About

I'm Jean Morris

My other blog is tasting rhubarb

I took part in the challenge issued by Fiona Robyn to write a small stone every day in January 2011. small stone is a polished moment of paying proper attention: notice something, give it your full attention and write about it in a small number of careful words.  Fiona had been writing them for years on her blog, a small stone, and collecting other people’s in her blogzine, a handful of stones.  The hope was that writing small stones would help people to pay more attention to themselves and to the world. More than 300 established and complete-beginner writers joined the January 2011 challenge and Fiona went on to found an online writing practice forum, Writing our Way Home.

In that  month of midwinter gloom, cold grey skies and overwork, every single day, I thought: no, I can't summon the energy to notice something and write it down, and every single day I thought: and what's more, I don't want to. What's the point?

And every day I moved through these thoughts and did it, and every day I was enormously glad of such a small thing. Glad because it slowed down time and opened up a space, and something else, however trivial, entered the picture. Glad because a daily practice, as I knew from meditation practice, is a powerfully strengthening, stabilising, calming thing. Glad because every time was a reminder that I could pause and take a breath and look elsewhere for a moment whenever I felt sucked into a cycle of overwhelm and powerlessness, as keeps on happening when there's 'so much to do'. Glad because this daily writing of even a few attentive words was truly, wholly writing, and was slowly, slowly easing me back into
the flow of a broader impulse and ability to write. And very glad to know that a lot of others seemed to feel the same.  

So, when January ended, I decided to carry on and started this new baby blog in emulation of some micro-blogs I greatly cherish and admire, like The Morning Porch, Out with Mol and a small stone.

I had no aim in that first month beyond paying close attention to something every day and describing it in a few words.  Maybe this will veer off into more specific topics or formats from time to time.  Maybe a single ongoing focus will emerge. I don't know yet.

That's an awful lot of words about a blog of intentionally few words.