Splash State

My Sacred Morning Writing Ritual ☕️ | no. 004

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Sometimes ritual quiets the racket.

—Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

The morning sunrise outside of my old graduate-student apartment. (2018)

I.

Ever since I heard the term “Splash State” in 2015, I’ve spent nearly a decade enchanted by it.

Discussing his poetry collection Splash State on an episode of Bookworm, Todd Colby explains the inspiration for the title:

I write in the morning, early mornings, 5:30 in the morning, drinking a cup of coffee, thinking and meditating. I write freehand in these big black sketchbooks I have literally hundreds of. I sit and I just start writing. There’s a certain pivotal golden moment, usually about a half-hour [or] 45-minutes within that three-hour framework of writing that I hit some sort of vein, and I associate [Splash States] with just hitting that lean, muscular, central part of my nervous system that comes through as verbiage, as the word, as the poem. And it’s really about aspiring to that state in many ways. And I think a lot of the poems come directly from that state.

In his customary fashion, the always brilliant Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt summarizes Colby’s words succinctly: “You write and write until you get to the splash state . . . a morning kind of elation.”¹

Another picture of the sunrise outside my graduate-student apartment. Not a great photo, but those colors . . . (2018)

II.

Recently, I revived the splash state: My old routine of waking up between 4:30-5:30am to drink coffee, journal, and write. It’s one of those pre-kid relics I’ve been able to salvage and dust off thanks to my toddlers getting a bit older. Their sleeping patterns remain somewhat unpredictable, but nothing like those newborn days when time is perpetually warped by exhaustion.

The recovered quiet of early mornings are now charged with creative urgency and have become lit up with a reverential magic made possible only by parenthood.

A splash state is the time I need each morning to rediscover myself, to track my heart and mind, and to reassemble myself in a way that allows me to be present with my family and not be cynical about my career. It is a restorative process wherein I find the artistic fulfillment my daily life of work and care denies me. Each morning, this time of possibility beckons, and I eagerly await accepting its invitation to luxuriate in the tranquility afforded by these early hours.

There’s something special about trying to create art when my brain is still waking up and everything is a bit fuzzy, dusted with the remnants of sleep. I let myself write more freely—no doubt encouraged by the accompanying practice of first doing my Morning Pages—and I’m typically able to produce somewhere between 300 to 800 words each day. This may not sound like much, but it adds up to a dream over time.

5:57 AM. Irvine, California. (2018)

III.

This isn’t to suggest I wake up feeling energized and ready to write. Quite the opposite. Most days I wake up thinking I’ve lost every one of my marbles to the cult of productivity along with hearing the chorus of familiar self-defeating voices: What the hell is the point of Substack, anyway? Oh, sure, big time writer—got it—keep typing into the void pal. Careful you don’t drown in all that money and praise!

Intention matters. I don’t wake up early to write because I want to be productive. I do it because it’s one of the only times during the day I can reliably recover who I was before I became a dad and have the space to forge the person I want to become next: a published writer.

Before my babies were born, I could hit the snooze button and tell myself I’d write later in the day. Not so with two toddlers, including one on the autism spectrum. If I hit the snooze button now, I’m not just delaying getting out of bed—I’m hitting snooze on an essential part of my being.

The days and nights so often present hundreds of tiny (or sometimes big) reasons not to write, not to be creative, not to dream big stupid dreams or feel alive with outlandish possibility, those wishes for myself I’m embarrassed to share with others and only write in the back pages of my journal. Therefore, I must carve out space for myself, a designated time each day to write before the rest of my world comes online.

If I’m up at 4:30 or 5:30am, my family is (hopefully) asleep upstairs, everyone tucked away in bed, my kids’ lingering congestion from their colds making them snore like bears.

I know the university is quiet. My students have likely just gone to bed after studying or overindulging with their friends all night, and they have surely sent me an email asking for an extension on that upcoming essay.

Very little is open here before 6am and the wide, expansive fields of the Midwest are cold and silent.

Everything in my world is briefly suspended in this perfect quiet.

If there are any problems ahead of me today—a broken appliance, a flat tire, an annoyed boss, a sick kiddo that must be picked up from daycare—for the next hour or two, I remain blissfully ignorant.

In the splash state, there are no demands, no expectations, no social media, no meetings: just the inviting conditions to create art or, on a particularly tough morning when the muse stubbornly refuses to sing, the solitude to reflect on why I can’t seem to write a darn thing.

The problem with writing in the afternoons and evenings is that I’m carrying the burden of the day with me: every frustration, triviality, and stressor. I’m winding down and tired not just physically but spiritually, emotionally. I have nothing to give the page.

Not so in the morning and during the splash state when my mind is as close to a tabula rasa as it’s going to get. It’s the difference between creating from a place of abundance versus a place of depletion.

IV.

I always grieve for the end of the splash state. Its rupture lingers briefly before being subsumed by the responsibilities of the work day.

I drop my son off at his daycare and push away the sadness I feel when my daughter cries as I leave her behind at hers. I drive to work while cycling through my to-do list for what feels like the hundredth time since the kids woke up. I arrive at work. Between classes, I retreat to my white box. I send emails, attend meetings, think very mean things about Zoom. I eat a Jimmy John’s sandwich under fluorescent lights (and sometimes give myself permission to order the oatmeal raisin cookie). I get more coffee, but it’s late in the afternoon, so this cup has no magic.

After lunch, I find myself daydreaming and yearning like crazy for that fleeting stretch of time that exists each early morning outside the world of work and is reserved for artists and dreamers only. There, anything is possible. That’s where my heart sings.

Yet part of the splash state’s power lies in its fragility. It derives energy from its fleeting, threatened nature, and the urgency to be utilized. In this way, I savor my writing like a delicacy because soon it will be over; it must be relished like the last bite of an extravagant dish at a restaurant one can’t afford.

I recognize the equilibrium at work. Too much abundance would make me gluttonous and perhaps unappreciative (I only need to reflect on my twenties and early thirties to be reminded of that). So, if I continue to be fortunate, another morning will come tomorrow and with it another splash state.

V.

Some interruptions, though, I welcome because they enhance my art rather than diminish it.

As I write this paragraph, I hear stirrings, and I know this particular writing session is near its end, and that’s just fine. Soon the house will be alive with stampeding little feet, shouts of joy and tiny rebellion—thrown food, thrown plates, thrown spoons, thrown clothes—plastic toys bouncing and echoing off the hardwood floors, tears and tantrums, giggles and tickles, the frenzy of getting everyone dressed and out the door and on time to daycare so that mom and dad can start their workdays. I try not to absentmindedly leave anything behind like a jacket or, God forbid, a lunch, or, like I did last week, one of my daughter’s shoes.

The love of my family is the other essential element responsible for the sacredness of the splash state: The promise of a house filled with the noises of people who love me, my wife’s laugh, the reckless way my babies throw their small bodies into me, laughing, waiting to be embraced and enveloped in my arms. To borrow a phrase from an old professor of mine: they are my condition of possibility.

Shortly after finishing this paragraph, my son wakes up, and we cuddle on the couch before he eats his breakfast; he lies draped over my chest like he did when he was a newborn, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, he too preparing for his day. I kiss his warm forehead, and I dissolve into love and gratitude, awakening to the fact I’m living through a moment I’ll one day give everything to return to.

More than anything, this explains my love for and renewed commitment to the splash state: To write in the early morning is to enact a daily ritual of becoming, a brief moment outside of labor time designed to preserve, protect, and cultivate the part of my being I cherish most: the artist; it allows me to temporarily inhabit a better version of myself, one who is calm, present, and less distracted, dedicated to his craft, and given permission to reflect upon his deepest values and feelings. Far from a shallow gesture of productivity, the splash state is a reliable way amidst chaos of finding my way back to my truest self.

My beautiful, precious son helping me write.

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1. To listen to this episode, check out this link: https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/bookworm/todd-colby-splash-state