My friend Jennifer turned me on to a really cool art project–shared journals. You start with two notebooks and each person fills out three or four pages with drawings, collage, or words, and then you trade. You write on, paint, and otherwise interact with the other person’s pages and then do three to four more of your own. And so on. You can see the cover of one of ours at left.

We started about a year ago and it’s such a fun process. We don’t live very near each other so sometimes we mail the journals back and forth, sometimes we just wait till we see each other.

I love collaborating this way. You can share deep (or fluffy or strange) expressions with someone else, but through the lens of art. And Jennifer inevitably makes my pages cooler and more inspiring (she’s an artist and way more visual than I). For example, I drew a page that diagrammed my “thought loops”–the repetitive thoughts that go through my head. She drew amazing words and images of healing around it. And now I feel like I’m not quite so barren and alone with the loops, and am uplifted just for having some of my weirdest psychological habits seen and sent love.

Apparently this is a tradition that artists around the world share. This site is a virtual version: 1001Journals.com–so cool, you can see people’s journals from around the world! And there’s this book, Collaborative Art Journals. Here’s a blog post that explains how to do shared journaling, but you can always do it like we did, and just swap with a friend.