I have kept a journal most of my life and when I have finished writing have simply tossed the notebooks into a bin ... except for those that I wrote in 1976 which were so filled with self pity I burned them.
At this stage there are several Rubbermaid bins filled with these scraps of life.
I began to mine the journals for scraps of poetic lines that might inspire some writing ... for tea cozy poems and images ... don't ask.
Then yesterday I received a message from My Dear, a friend on the cusp of her 41st birthday who asked me for three stories of when I was her age. I dove back into the boxes and found A DOZEN, yes, a dozen journals from that year. I honestly wonder how I had the energy to be that prolific, hold down a teaching job, be a mother and be a spouse. Maybe I will discover the secret as I look for those three stories.
I hope the excursion into the past will be revelatory and inspiring ... or at least fun. I will let you know.
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3 comments:
wow. It must be someing in the air.
I am in the process of harvesting my 26-year, 44- volume journal -- 3.700 pages of journal into 75.
And I'm still writing in it. Somebody stop me!
And why do it?
“True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.” G.K. Chesterton
Writing it down helps you understand your life, and finding the les mots justes makes it all the more rich.
Are you as surprised by the young woman you are meeting on those pages as I am?
No, but then I was 39 when I started to keep the journal. By then I, like you, had thrown out all the awful stuff I'd written up till then. By 39 a lot of my rough edges had been worn down so I could smooth my way through any situation and l laugh self-deprecatingly about those I couldn't.
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