Eve in 2019, I was non-committal. I’m just trying this out. I can stop if I don’t like it. To my surprise, I noticed a few benefits in my very first session. Daily stream-of-consciousness journaling quickly became one of my most beloved practices for feeling both firmly rooted and creatively expansive.
But on day 900 or thereabouts, I had to admit to myself that my daily practice was starting to feel a little less shiny. I was writing morning pages just to get them done. The aha moments dried up. It became a chore. I was rambling and incoherent, my thoughts diverging— my hand moved to write one thing while my mind was trying to focus on another. My consciousness seemed to be over journaling.
Yet this wasn’t something I was ready to give up. This practice has provided me with a multitude of tangible benefits and I wanted to return that place. So naturally, I did something that had nothing to with morning pages at all. I bought a set of beautiful oracle cards. I filmed an unboxing video and pulled my first card (Kali, reversed).
The next day, I found myself drawn to learning more about the deity depicted on the card and how the lessons from that deity might help me in my own life. I supplemented the blurb in the accompanying guidebook with some online research. With those details in mind, I journaled my thoughts during my morning pages session. I started to feel some magic return as my mind connected the card to my life to my dreams to my inner knowing. The aha moments were trickling back.
From there, I repeated the process of pulling a card in the evening and journaling on it the next morning. Then I did it again. And again. And again. And just like that, my morning pages practice felt fun and purposeful again. It felt like there was something to be revealed. Something to be learned. Of course, my mind still wanders—it is stream-of-consciousness after all—but overall I feel more focused and receptive.
When I initially bought this deck of oracle cards, it was because I thought they would add to my moon planning practice. I didn’t anticipate that pulling a daily card could also revitalize my morning pages practice. After around two weeks of pulling daily cards, I’m back to journaling without a prompt, but I know I have my divinity cards in my toolkit in case I ever need another little spark.
