Today has dawned hot and steamy, more like the rest of the country than the previous few weeks. We are also getting a fair amount of smoke from Canadian wildfires.
The latest triage challenge (and process) has been dealing with my handwritten journals. These date mostly from late 2014, covering approximately the same time frame in which I have written this blog. There are about 40 of the books, 3-5 a year.
My first instinct was to toss them all. They are brutally heavy. They are my thoughts in their most raw form, my spiritual path as oxygen, breath-by-breath. Yet over the 30-plus years I have written journals, I have never once gone back to look at old ones. It is not looking as if some future historian will want to read them for deep insights about me, so it seems ridiculous to hold onto them.
However, what rose up next was fury. It's like, I've been silenced and swept under the carpet my whole life, and I'm once again going to speed the process along by throwing out important evidence of who I am and the process by which I got here? I'm going to throw myself out?? No way!
So I let the pile sit in sight for a few days. Then I put them in roughly chronological order. That took a few minutes, but it was all I could do Monday. Yesterday, I randomly picked up a few journals and flipped through them. Yes, they are helpful in reminding me exactly where I was at any given time (these ten years have seem Montana, England, various parts of the northeast, England again, and Duluth. Confusing). And it's interesting to see that I was almost as Goddess-centered a decade ago as I am now. The only difference is that I was also still holding tightly to the hope that I would get back into English church music in some meaningful way. This double focus caused anguish (lest I ever give the impression that I'm never angry or distraught, that is not the truth)! The journals are also filled with balancing efforts to write "lists of ten" (gratitude), record my oracle card readings, and overall, simply process the process.
What tipped the scales back to my original "instinct to toss" was this: you have noticed that generally, I make few specific blog references to people in my life. I just don't think (with the exception of some family memories and events) that it is right to talk about people without their permission. But this isn't the case in these journals. This is where I tried to make sense of specific people, institutions and events. There are huge, three-inch tall "WTF"s and similar rants. And although I did it rarely, I occasionally seem to have shared things about other people that arguably aren't mine to share -- even with a future historian. So, in the end, that is why I have started the journal-deep-sixing process. I am pulling out occasional entries (to save) and flipping through each book first, so it may take a few weeks. But I'm at peace with the overall decision.
Much easier was the decision to throw away my syllabi and materials for the classes I taught at the Community College of Vermont (Dimensions of Learning, Seminar in Educational Inquiry, Women and Art, Art History, and Two-dimensional Design). I held onto them until now in case I should teach any similar courses elsewhere, but in nearly 15 years, that hasn't happened. Right now, my litmus test seems to be the nature of my new "career" -- representing the Goddess. I'm doing my best to intuit whether specific material will be necessary in that career, and if the answer is "no", it is going out -- with a genuine word of thanks for its help in getting me to where I am now. Same with looking to the future. It's not primarily about looking for a nice place to retire, or to be with or near friends, or whether I can afford it, or whether it will be relatively safe in these times. It is all about, where am I most needed in this new role? Where can I best do this work, whatever it eventually looks like? When that becomes clear and I have pared down to the most essential materials to do the work, the path ahead will open (I believe, as per my last post, with ease!!!)
