What I’m Writing With These Days

I took advantage of a summer lull in my work load to follow through on the program for creative recovery in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I’m mentioning this book on my GreenLivingOttawa blog for two reasons.

First, I’m getting a lot more satisfaction out of the dailiness of living through doing the exercises in Cameron’s book, and it seems to me that by living more creatively my desire for material things has significantly decreased. Despite its name, The Artist’s Way is not just for artists or writers but is a useful tool for anyone wanting to shape their life around values and dreams that perhaps run counter to the mainstream.

My second reason for mentioning it is that one of the main tools in The Artist’s Way is to write three pages of stream of consciousness writing every morning as soon as you wake up. Over time those pages add up to a lot of notebooks and a lot of pens. Since one of my dreams is to tread as lightly as possible on the earth, I found some sustainable solutions to my morning pages.

What I’m writing with these days are banana paper notebooks from Costa Rica and a Pilot BeGreen G-knock refillable pen. The notebooks are made from banana plant fibres that are a by-product of banana cultivation mixed with post-consumer paper waste. 4% of the profits from sales of these banana paper products go to Earth University for student leaders from the tropical rainforest regions of Latin America. I bought the notebooks on-line from the manufacturer: www.ecopapers.com.  Though they shipped from Costa Rica, they got here within two weeks of placing my order and even taking into account shipping fees, the cost was quite reasonable.

I’ve always been a fan of Pilot Pens, particularly their fine point liquid ink pens. But I wanted something a little more ecofriendly so I picked up their BeGreen G-Knock at the Grand and Toy store in the Rideau Centre. It’s a gel ink pen, rather than a liquid ink one, but I’ve found it writes almost as smoothly. It goes a little spotty when I draw straight lines across the page, but for normal writing it goes on fine. The G-Knock is a little wider than a standard disposable ball-point and I find that makes it easier on my hand and fingers when I’m zipping through three pages of writing.  Pilot’s line of BeGreen pens all use recycled materials (the G-Knock is made of 81.5 % post-consumer recycled materials) and are manufactured “without toxicity”. The G-Knock is also refillable.

For a full list of stores in Ottawa (or elsewhere in Canada) that stock Pilot BeGreen pens see the distributor’s website: http://www.crestar-limited.com/
For a full line of banana paper products go on-line to www.ecopapers.com