What happens when private pages become public? When you’re not simply writing into the void alone, but with a friend, an audience? Mooring Pages attempts to answer these questions through unedited, occasionally live, letters and text-based conversations. The project is a living document, fluid and ever changing—searching for an anchor that frees us to drift.
My best friend Alicia and I started this project (“Mooring Pages”) after several attempts at Julia Cameron’s “Morning Pages.” We thought it might be more interesting to write back and forth to each other.
The document is live now on Ellipsus and ready for your eyes. Over the coming weeks and months, we will write to each other not just in letter form but also in “live writes”—a sort of Cam Girl style writing wherein we’ll announce that we’re live, write to each other, and take questions from whatever audience may be around. We want to uncover new ideas of intellectual intimacy and discover how writing might evolve beyond a solitary practice. This is a practice in writing not just for a future audience but a present one; an audience that hovers in the doc while your cursor flickers and your mind is searching for le bon mot or whatever.
Some snippets to entice you include….
I think we (by which I mean specifically you and I) are in a really unique position (in terms of our social roles and the time in which we’re acting them out). I think it’s possible to make our lives an act of actual liberation—although I’m not yet certain what that means, much less what that looks like. I’m also convinced that the way forward is both more simple and more complex than we’re allowing ourselves to see. Complex in that it involves acknowledging our basic interdependence; simple in that all we have to do is be authentic and be adamant about that authenticity.
I don’t know for certain that this is the best path forward—but at this moment, it is the only clearing in the thicket I’m able to glimpse. How about you?
And other highlights such as…
Maybe that's one way to consider being "present," which is to nurture… the present? And whatever exists in it? Me, relationships, my mind and my work and my body, etc. And I do like what you said about the complexity (acknowledging interdependence and living and existing with others) and the simplicity (authenticity) of achieving acutal liberation. I suppose I wonder how much of one's authenticity is something one chooses and something one accepts/embraces. There are things we can change in ourselves that we don't like, but how do we decide what's worth changing and what's not? Do we just follow desire? The mother of all choices?
I hope to see you in the doc—and keep an eye out. We’ll be announcing our first Live Write soon.
Let me know what you think xoxo