The other day a good day that started out full of dreamy potential and high productivity turned … bad. Probably because I put too much pressure myself to make the day perfect; when I failed to live up to dreamy perfection I felt very sour and unhappy. I didn’t know what to do to turn it around.
So I decided to just sit down at my grey table, pull out my fountain pens … and enjoy them. Just very simply appreciate them, taking notice of each one in current rotation, making a list, logging them along with what ink they’ve got inside them.
I am grateful for a lot of other fountain pen and ink lovers on the internet; seeing them demonstrate and share how they document what pens and inks they’re writing with, how they log the inks that they’re using and note the details. They’ve given me permission to do similar things. To simply take studious time relishing the sensory experience of putting pens to paper. To make basic lists. To make personalized catalogs of COLORS.
Fountain pen fans online have shown personal examples of un-self-consciously devoting time and focused attention to simple things like practicing their handwriting, copying favorite passages from books, and paying extremely close attention to the tools and materials they use. If it weren’t for seeing that other people unapologetically enjoy themselves and their pens and inks and papers this way, I don’t know if I would have allowed myself to find relief from a bad mood in the same way.
Sitting down to write lists like this is an active meditation on colors and textures. On the multi-sensory experience of FEEDBACK: the sounds and tactile information of a nib moving over a surface lubricated by fluid color. There are even subtle aromas, especially when you put your face down near the paper and look sideways at the inky lines and swirls unfurling, the pen becoming an extension of your hand, like an extended finger releasing an exquisitely small but remarkable steady stream of ink.
Watching the ink change from wet to dry is a mesmerizing way to witness the passage of time: delicious transformation in tiny segments of seconds as shiny glossiness evaporates, changes form … is absorbed by paper. Like your own private miniature watercolor fireworks exploding with muted wetness, changing colors … spreading out. Shimmering golden one second and then darkening into deeper shadow-colors on the tail ends of shooting-star pen-strokes.
And it doesn’t have to be anything more than that: a list.
It does not have to be art. It does not have to be sent to or seen by anybody else. It does not have to paint more of a picture than exactly what it is: pen meets ink meets paper through the power of your body and under your singular private attention.
Taking a break to savor pens and inks and colors, and making lines and shapes and logs with them, is a way to practice meditation (like eating meditations, walking meditations, gardening, etc.) and access many of the benefits of meditation in an accessible way for those of us who might not otherwise meditate in one of the more still and disciplined ways we usually think of as REAL meditation (note: moving meditations actually ARE “real meditation” with long traditions stretching way way back; you DO NOT have to sit in a lotus position putting yourself into a transcendental coma to meditate “properly”).
Making lists that focus on the materials you’re using to make the lists kind of functions like counting or chanting, but maybe more meta (not metta, but that’s cool for meditating too). When you write the color you’re writing with and note the pen and its attributes, it makes you very focused and observant. And when you do it like I did the other day in my bad mood — just to escape from other thoughts and fears and worries and discomfort — to get out of my wordy-thoughts and put my attention into something simple and specific, quieting the chatter of BS in my brain … it is a beautiful calming trip. Especially when you just submit to making the list without judgment.
I think being in the early stages of expanding my fountain pen and ink collection helps this list-making be peaceful and “successful” as a meditation; I do not know enough to be measuring and quantifying and judging the “performance”/perfection (or lack thereof). Maybe that is the benefit of what they call “beginner’s mind”. The pens and the inks and making lists like this are still new enough to me that all of my attention is on the task at hand; my brain is not mulit-tasking. I am just making a list, focusing on my beautiful materials and colors and the flow of time measured in letters adding up on paper.
