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.