Starting a Journal Revolution

I wrote a proposal for funding and other support to start a writing group last month, but my proposal was rejected for reasons that are complicated but completely understandable. However, that doesn’t make it any less disappointing. I had taken a lot of time to put my ideas on paper and to select the items that I wanted to purchase for each participant so that I could create a budget. It felt so good to complete the proposal and I was excited by the possibilities. It was a major letdown to not be able to move forward with my plans.

A few weeks later I was talking to a friend of mine who had read some of my memoir pieces and she mentioned that she had always wanted to write down her life experiences but didn’t really know where to start or how to do it. Her son was leaving for college and I wanted to get her a gift that would help fill the gap that her son moving away would leave. Then something clicked in my mind. A journal! Now that would be the perfect gift. She would have the time to write and I could provide her with the tools necessary to do so. I ordered The Spirit of Flight journal and a Pentel Arts Slicci metallic pen with violet ink. She loved it!

After she received her new journal I noticed something extraordinary. I would be having a conversation with someone and a little voice would say, “She needs a journal!” And so I began sending these journals as special gifts to women who are important in my life. As I sit here, I imagine us all filling blank journal pages with our life experiences, hopes, dreams, fears, and adventures and our collective empowerment being sent out into the universe. At the beginning of Leslea Newman’s book Write from the Heart: Inspiration and Exercises for Women Who Want to Write there is a quote by Muriel Rukeyser: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” I want to help make that happen! I want to begin a journal revolution. Won’t you help me? Listen to those you talk with. Listen to the small voice when it tells you: “This woman needs a journal, a gift, a safe place to split her world wide open.”

If you decide to join the revolution and send a journal to a woman you know (or one you don’t) come back here and leave a comment. I would love to hear about it!

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Finding Nature

As part of my Nature Writing course I had to choose a location to sit and journal for the duration of the semester. This journal project made me aware of the isolation I have fallen into within the confines of my home. I complain often of not having a place to embrace nature fully and yet I haven’t even tried. When searching for a location for this project I thought about the local cemetery with its dark, gray stones; its deadly secrets; and its ghosts all vying for my attention with their own stories to tell, but I wasn’t sure I could make it there consistently. I thought about the park, usually my favorite place to escape, but then read in the newspaper that a woman’s body had just been found in the lake among the newly sprouted greenery, winter sludge, and hungry geese. I thought about my front porch and my back patio, neither seeming quite appropriate. And so I stalled, with no place to go.

It was the looming deadline that forced my decision and for convenience I chose my front porch. I cleared away debris – five-year-old dried leaves along with the petrified spider webs – and bought two Adirondack chairs, a wooden, rocking chair wind chime, and created my own haven on my tiny front porch.

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Today my bare feet root to the cool concrete floor of my front porch as I watch two robins in a lover’s spiral dance. The wind plays music with the chimes as I silently cheer on the budding grass and tiny, white flowers emerging from the barren ground. The sun is solid today displaying angles of dark and light as if rearranging the earth in an act of spring cleaning. I want to sit here forever and listen to the notes of the wind, watch the animation of the invisible – tangible proof of things unseen.

A fly lands on my page warning me that there are more to come, that the warmth my body so desperately craves will bring them in droves and I will be unable to sit here listening to the wind’s symphony without the interruption of their vibrating wings.

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