Sometimes, the right notebook DOES change everything.
How my 20-year-plus relationship to morning pages was lost and found through witchery, sensory joy, and stickers.
This is a story—an ode, a song, a love poem—about how finding the right notebook brought me back to my writing practice.
One of the earlier signs (symptoms?) of the Autistic burnout that engulfed much of my last year was how my 20+ year morning pages practice vanished into thin air.
I’m tempted to say that I stopped journaling, because for most of my life morning pages were the same as my journaling practice, but that wouldn’t be true at all. Last year my journaling practice, inspired by Erin, my fairy journal godmother expanded and flourished into something vast, supple, and capacious, and grew into a container that holds much more than my morning pages practice. And while I think that this expansion and growth was in many ways a result of losing my morning pages practice, still it was hard for me to think of what I was doing as “real” writing and, besides, I really missed the flow of longhand stream of consciousness writing that had been the underpinning of my days for over two decades.
I’m grateful that I could trust the practice enough to leave because I knew it would come back: I understood this as a pause in my relationship with morning pages, necessary to reassess its place in my life and explore in what ways it might need to show up differently.
I am fussy, fastidious, and faithful in my writing habits, and nowhere is this more true than in my choice of sacred vessels: notebooks & pens. I like using the same format in a variety of colors, which I now understand as a way to please the gods of both my Autistic and ADHD brain. I can plot the trajectory of my life based on which notebooks & which pens I was using at which time.
From where I sit as I write this I can see maybe thirty lined Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks, arranged in rainbow color order, obvs. For years, it’s been my notebook of choice, which I’d come to prefer over Moleskines, which had been the previous favored notebook, because of its wider pages, page numbers & index that I never use, but I could, and that delight me whether I use them or not; its two bookmarks that I do use, its ampler size (248 pages vs 192) and its wider selection of colors.
When it comes to pens, I’ve gone steady with a variety of them over the years: I had a long, torrid love affair with 0.5 black Muji pens for years, followed by Pentel’s InkJoy pens (I prefer the turquoise ink.) When my morning pages practice ground to a halt, I was a couple of years into reviving my fervor for fountain pens with a sweet little purple Kaweco Sport number, with a rotating selection of ink colors.
For months, I carried my lined Lilac Leuchtturm 1917 around without writing in it, preferring the looser, smaller format of pages in my two Traveler’s Notebooks, which I’m hoping will get their own post soon. The TNs grew fatter; the Leuchtturm snoozed, unbothered.
Then came December. I was excited to join one of my favorite witches, Rachael Maddox, for a two-month, 7-ritual offering called Business Witchery and, as any self-respecting journal witch would, I went on a quest for the right notebook to join me on the adventure.
I settled on a Lilac-covered, dotted-paged Leuchtturm 1917 that I had dedicated to a book project the previous spring and had used about 40 pages of.
For each of the seven rituals, Rachael created a super sexy, hand-drawn, black & white workbook, and I began a practice, each week, before our live ritual call, of printing out and cutting & pasting the workbook pages in my journal.
I am always super hesitant to allow myself to be led into ritual. I don’t trust many people to do it for me anymore, my PDA showing up in its spiritual brat incarnation. I was enthusiastic about Rachael’s program, and it felt ok to trust her enough to try something new with her, but all of this was made easier by the fact that I had my journal there to ground me and hold me through this portal of change.
From high school through college and all the way through yoga therapy training, I’ve long relied on doodling and drawing hearts and roses and song lyrics in the margins of my planners and notebooks. In this incarnation, I added ornaments of washi tape, stickers, stamps, and colored markers to the pages, making them my own.
A reflection I had earlier last year is that, for my whole life, when I’ve looked in the mirror, I rarely felt like the reflection looked like me. But, when I look at my journal pages, when I look at the colors and shapes and patterns adorning each page, I marvel: it looks exactly like me, and I fucking love the way it looks.
Now, the stamps and stickers and washi tape and colored markers were not at all newcomers: I’d been using them every single day in my TNs. But using them in a Leuchtturm was new, and a bit unusual, and that felt good. It felt right. I got used to holding that format in my hands again—that sized notebook, the feeling of that paper—and began to feel into the possibilities it held.
Rachael’s program started in early December; that month, I started experimenting with writing shorter, smaller morning pages again, this time in my standard TN. While that hadn’t been part of my morning pages practice before, I started playing around with adding little bits of ornaments around the edges of the pages, creating a container of sensory joy for myself on the page, to ease myself back into the practice of longhand, stream of consciousness writing.
It worked. I found that the time I spend decorating each page—choosing a color scheme for the day, selecting the tapes and shapes that would suit my mood, and creating repeating & contrasting patterns on the pages soothed the anxiety I had about the fact that I hadn’t been writing, and made me eager to dive into the cute & colorful container I’d just created.
From there, it was just a hop, skip, and a jump back into Leuchtturm morning pages—only, this time, it was on dotted pages, between the bright cut & paste mess of weekly ritual workbook pages. I have been joyfully, eagerly back to writing morning pages almost daily.
There was a final clincher to changing my relationship with my morning pages. I’d long been eyeing my fairy journal godmother’s beautiful journal covers and decided to get one for myself, to celebrate and honor this new season in my relationship with my morning pages journal. I fell hard for this beautiful mint green Moterm cover, and while it did take me a bit of time to get used to it, I quickly grew to love it effusively.
The pale green color is both soothing & exciting to my system, the pebbled texture and heft of it feel so so good in my hand. And I don’t mind telling you: it feels very, very good to hug. (If you’re not hugging your journals and/or other special things yet, I cannot recommend enough that you start. Some days, it’s all I can do. And it is enough.)
I’m glad I trusted the process when the pages slipped from my grasp early last year. It would have been easy to get despondent and despairing, to make a huge deal about the whole thing, try to force myself back into trying to write when my body was asking for a pause, and to shame spiral when those efforts inevitably failed.
Turns out, what it needed was a new sensory container: a dotted page, for starters. Different colored pens. Washi tape, stamps and stickers to decorate the pages. And a journal cover, a leather-and-paper familiar to build a continuous sensory relationship with.
Speaking of magical containers, my witch pal Rachael Maddox is running another round of Business Witchery in April + May. The first round was so impactful for me that I’m actually going to do it again! (Rachael does cool shit like this, like let you take a program again for free.)
You know when you watch a show or read a book, and something is revealed towards the end that makes you want to re-read/re-watch the whole thing again so you can understand how all the pieces fit together? It’s kinda like that for me with this program. I got to feel in my body how so many of the things that feel stuck around are actually possible, and now I want to go through all the rituals again with that same clarity.
(Plus, I bought a paper trimmer halfway through the first round to cut my workbook pages, and I’m excited to use it again!)
The program starts April 1st. Rachael offers generous payment plans and solidarity pricing so hopefully it is accessible to most folks, and also no one is turned away due to lack of funds, so please don’t hesitate to reach out to her team if this offer resonates with you but funds are low.
We need more loud-mouthed witches who are not afraid of being disruptive, who are embodied and resourced enough to say the hard shit that needs to be said, dreamed, prayed, danced into being, and since Rachael is the living, breathing embodiment of the cackling witch archetype, there really is no better guide I can think of to help you uncensor your wildest wisdom & unleash it into the world.
It is important to note that Rachael is an anti-Zionist Jew whose entire body of work is rooted in political action and collective liberation. Funds from each purchase will go towards refugees in Gaza, and each of the seven rituals will begin with a prayer for Palestine. I wouldn’t do this kind of spiritual work with anyone who isn’t explicitly aligned with Palestinian liberation, and I wouldn’t recommend it to you either.
Hey journal nerds! I hope to soon have a page up that lists sources for all my stationery supplies, but that’s not done yet, so if you see anything you want to know the provenance of, just ask in the comments! Chances are it comes from Journal As Altar shop, JetPens, Cognitive Supply, The Creeping Moon, or Stasia Burrington.