The Book of Alchemy: A guide to the art of journalling

In the case of my memoir, Stray, I would take an index card, and on the front, I’d write a place—“Laurel Canyon,” for example. Then, on the back, I’d write any details that came to mind: landslides, traffic, Lily’s coffee cart, squirrels stealing pomelos, care and threat, Fleetwood Mac, loneliness, losing the daylight. Another was “Owens Lake”—dust

I was not, of course, fine. Are most of us? When we’re regularly chugging from a firehose of human suffering on all of our screens and involuntarily taking extra servings of stress and responsibility even though our plates are plenty full?

THIS IS YOUR PROMPT: Have you been bracing yourself for a new beginning? Perhaps one that is daunting yet inevitable, or maybe one that you’ve been hoping for and dreaming about. What will it take for you to get there? Who will be with you? What will it feel like when you get to the other side? If you’d like, use the refrain, “I will begin again as

I do this sort of tango with fear perhaps more often than most people because of illness, but we all do a version of this, don’t we? You go through a bad breakup and swear off romance because you feel like you won’t be able to survive that kind of heartache again. You get a rejection letter, and the sting is such that you vow to never put yourself

once I figured out how to contend with my circumstances on the page, it became possible to engage with people around me and to speak the truth of how I really was. In turn, they began to do the same, and together we accessed new depths of intimacy and love. It taught me that if you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with t

My modus operandi became this: to trust and find ways to delight in the mystery of how things unfold, even if it’s not what you had planned, even if it’s far from ideal, and to believe that facing the thing you fear brings you exactly what you need. In my journal I wrote: It is possible to alter the course of my becoming.

THIS IS YOUR PROMPT: Pick five items from the list below. popcorn * lettuce * iceberg * cotton candy * puffs * sugar cubes * dandelions * buttercups * pallbearer * clothesline * National Geographic * fire ants * watermelon * sunflowers * ticket stub * campfire * satellite * fish scales * baby powder * quilt * brooch * barrette * tin can * bingo * F

Small talk has its place, of course. The checkout person does not get paid enough to hear the truth, and there are people in our lives with whom it’s not safe for us to share our tenderest truths. But among the people who matter most to us, why do we relegate such a fruitful question—How are you?—to shallow small talk? And what would happen if we d

As Anaïs Nin wrote, “When we go deeply into the personal, we go beyond the personal. We achieve something that is collective.”