Day Two

So I am back.  Not really certain what to write or what to ponder.  Being new to journaling, I have many options.  Technically I dd try to keep a journal in my past.  I think every pre teenage girl has attempted a diary.  I've always loved words and stories so I thought, well, I should be keeping a diary.  Only, I hated it.

Who knew you could keep a diary wrong?  At least that is what I have decided.  I didn't use it to pour out my feelings or at least not often enough to justify it's existence.  More often than not I would ignore the thing, then snatch it up for a quick rant the ended in my feeling obligated to recount what major events had happened in my life and the lives of those around me.  Ugh.  Such a chore.   I came to dread the thing.  And when you realize you have entries from the age of 11 to 22 and hadn't managed to fill up more than a third, well, one must face it's not for them.

I come to realize though, the journaling need not be a diary of events.  Journaling is supposed to be about anything that comes to mind or heart.  So since I no longer feel bound to chronicle life, or really have any main topic or theme, well, that lifts the burden.

Until it's time to write something.

I do need to have a reason to write beyond well, I want to.  Or maybe I don't need more than that.  Maybe the desire in itself is reason enough for setting a timer and starting to let those words free.  I read once in a book a passage about an artist.  She looked upon the man and knew immediately he was someone that sought to create but she didn't know his medium.  As she studied him, she eliminated sculpture because he wasn't judging dimensions and depth.  Then she eliminated writer because rather than frowning in concentration, trying to choose the exact words to describe the beautiful sunset, he merely sat back and took it all in, memorizing and living in the beauty so he could recreated what he'd seen. 

I realized then apart from my appalling inability to draw a straight line, I did see everything in my life in words.  I will be a part of an event and I pick and choose how to tell the tale even if there is no story to be told.  Words are my medium.

Another way I realized the truth of the intrinsic way I wrapped them up with my identity is I did not give them the proper respect they have earned.  Let me clarify.  I love words.  Value words.  Do not believe any word is identical in meaning even if it's only a sub consciously understood shift in tone that marks the difference.  But I have a hard time thinking of words and me in relation to that elevated term, art. 

Art is for museums or recitals.  I must confess now to having little use for poems.  There are those I appreciate, but as a genre, I have rebelled against the definition I first heard of poetry.  "The highest form of expression"

Poppycock.

Poetry is about mood and emotion or place and feeling, yes, no denial but I refute it as the highest form of expression.  Let me ask this, which was more common to your life?  Weeping over a poem or a novel?    Thrilling in victory for the hero at the end of a book or the subject of an epic saga as the hundreth stanza concludes?  For any medium to be the highest form of expression, it must actually reach the hearts, minds, and eyeballs of those it's supposed to express its self to.

Perhaps our society has lost that ability to want to read and understand poetry and that might be a shame.  Or maybe it's always been such and everyone just refused to admit they didn't really understand poems.  Poems are too much like paintings for me, with a thousand interpretations.  I've written poems back in school and been frequently lauded for them.  But even as I wrote them I knew they were meaningless so of course praising them only reinforced my belief or rather lack of belief in poetry being a higher form of expression.

Quite possibly the artistic part of it comes from when brevity combines with precise word choices.  Well, one thing I am not is brief.  Perhaps that is the root of my rejection of it and labeling writing as art. My own lack of understanding or ability to replicate without letting it dissolve into pretty nonsense.   I do think that there is art in creation of worlds and places and people.  And that is where I want to live.  In those more open plains.  Where writing is art because it makes something that didn't exist before even if what is brought into creation is hard or brutal or idealized and lofty.  All that is made true is true.  Familiarity with words and how to use them should not keep me from acknowledging them as art.

So here's to day two.  I hope I can learn to let go of my reserves and let my truths live on in words as I know they should.

An Experiment in Words

I recently have spent time with someone that journals everyday.  Everyday she wakes, gets ready for her day, makes her tea (an electric kettle and she's not even from the UK) and then sets a timer for a half hour and writes.  Writes whatever crosses her mind.  Sometimes profound, sometimes absurd, sometimes important, sometimes trivial, but always what is in her mind and what she needs to get out to feel grounded.

She didn't use the term grounded but I've known her a while now and that's the impression I get that her regular journaling does for her.  It lets the things swirling beneath the surface or screaming right at the forefront of her mind have their say.  Sometimes she comes to revelations, sometimes she plans out her life for the next year, sometimes it's a grocery list.  But it's an outlet.  And it's a teaching tool.  I'm not entirely sure which one I envy more.

I meet with this person every morning and we write.  Separately on our own thing, but on a schedule that keeps us committed.  I try to dive into my story, struggling to top 300 words in those thirty minutes while she churns out well over 1k every day in her journal.  The ability to let those words freely flow like a maple tree being tapped in the spring is...not me.  But I want it to be me.  I want to be able to write without that break constantly applied.  I want the mind thought connection to come without the stutter, the second guessing, the blanking out that assumes that what I was going to think or say or do can't possibly be the right thing.

Ok, in practice double checking on something, maybe any one thing isn't a bad thing but when you do it on EVERYTHING, gah, life is weary.  That's what I guess my first goal in this blog is, to learn to stop choking every thought and impulse I have.  To train myself to allow my conscious or unconscious mind to flow in a more natural manner.

I blame multitasking.  Sometimes I wonder if I should be on adderall; my attention span is significantly limited.  I can't seem to stop myself from flipping channels or checking the news feed every hour or hopping from tweet to tweet, only absorbing enough for little sixty second bursts.  Not always, but too often.  I have to work to focus and that for me is an unnatural state.  I've referred to myself as a bookworm for decades but in recent years i can't seem to read new things without a half hour into it my attention wandering off.  Or worse.  Do you have any idea the number I've bonked myself on the head with my tablet?  That's what happens when you fall asleep while still holding it.

I can't be sure yet, but I feel like there is a strong connection between the two.  If my attention is really engaged then reading keeps me awake.  And it still does on the more frivolous things but I want to be a deeper person.  I want to go back to that bright mind that gobbled up knowledge because it was knowledge, that was interested because understanding is more exciting than anything else in the world.

So here I am.  Starting something new.  Something that I hope will be more than a place to rant.  I'm still pretty great about ranting. But I think I've forgotten how to dream.  Or at least, I've gotten too good at chocking off those dreams before they fully form.  So this is me giving the dreams and the rants a new place to go.  It's me trying to get out the way of myself.  And it's me being just a bit competitive because someday I want to be able to sit down, set that time to a half hour and lay down a thousand words with no more difficulty than breathing.  The words are there whether I give them a place to go or not.  They need to go somewhere.