Why I Carry Notebooks Everywhere

And how writing in your own might change your life

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Here are some of my handmade notebooks in (of course) a vintage recipe box.

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Friends,

When I started high school, a friend handed me a copy of Madeline L’Engle’s Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. “I think you’d like this,” she said, not knowing that this book would plant the seeds for years of writing later.

One of the things that stuck with me is where L’Engle describes a commonplace book—a single place for a writer to capture ideas and impressions and quotes, and literally anything you want. It’s a common place for thought, for reflection, for noticing the world. And, according to L’Engle, the foundation for being a writer:

I copy down thoughts upon which I want to meditate, and footnoting is not my purpose; this is a devotional, not a scholarly notebook. I’ve been keeping it for many years, and turn to it for help in prayer, in understanding. All I’m looking for in it is meaning, meaning which will help me to live life lovingly…

So I immediately bought a journal and took it in my backpack everywhere I went. Song ideas, words that interested me, quotes, what I overheard from friends. It all went into my commonplace book. I kept up the practice through college, and when I was in grad school I decided to start making my own. I made them reporter-style and pocket-sized, with enough pages to last for a month or so. Now I’ve become so used to carrying them around that pen and notebook became part of the habitual last minute check at the door.

Wallet, phone, keys, pen, notebook? Great: ready for the world.

Honestly, there’s no weekly Still Life letter without these notebooks. And that’s not because of what I wrote down but the act of writing in the first place. The practice of noticing, of not letting things go, has become fertile ground for a habit of attention—and that matters whether or not you consider yourself a writer. It’s a good thing to enlarge our capacity to take in the world. Because, what we give our attention to and what we hold onto, over time, becomes who we are. Or as Anne Dillard said in The Writing Life with her classic existential bluntness: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”

That kind of hour-by-hour self-aware intentionality can feel a bit much. Not every day is dense with existential awareness (Dillard also described her work like a pilot skywriting so hard that he crashes his airplane into the ground. So, you know... intense). And yet this is where a writing practice and a spiritual practice overlap: a committed effort of curiosity, a desire to step beyond what we know and discover the welcome of a larger world.

So make a notebook. Carry pen and paper for a while. Why not? Approach the world with the gusto of a child completely unaware of their own ignorance. Explore the world like it’s the only world we have, because it is. And then write down what you find. Will it lead to the Next Great American Novel? Who knows. Will you become the next New York Times Best-Selling Author Who Has Millions Of Followers And Just Sold Book Rights to A Hollywood Studio? Probably not (and besides: chasing after Being A Writer™ confuses the role with the work).

But if you start, I have to warn you. Be careful. If you start writing down beautiful things that you see and wisdom from good friends and quotes from library books and lists of words that sound weird and poem scraps and tree names and random loopy lines for no reason other than the pure pleasure of your favorite pen, you might just find, twenty years later, that all those pages will stack up into a single door that you open, right into your own life.

Take care,

Michael

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“Digging” by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb   
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   
Bends low, comes up twenty years away   
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

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A meditative and simple review of leaves

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