A friend of mine who writes and loves notebooks helped me coin this word: scribwist, meaning one who delights and finds reverence in the tools of writing. These tools include (but are not limited to!): pens, ink, fine paper, leather notebooks, paint, an occasional gadget, and the bags that carry them all.
A wistful scribe. She is me.
I always have a book and a beautiful pen in my hand. Life in all its beauty and tragedy catches me daily, and the pen records the experience. As Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in Big Magic, “… that ideas are alive, that ideas do seek the most available human collaborator, that ideas do have a conscious will, that ideas do move from soul to soul, that ideas will always try to seek the swiftest and most efficient conduit to the earth (just as lightening does).”
I believe Gilbert. I’ve felt it. So I carry a book and a pen everywhere I go, so I don’t miss that idea when it arrives.
When you prepare your scribe with tools for the journey ahead, you are accepting the challenge of the mystery. You come awake, literally and metaphorically, grab the pen and the just right notebook with its smooth waiting blankness for this idea that will not come at any other time.
Tools matter. They help engage and honor the mystery of story and idea.
Look forward to the exploration of the tools. This idea was caught with my Manuscript 1856 pen called Northern lights, belly full of iridescent Iroshizuku Tsuyu-kusa Japanese ink. The pen wrote on Nanami Paper’s B6 slim, Tomoe River grid, café notebook. The notebook was held in Chic Sparrow’s B6 slim, Deluxe Austen Lady Catherine (rich orange). The idea came in the woods with my dog Remy. Beauty and walking awaken all kinds of things.
And wistful? Because I know I will not have nearly enough life for all the ideas.
