In The Journal

            It is superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person: I create myself.    
                                                               -- Susan Sontag, On Keeping a Journal

Author and literary icon Susan Sontag believed that an organic flow of thought, feeling and ideas emerging over time meant that an individual life can be viewed as a path with a creative, cyclic nature. She wrote that who you are today may  very well be a different self from the you of tomorrow, and you have only to consult your journal over a period of time to affirm that this is indeed so. Sontag's notion is echoed in Mary Catherine Bateson’s  belief (Composing a Life) that our lives are at essence raw material, both past and present, which is being continually shaped and reshaped over time. The older I get the less fanciful this notion seems to be. In fact, it adds a whole new dimension of hope and inspiration because it shows me the way back home, to center, every time I think about it.  I know for sure that the life I'm living now holds the promise of a time and place wider, deeper, friendlier and fuller than anything I thought possible in the first half of life. And I'm open to the unexpected and unfamiliar in a way I never could have been before.

A Friendly Owl 
             For instance, after dabbling around with watercolors for a few years, I took up making art in earnest recently, just drawing and painting whatever came into my head on any particular day. I found myself becoming obsessed with birds and among other efforts, produced a somber but friendly looking owl who had in tow a perky turtle compadre sporting a multicolored shell who just kind of appeared at the bottom of the painting as if to say, "OK Boss, where do we go from here?" Why do I tell you this and what does it mean? I believe composing our new stories is a process not dissimilar to how that painting took shape. I didn't know that owl was in there when I started with an old unfinished abstract orange and purple watercolor sketch that had languished in a drawer for a couple of years. I just began to add details with charcoal pencil, livened the whole thing up with a rainbow of pastels dashed here and there and then added whatever else seemed to be calling to be made use of. My finished painting was, in the end, not that different from our second life stories: Composed of  bits and pieces of things gone missing in the relative wilderness of a previous existence (the drawer/the first half of life), we shape memories of people, places, things which are recovered, transformed and made new and whole again. I have grown to love this owl and I call it Wisdom. It is my muse and holds a regal place of  great honor as the only painting on the wall in my new writing studio. 

Speak Your Truth

Honing a heightened awareness and finding a new composition and meaning is possible by harvesting seemingly unrelated pieces and pages of the personal diary or journal.  Like the way I found a new shape, form, texture and meaning for what was in its first life an original, unfinished abstract watercolor painting. Distilling past and present,  you can honor future by paying attention in a very focused way so you can see the stuff of what your life really is, right now. With the pieces from your journal and diary, whenever you encounter even a small bit of awareness and intention, you can be sure you are embracing a singleness of eye, a purity of intention and a return to center.  To get to this new sense of meaning from seemingly unrelated bits and pieces, try the process of Reflective Journaling. It's a practice influenced by writers Dorothea Brandt, Brenda Ueland, Ira Progoff, Peter Elbow, Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron and especially Linda Metcalf and Toby Simon (Writing the Mind Alive: The Proprioceptive Method for Finding Your Authentic Voice).  Putting it all out there in a journal without anxiety or judgment becomes pretty easy because you know this isn't a formal or finished piece of writing. At the same time it's not a sloppy, splashy, messy yadayada either. Rather it's a accessible but methodical way to befriend your writing as your muse, one you respect and listen to deeply and authentically.  To journal the way I am describing below is a sincere personal and intimate engagement with your own soul. The intention is to establish self trust, to find your voice an in the end, polish the glowing center, the essence of who you are and what you think. When you free yourself from the pressure of performance you naturally listen to our inner writer and that's how you get the connection between head and heart, thought and feeling. Which is just another way to say that's how you get to wisdom's edge.


What Do I Mean By?
              1. Light a candle, turn on a classical music piece of your choice and use clean, white, soft writing paper with a steady, clear pen. Have a timer handy, a digital clock is good. Now.

2. Write fast. Clean. Raw and open. Take 25 minutes. Don’t ask yourself to do more, this isn’t a competition.

 3. Now read it over and pick a word or phrase that jumps out at you. Follow it by playing with its meaning. See where it leads you. Ask the crucial question “What do I mean by?” as you write and read without any sense of censorship, analysis or intent. This is an encounter with authentic center.

4. You’ll begin to see that your thoughts have a direction, a life of their own, a purpose you can trust. This is your true writer’s voice. This is your center. This is your muse speaking to you. Later when you begin to write the essay, memoir or autobiography , you will know what it really feels like and what it sounds like to write from  this place.

5. Read your piece again, this time scouring for remembrance of things past or intimations of immortality (thank you Marcel Proust and William Wordsworth). Any indications that you are a creature living here, there and yonder all at once? That the veil between past, present and future a  little less clear than we typically believe? Notice and write. Your muse will thank you.