Whether you consider your craft to be artistic or magical, it seems as if someone is always telling you to Write Down Your Experiences.  Dream Journals, Rehearsal Journals, Books of Shadows, Books of Scripts—no matter what you call them or claim as their purpose they all amount to the same thing–extra time added to your daily practice spent writing down what you did.  If you’re like me, it’s also the hardest piece of that practice.  When I’m coming out of an amazing ritual/performance/rehearsal, I want to ride that experience’s afterglow.  The last thing I want to do is grab pen and paper!  The same is true when I wake up from an intense dream or have a spark of inspiration–I don’t want to stop and record it, I want to get right to processing.   We live in a short attention span world, and all this journaling is slowing me down.  Why the constant insistence that these books are important?

The first and most obvious answer is also the most cliche–we write things down so that we don’t forget them.  There is no worse experience than having a ritual in which we created this amazing hymn or a rehearsal in which we made a real breakthrough in terms of character or staging  and then not having the ability to recreate that hymn or that breakthrough because we’ve forgotten it and no one wrote it down.  Studies have shown us that writing things down actually has a twofold affect on memory–not only do the written records we’ve produced fill in the gaps in between what we remember, but writing also helps us to remember more in the first place.  Because writing is a physical process that uses 2 of our senses–vision and touch–it invokes our sense memory or physical memory as well as our rational or mental memory, and we are more likely to find a memory if it is stored in multiple parts of ourselves.

Writing is a bridging process between more than just our physical and mental memories.  The second reason that Magi, Mystics, and Artists are so keen on writing things down is that writing as a practice helps bridge between our creative/subconscious selves and our analytic/conscious selves.  Hayden mentioned this when he talked about dream journals–by writing our visions down we can start to track symbols and where/how they appear and thus begin to understand what those symbols mean to us.  Similarly, writing requires us to find a way to quantify and qualify our visceral experiences, to find a way of communicating them and that requires us to break down our right brain/left brain or conscious/subconscious barriers.  This is one reason why I personally find that a real “paper and pen” recording process works best for me in this sort of work–I can continue to communicate via doodles and diagrams when verbal communication methods fail to bridge that gap.  That’s not so easy to do on a word processor.

I’ve known the above reasons for the recording process of my practice for years, but just this past week I discovered a third reason that no one had really made explicit to me before.  I was going through some old papers when I came across a rehearsal journal from a previous show I worked on.  On the very first page I found this written as the initial concept for the performance:

In many of the old religions, GLBT persons held special roles as shaman/seers/etc because they were perceived as taking part of both male and female spirits.  In modern times, however, we are by and large a secular community, ostracized by the religious systems that have come into power in the past millennium, and frequently considered frivolous in our pursuits of pleasure.  But are these pleasures we pursue so frivolous or are they simply a modernization of the rites of old?  Sacred or Profane, who are we?

Sound familiar?  It’s awfully like the concept for Yes They Are! Meeting and Greeting the Queerest of the Gods, last year’s performances of which propelled the Circle of Dionysos into becoming what it is today.  But the concept above was written for a never performed dance piece I was developing back in 2003, before The San Francisco Gay Men’s Open Wiccan Coven, which was my first queer spiritual community, even existed.  The day I found this journal I was feeling depressed and questioning a lot of my decisions over the past year or so.  It was lovely to find such a clear message that yes, I am on the right path!