The other day I wasn't feeling so great (thanks to the gift the Goddess bestows upon women once a moon cycle) and I woke up to find my husband kissing my face. He then gifted me with this beautiful rose-coloured journal. Of course I had to wipe the drool off my face and rub my eyes for a good five minutes before I could see what exactly he was holding up in my face. It's apparently eco friendly with acid-free paper, printed with soy-based inks. Gods, he knows me well!
I absolutely love journals. I used to keep one almost daily when I was in high school. It was a notebook, something easy and innocent looking enough. It's where I wrote out all the stresses in my life. If anything was bothering me (usually something about boys, or my stepdad, or school stresses) or if something amazing happened (something I wanted to write down so I could look back on it and remember it always), I would just write away. By the time I finished writing my thoughts, all my stresses, worries, and concerns would melt away, because I almost always found a way to reconcile these worries. A solution. And if I didn't, then it just felt better having gotten all these heavy burdens off my shoulders so that I could breathe again.
The thing is, these days my journal lives. He's alive and breathing and warm and loving. He is, of course, the person I'm married to. There is rarely a thing I can't talk to my husband about, and rarely anything he can't help make feel better. Of course there are some things I keep inside myself to spare his feelings, and things that I just don't know how to talk to him about (usually spiritual issues, despite us having the same faith - yes this is an issue we need to work on!). But I'm not so sure I need a journal now to write out my stresses in order to resolve them. To put it simply, I'm very happy right now and rarely feel the need to vent about something in life.
So now I have this gorgeous journal without a single thought to put into it. So I think I might turn it into a sort of spiritual quest journal. In it I can write down prayers, rituals, things I want to remember, to incorporate into my spirituality and practice, things I've never known before, maybe even experiences. Most people would call this journal then a Book of Shadows, but it's not. I've tried to have Books of Shadows before. All of them failed. I'm simply not ready for such a permanent thing. And to be quite honest, spirituality is such an individual experience, something so precious and personal to each and every person, that writing down my own beliefs and practices, knowledge and wisdom in hopes of passing it on to someone else just seems inappropriate for myself.
Perhaps if I have a daughter or granddaughter who could benefit from learning from a book full of my ramblings once I'm long gone, then that's fine. But for now, this journal is still just a journal, but with a spiritual focus. It will probably be messy (despite my strong need to be organized, to be able to find things easily) and uncoordinated, but isn't that how life is? Isn't that how spirituality is? Natural, spontaneous...you never know what will happen next.
And so, on that note, I'll leave you all to have a wonderful day. I have tea that needs drinking and a journal that is waiting for its first instruction.
2 comments:
Journals are so wonderful. There is a certain intimacy to the written word that it as unique to its owner as a fingerprint is. Here's to many future journal engtries my friend.
Journals rock. they help me keep track of my progress.
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