There Is a Link Between the Head and the Heart {…and it’s the hand…}

I have a shelf in my studio that holds the most beautiful things I own.

Not the most expensive. Not the most impressive. The most beautiful, which, in my world, is a different category entirely.

On that shelf, inside a few glass boxes, sit books I made by hand. Leather spines. Painted covers of deep blue with copper florals, forest green with gold. Frayed silk ribbon for a bookmark. Every one of them contains, page by page, in my own handwriting, lines that were doing the slow work of making me into someone.

I call them my Commonplace Books. They’ve been called Commonplace Books for generations.

And I’ve been keeping a secret about them for years.

Here is what I have learned, the hard way and the long way, which is apparently the only way things ever get learned by me:

Typing doesn’t do it.

I don’t mean typing is bad. I type constantly…you’re reading typed words right now. But there is something that happens when your hand holds a pen and moves it across paper that does not happen on a keyboard. Your body engages. Something settles, or breaks open, or both. The thought moves from the mind down through the arm and out through the fingers and becomes…different. More yours. More kept.

There is a link between the head and the heart, and it’s the hand.

Neurologically, this is documented. Spiritually, the monks knew it centuries before the researchers did. And practically speaking, I know it for sure because I have been doing it, and it has changed the texture of my inner life in ways I didn’t expect and can’t fully explain and won’t stop doing.

A Commonplace Book is not a journal.

I want to be clear about that, because when I tell people about mine, they maybe picture something with a lock and a key and a lot of feelings about former church members in it. That is a journal, and journals are wonderful, but this is different.

A Commonplace Book is a collection. You don’t process your feelings in it. You collect treasure.

A line from a poem that sat down inside you. A sentence from a sermon that broke something open. A verse that said the thing you’ve been trying to say for years. A quote from a book that you know you’ll forget if you don’t write it down, and you cannot afford to forget it, because it is forming you.

You write it out, by hand, slowly, in your own handwriting, and something happens.

Thomas Jefferson kept one. So did many of the saints. And Marcus Aurelius. And Milton. The great minds of every century before ours carried a book for this purpose, filling it across a lifetime, returning to it the way you return to a well.

We stopped.

I think that was a mistake.

So I’m making a free class. In it, I will show you a method and materials I haven’t seen before.

Start to finish, I will show you how I make these books. The materials. The boards and the leather and the painted covers. The copper details. The silk ribbon. The glass box I keep the finished ones in, because finished things deserve to be honored.

And then tell you how to begin filling one.

Because the making of the book is only half of it. The practice is the other half. And both of them matter, and both of them are learnable, and neither of them requires any experience or artistic background or special gifting. What they require is a willingness to slow down and let your hand do something your screen cannot.

The class will be free.

Completely, unapologetically, no-strings free, because this practice is too good to have died out, and I want to put it back in your hands. Literally.

If you want to be the first to know when it goes live, there is a sign-up at the bottom of this post. Leave me your email and I’ll send you the link the moment it’s ready.

Beauty is a practice.

This is one of the most beautiful ones I know.