Ghosts of Journals Past

Last night I pulled out one of my many journals that hadn’t seen any pen action in a few years. 

Yes, journals plural.  The thing about them is they always seem to be born during a significant high or low in this woman’s life of many lifetimes.  They are then punctuated when a detectable change demands to be recognized in not only its own chapter, but its own volume. 

The journals know when it's time to lay down and die.

I’ve kept diaries since the 2^nd grade. “Dear Diary, Tommy is the cutest boy at school.  He whipped a dodge ball at me today.  I think I love him.”

Fifth grade. “Dear Diary, Boys are pigs. My bestie and I started a boy-hater’s club.  Except for Tommy.  He’s ecxuzed excused.”

High School:  “Dear Diary, Mary told me that Jake wants me to ask him to Sadie Hawkins dance but George will get mad and so will Sally because she likes George & he likes me but I really like Jake.  Oh what will I do?  Life is so hard I could just die!”

There’s a journal from a Yoga teacher training intensive two summers ago.  Then I left for Italy a month later armed with a travel journal, well worn and full of the last two years of mental meanderings (and wine notes).   

I started journaling again in the 90s as a way of emptying my brain of strange dreams during an even stranger marriage that was finally put out of its misery in the new millennium.  The journal stayed by my bed and continued to be an ink-stained repository of toxic and healing thought cycles as I found balance, lost it, and found it again over a decade of discovery.  Exactly 10 years from the time that journal was launched it was retired when I made another conscious decision to retire my attachment to outcomes. 

It was a new era – one that would allow me to seek peace, inner, outer, on the mat and off.  There was a deeper plunge into Yoga, meditation, crystals, Reiki classes that I swear saved me that year, girlfriends, cleansing ceremonies, and gallons of Prosecco we drank together as if it were our uniting life force. 

A quote from a book I was reading at the time by Lama Surya Das opened the latest Gilt Morocco-bound journal:  “Tonglen – the taking on of burdens without feeling burdened – a lesson in letting go of self-clinging and attachment, and transforming egotism into love…” (Awakening the Buddha Within, 1997)

I was attached to something or someone … again.  I was trying to balance whatever burden du jour without breaking myself down … again.  I wrote, “How do you open yourself up without losing control?  What kind of strength does it take and do I have it?  Is it more discipline or less?”  Preoccupied thoughts needed an outlet and here it was.  Sometimes we really do over-analyze the hell out of our stormy responses to life's doings.  Hence, the journal (or therapist. or booze) as opposed to posting shit like this to facebook (and really, people?).

Then there are those narcissistic masochistic moments where I leaf back through the pages, only slightly acknowledge the ghosts of Val past.  It’s enlightening to see not only where I’ve been, but where I’ve passed through, who I was, and revel in who hope I am not anymore.

The changes are fascinating to ponder – changes in the way I saw certain relationships, the world, others or life itself.  I would write to empty my mind of whatever needed to be released as if the journal had the power to heal heartache, cast clarity on confusion, and manifest those deepest desires that had the unmitigated gall to elicit physical responses in my being. 

Last night during a sweet pen-to-journal session my heart got sloppy and spilled out onto those pages once again.  It doesn’t matter the inspiration – what matters is the ability to look down onto the blue, black & purple smudges, reach back through splotchy tear stains & not worry about discerning whether they were grief or bliss induced.   

What matters is ... 

... to honor every page, chapter, volume, and, more importantly, revision of this life. The changes I've allowed to happen, the letting go of things that don't serve, or the renaissance of those moments I once chalked up as lost forever.