I found it. As I have been writing these posts it has become important to confirm facts and dates. If the writing of Tripio, as recounted in this blog, is going to help even one person find their own voice and thus create their own unique work, then I have to check the facts. In this case, they are found in my journals, or what I call Sketchbooks of the Mind (SotM). Those contain the dates, times and places I need. For close to thirty years I have kept a SotM to track where my thought-producing mind is. I like to refer to journals as both the landing spot and launching pad of my mind and thoughts. A place where journaling and the mind meet.
Nothing is external
I know that the above statement is true today. However, for the first 25 years of journaling, for keeping my SotMs, I did not fully realize I was tracking my mind. Yes, I was noting where I was, what I doing and noting things I wanted to remember. I saw the world as external. Today, I am quite happy to be able to pinpoint the birth of Tripio as a seed planted in my mind garden. But the date is only relevant as it tracks where my thoughts were at that time. My thoughts give the date meaning and not the other way around.
My thoughts in the days before Tripio was born were occupied on a variety of things, which is the norm for most all of us. I was reading the books of James Allen. An entry from a few earlier notes that a 22 minute mediation was “just about the quickest 22 minutes to ever pass”. I was religiously practicing the Five Tibetan Yoga rites.
The job was taking it’s toll on me. I was keeping busy with my two older kids still at the house. My writing consisted of a short story called My Dinner with Padre and an attempt to re-work another short story called Altonstreet and Philpatrick and the Mystical Antagonist. I had also been searching old letters and typed notes from the years I lived in Chicago. I had just put those in a folder which I labeled Chicago Days. This was all noted in the SotM and all taking place in and around the grocery store, paying bills, watching sports on TV, placing calls to relatives and making visits to the gym and my therapist.
No such thing as one size fits all
Why recount all this? I hope I am making clear that there is no “one size fits all” approach to writing and creating. There is no “one size fits all” approach that works for anything in life, really. Tripio was born on an early spring Monday in 2017 among events, people and places that will never be sequenced, made relevant, or affect me the same way ever again. Consequently, there is no prescription for starting a novel here except perhaps to begin your practice of paying attention to your own thoughts which are growing out of your own wonderful, unique, bountiful and beautiful mind.
Maybe that was a prescription. It is now. It has become a “red apron recipe” since the last paragraph. Be that as it may, as spring of 2017 arrived, I was just becoming comfortable with the practice of paying attention to the internal world of my mind. I understood I was journaling my mind, not external events and places. And, believe me, I am not claiming to be an expert on anything. I just know that just as I was discovering how to track and cultivate my thoughts from an observed mind, Tripio was born. These more closely observed and carefully cultivated thoughts were noted in the SotMs of course. One of which records the original seed of Tripio:
“Odd, but I’m trying to hit on what to write next. And maybe I have. The early days of the Cosmodemonic Coffee Company are stirring in me. It’s there and ready on my desk. Chicago Days”
Love this. I, for one, am wary of anybody who says that ‘this is the only way to write’, as if plotting is somehow better than pantsing. We all have our own processes to discover, and our job is to learn that without following what others think is best. Anyway, thanks for this post!