Helen Lehndorf

Category: journaling

  • 53 thoughts

    Hello. I know it’s Friday but instead of a ‘Slow-Small Media for the Weekend’ I want to share something else today.

    I’ve had a challenging couple of weeks so my usual ‘lovely things detection service’ have been a bit on hiatus.

    I hope to find my sea-legs and return to usual services next Friday but for now…

    …almost a month ago I turned 53. Not a very special age. Not very young but not very old either. Not a ‘big zero’ birthday. Just a middle-aged-woman kind of birthday.

    F and I went off-grid for two nights to a beautiful bush hut for a dip into nature and quiet. Trickling streams and ruru calls at night. It was lovely.

    My birthday fell on a Saturday this year and the sun came out for the day after weeks of very stormy and cold spring weather. The sun felt like such a big birthday present that day.

    Fraser went off for a walk and I poured a huge cup of tea and opened up my journal. I love using lists as a way into writing in my journal so I decided to set myself the (gentle) challenge of writing 53 thoughts for my birthday. At the outset, I didn’t have any sense of what might come…I just wrote quickly – hoping to get to 53 before Fraser returned.

    (Above: the hut had a kaitiaki with paua shell eyes.)

    I’ve decided to share the birthday list with you …not because it is especially edifying writing but because it is a snapshot of how wobbly and tender 53 feels; maybe it will be of some solace to you if you’re feeling wobbly and tender, too?

    Some of it will probably read like naff pop-psychology or hippy aphorisms. What can I say? Those things are inside me and it’s what poured out on the day. At the time of writing it was just from me to me.

    (I’m copying this from my journal. As I transcribe, I may ‘redact’ a few if they feel too specifically personal or mention my family)

    53 Birthday Thoughts

    1. Despite my challenges I am so grateful for my life.
    2. There is beauty to be found in each day. The task is to find it and attend to it.
    3. *redacted*
    4. *redacted*
    5. I forgive myself. I was doing the best at the time…or at least I was surviving.
    6. I forgive people who have hurt my heart. Not all friendships/associations are meant to last …people come and go. People are mysterious. I am mysterious. I have disappointed people. People have disappointed me. It is the way of things. Let go…..let go…. let go…
    7. Be more like a river.
    8. Be a river.
    9. We’re here to love. That’s it.
    10. No act of love is ever wasted.
    11. Try to adopt more of a ‘maybe’ attitude like the Chinese Farmer.
    12. Love is the bridge…even if long, slow and not resolved in this lifetime.
    13. I read somewhere about midlife, ‘Get better or get bitter.’ I want to get better.

    (Above: my unglamorous, sticking-plastered hand touching moss in the forest on that trip.)

    14. In a similar vein, if at midlife you have ‘ripened on the vine’ and you choose to become wine (sweet) or vinegar (sour).

    I choose wine.

    15. ‘It will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.’

    -John Lennon

    16. I tied a red thread around my wrist in August to remind me to stay awake to my life. It’s still there… although now faded and looking a bit manky.

    (oh my gosh 53 things is so many)

    17. Is there any sweeter experience than sitting still enough that a bird swoops past you, low and swift, and you can feel the fan of air from it’s wing’s beating? (The swallows nesting in the porch here just did that to me.)

    18. The 1990s (most of my twenties) feels a long time ago now. It didn’t used to.

    19. I just found a dried and beautiful cicada wing.

    20. The love in this hut is tangible. The energy of the family who built it having lots of good times over lots of years. (est. 1988)

    21. My soundtrack right now is rushing water, magpies and tui.

    22. We decided to bring just enough food so all weekend we are eating foil-wrapped potatoes cooked in ashes with lots of butter and salt.

    (Above: birthday breakfast at the hut)

    23. Happiness can be so simple if we let it.

    Simplicity = happiness.

    24. The satisfaction of elemental sensations: food in belly, sun on face, fireside gazing, hot coffee, good pillow, the sound of a river.

    + Sitting still long enough to let it soak in.

    25. We (humans) could have this every day but we love to complicate things.

    26. No internet = more time with mind = space to let thoughts meander and unfurl.

    27. When I feel dissatisfied with life, remember today.

    (Above: hut kitchen. Simple and good.)

    28. Being content is a decision…is active…

    29. Oh the neurotic, writerly, artist’s need to record things, capture, analyse, grasp at experience. (All the photographs I’ve taken. This list.)

    30. Eels nearby. This afternoon’s adventure.

    31. An almond-finger for birthday cake.

    32. Scottish oat cakes and tangy cheddar.

    33. Lagavulin whisky.

    34. We resisted the inclination to overpack and over-cater and that has increased my enjoyment of the weekend so much. (Chosen) scarcity can increase appreciation.

    35. That sounded a bit ascetic but it doesn’t feel in the least ascetic.

    36. F is walking up a very steep hill with his still-mending leg. Courage. Determination.

    37. The warmth of companionable silence.

    38. In every way, I have to fight my constant urge to add more.

    39. Evolution, devolution, evolution…

    (home stretch)

    40. We went off-grid for my 50th also. I can feel how much I’ve changed since then. Just a few years…but big such big years.

    41. Delayed gratification: I left my little pile of birthday gifts at home on the kitchen table to open on Sunday night.

    42. In my experience, time is a spiral.

    (Above: hut bathroom. (Yes, of course we did!))

    43. The vulnerability of birthdays. The vulnerability of spring.

    44. When all you want is less – what does that look like?

    45. Being okay with the things I thought I might do that I probably won’t do.

    46. Being okay with how it all transpired.

    47. Being okay with my own particular closet-skeletons.

    Understanding that everyone has them and it would be very unwise to ever wish for anyone else’s life but my own.

    48. Knowing that you never know what people are coping with, carrying, surviving or healing from.

    49. Knowing that sometimes people who appear incredibly fortunate from the outside can sometimes be tortured by their own minds…a personal hell…

    50. Knowing that this is why it is unwise to envy.

    51. Knowing that gratitude is a kind of super-power that can help with almost any problem.

    52. Knowing that choosing love is, more often than not, the right choice.

    53. Knowing mostly how little I know…& this is the nature of life’s ongoing mystery and the way to peace.

    *

    Lucky, lucky life!

    (Above: Crossing the log bridge.)

  • 52 and still stumbling over the ‘A’ word…

    (Above: journal word cards I make for my workshops.)

    Over the weekend, I was at a beach-side retreat for women so I was meeting some new people. I had just taught a journaling workshop (if you’re reading the blog because of foraging…you might not know my second book was about the practice of keeping a journal and I teach journal workshops) and a new acquaintance asked if I were an artist.

    I made some digressive, stumbling reply about how I loved to ‘mess about’ with art, had a visual element to my journal practice, love to play with art materials…mumble mumble… but ‘no, I am not a ‘proper’ artist.’

    My friend C, who was standing there, who is a visual artist, has been to art school, etc, interjected and said,

    ‘Helen, you are an artist. You are. You spend a lot of time doing art. You’re an artist!’

    I thanked her…the conversation moved on…but it left me reflecting.

    (Above: Mixed-media chamomile from a botanical sketchbook I’ve been working on.)

    I have taught creative writing for most of my working life (at university) and there I was, encouraging my undergrads to claim the ‘W’ word, ‘writer’ for themselves.

    ‘If you are passionate about writing, you spend your time writing, you are a writer!’ I said to them. I meant it, too. I felt there was power in the claiming of the word for themselves.

    And yet…and yet…here I am, old enough to know better, and still wiggling around doing the same thing for myself in another creative discipline. I studied creative writing at university and spend a great deal of time writing so it feels simple to claim ‘writer’ for myself. I still wobble around with claiming ‘artist’.

    Aren’t our brains fascinating, and odd, and annoying?

    (Above: Mixed-media red clover from a botanical sketchbook I’ve been working on.)

    I think part of it is where a passion intersects with an audience, or with capitalism. I find it easy to claim ‘writer’ because I have published things and had an audience respond to them. My words have earned me (a little!) money. I have been successful in selling books.

    (Above: art manifesto in the making. Sketchbook notes.)

    My art is mostly in the vein of play, experimentation and enjoyment of the creative process. I have exhibited art work and sold a few things. When my children were small, I supplemented my income with making self-designed and drafted textile crafts and paper goods. I love taking photographs. I feel I have a good visual eye.

    So how is it, I can, for years, have encouraged students to claim ‘writer’ for themselves and yet fail to take my own advice in another discipline?

    Do you have a creative practice noun -artist, writer, musician, singer, potter?-…..you yearn to claim and inhabit but struggle with? I’d love to hear about your blocks or advice for overcoming this odd phenomena.

    Love, Helen, (confident writer, tenuous artist.)

  • somehow, ‘a forager’s life’ is two

    On March 18 my book ‘A Forager’s Life’ turned two!

    The two years since it emerged into the world have been, frankly, mad.

    I’m a person who enjoys a slow, simple life and lots of huge (for me, anyway) and exciting things happened with the book since it’s release. In this space, I’m going to share some of the things that happened…even though they are old news in terms of the pace of the online world. They are still very much with me.

    (Above: I threw a morning tea for the staff at my wonderful local bookshop, Bruce McKenzie Books on the day the books arrived in store, March 2023.)

    I was unkind to myself and, freaking out about money once my book manuscript was delivered, started a new job before the book even came out. At the same time, my younger son who has a disability was finishing high school and in a massive phase of transition into post-school life. I had underestimated how intense of this phase would be for him, resulting in a high-pressured time where I was trying to enjoy the opportunities the book bought my way, learn and hold down a new job and be there for the kid. Oof.

    It was all too much and, coupled with the NZ government’s slashes to disability support last year, I only lasted two years in the job before something had to give and I left it so I could adequately look after my boy.

    Now I’m out the other side of the intense part of the booky fizz, the job debacle, am still navigating the kid’s shaky steps into adulthood (I guess I always will be), plus I’m in the midst of the intense mind/body/spirit shake up that is menopause.

    I’m sitting here, a bit dishevelled, trying to put myself back together. It’s been a very strange time of immense, beautiful highs and difficult, fractious lows. (Then there’s everything going on in the world beyond my front door where the world appears to have gone completely mad.) Therefore, I’m hoping this winter is very boring and nesty so I can read mountains of books beside the fire and journal a lot (on paper and here) and let it all integrate into me at a pace I can cope with.

    So, interspersed with posts about other things, there will be the occasional retrospective post my experiences with ‘Forager’s’.

    I hope it’s interesting for you to read about such things from a writer’s perspective? As writers we are supposed to act very cool and nonchalant about the occasionally great things that can happen if you write something that people respond to…but I have never managed to be cool…I’m an awkward, nerdy, sensitive person who gets overwhelmed easily. I’m not at all nonchalant…I get very revved up about exciting things. In fact I get excited about non-exciting things, like the shape of a dried fennel seed head, finding a particularly niche-to-me second-hand book, or sampling from a pan of sun-ripened then slow roasted cherry tomatoes.

    & I know blogging is long dead but (see above point about not being very cool) however I’m hoping if I write here, the right people will find me, despite claims that blogging and personal websites have been made irrelevant by speedy old social media and peoples’ diminishing attention spans. ‘The right people’ are folks who like reading longer form than an Instagram caption and appreciate the reedy, faint voice of a shaky woman trying to lure kindred people into giving their precious attention to her personal website rather than further furnishing the pockets of tech billionaires.

    If that’s you, warmest of welcomes aboard.

    (Do leave comments if you feel moved to. I read everything and promise to respond.)

  • Some background on ‘Write to the Centre’

    Some background on ‘Write to the Centre’

    My whole adult life I have kept journals, capturing bits of my life in words and images. I’ve also taught journal writing classes from time to time. Journal writing is a key part of my creative process as a writer and my self-care regime as a human. Journals get some bad press – sometimes seen as self-indulgent, angsty or just plain pointless. I can only share my own experience with keeping a journal, which has been positive, helpful and life-affirming.

    Earlier this year I was part of a literary panel and a member of the audience asked us the question ‘If you were the only person left on the planet, would you still write?’ I had the microphone in my hand, so I answered first: ‘Of course!’ I said ‘I love writing, it wouldn’t bother me if no one else was going to read it.’ I anticipated my fellow panelists would agree with me, but instead the other three writers were looking at me incredulously and answered with variations of ‘Hell no! Why bother?’ and talked about how they write with an audience in mind.

    This could be a factor in the journal or no journal divide, perhaps?

    Keeping a journal is essentially writing to/for yourself. You either find intrinsic value in this, or find it as interesting as watching paint dry.

    I have been toying with the idea of writing a book about journal writing for a few years but was wrestling with whether other people would find it interesting, or horribly self-indulgent? I decided to leave it to fate (aka, a panel of board members) by applying for a grant, figuring if the panel granted my proposal, it would be signal enough that there was some value in the idea. They liked it and I received a grant to create the book.

    The book is nearly done and all going well with the printing process it will be released on October 15th.

    I have gone through some real ups and downs during the making of this book..it is a very personal, vulnerable, possibly somewhat naive book…it is not the New Zealand way to be so ‘out there’ with emotions and sometimes ugly private stuff. I feel a little like I am about to walk onto a stage in a crowded auditorium, flash my undies and then cry….or something.

    My journals aren’t ‘beautiful’, the visual parts are usually pretty haphazard, hastily daubed, scrawled or slapped together and the writing is not profound or intellectual…it is unfettered expression…and is offered as such. Now all I can do is wait for the publication process to unfold and hope that the book is met with open hearts, just as it was created with one.

    BJ_2006_12

  • modus operandi : life

    cultclassic

    <<< Phrase stolen from this three minutes and forty five seconds of genius  >>>

  • the creativity muscle

    I’ve spent so little time in my studio this year that I’ve been jokingly calling it “the cave of forgotten craft”.

    What with the new day-job and the intensity of the yoga-instructor training I’m doing, plus my general feeling of knackeredness which I’ve written about lately…the time and inclination to make stuff kind of ebbed away over the year.

    I can feel the desire to get back into it rising in me, which is a relief, because I was wondering if the yen had gone altogether.

    The other day I went into the cave of forgotten craft and it was a scene frozen in time of a busy and yes, untidy, person making several different things at once with a happy mess strewn around.

    I went in there, opened the window, pottered around tidying and remembering long forgotten projects and just kind of steeped in this abandoned part of of myself.

    When I teach journaling workshops, people often arrive like this – the desire for creativity is there, but there is a whole lot of ‘stuff’ in the way of their leaping in – fear, uncertainty, self-consciousness. The way through that is gentle baby-step exercises or as my friend Johanna calls it “throat-clearing”.

    Anyway, it was good to hang out in there. I’ve aired it out. I’ve tidied it. I’ve mooched. I emptied the rubbish bins and dusted the surfaces.

    Next time I go in there I might even…..make something.

  • minute by minute

  • art will eat itself

    I am working on two writing projects at the moment (around the day job, the kids, the endless house-keeping and cooking)…

    One is my next collection of poems and the other is less simple – a project involving over a decade of journals. I am scanning a whole lot of journal pages from 1999-2012…it will be a very visual book. This project is tricky – I haven’t quite found my way with it yet. It’s like it isn’t sure what it wants to be….I don’t want it to be a ‘how to’ about journaling, because I don’t find those books especially helpful myself…plus I don’t think I have much to add to that canon….however it may have elements of that. I am writing some prose pieces to sit amongst the scanned journal pages, but I’m not sure they are right in tone. It’s like I am putting together a book that is almost devouring itself – like the OUROBOROS.

    I’m both sharing parts of my journals and yet critiquing them and journaling and the creative process all at once.  It’s all very messy and more than a little scary, however I’m going to keep chipping away at it and trust that as I work the shape of the book will become clear. Basically, I am trying to write the sort of book I would be excited to find in a bookshop….full of images, honesty, ruminations on creative process, thoughtful mess.

    In the meantime, I take comfort from writers who have gone before me.

    ‘Any writer who knows what he is doing isn’t doing very much.’

    -Nelson Algren

    &

    ‘The furtherest out you can go is the best place to be.’

    -Stanley Elkin’

  • inspiration books

    I get a lot of magazines passed my way from family and as I read them I snip out anything which catches my eye and fill blank journals with pictures. I’m a very visual person and this practice inspires everything from poetry to life habits to cooking to gardening to craft to how I set up my house! (It’s like old-school Pinterest, right? Ha!)

    It doesn’t have to be something I would DO, or WEAR, or necessarily WANT, though…it’s more just about the visual inspiration. I don’t think about it too much – if my eye hovers over it for more than a couple of seconds, I cut it out.

    I’ve been doing versions of this as long as I can remember. I’ve thrown a lot of these book out, too – because of course my tastes and predilictions change over time and it isn’t like there is anything much of me in them – so I feel relaxed about chucking them if they no longer serve their purpose, which is to inspire me!

    Here are some pages from my 2010 inspiration book:

     

  • my journals keep me

    Do you keep a journal?

    Sometimes I feel like my journals keep me.

    They keep me sane, keep me engaged, keep me feeling creative even when I don’t have time for larger creative endeavours.

    I’ve been teaching journal-writing for years. Teaching is a good reminder to me in how important it is to keep on with journals. People often start the journal workshops with slightly skeptical, guarded expressions…(I don’t know what they are thinking, but I imagine it is something along the lines of ‘Is she going to make me write about my feelings and then read it out?’) but after a couple of hours of my raving and sharing my work wth them, they light up, they see possibility, they go out the door with a new resolve.

    Now that book one is nearly birthed, I am working on the next projects. There will be more poetry, of course, there’s another thing I’m working on which I am calling ‘writing blobs’ at the moment, because I’m not sure what they are yet – not poems, not stories, just blobs. Finally, I want to write a journaling book. I’m feeling my way into what that might look like – probably a mix of my teaching and my own journal pages. Would you read a journaling book? What would you like to see in a journaling book?

    Here is a recent journal collage: ‘water’: