As I have written, my three-year old journal was stolen back in December. Mild tragedy. I bought a new one in a librería in Punta Arenas, on the Straight of Magellan, and have been filling it with new words for the last four months. A couple of weeks I thought I had lost it (AH) but it actually turned out to be in my brain (my backpack one) next to some dead batteries. These events have made me think a lot about what journaling means to me. I was reminded of this today when I was writing in my journal and, on a whim, I read the first entry I ever wrote in it. I remember writing it: I was on the top bunk of a sketch hostel in Puerto Natales, Chile. Everyone in the dorm was asleep, and I was writing with my headlamp...
So how do you start a new journal? By ruminating on the old one that was neatly and horribly stolen from me in the Puerto Montt bus terminal? By wondering how the hell it can be worth it to pour my soul and my secrets into something so impermanent?
Oh I don't know of course. There was so much beauty in that journal but there was intense suffering too--maybe it's better in the end to let it all go; to be baptized by the frigid winds that blow here at the end of the world. Goodbye heartwrenched pages of first-kisses and Tibet exploration and musing at Carleton and on dark Kansas highways. Goodbye to resolutions about family and enlightenment written on the roof of my beloved Bodh Gaya Vihar, and goodbye to my goodbye to my Sangha. Goodbye to that place where tears splashed on the page from raw loneliness. Goodbye words; you are made of air and mean nothing, just like this cloak of a "self" I wear skating through life.
But of course I have to build it up again. I am not enlightened so I bought a new journal to replace the old one, and goddamn you impermanence I'm going to fill up these pages with the contents of my soul. Again. It's like finding the strength to love someone again; to climb up the mountain after you have fallen, again . This process may be truth but it stings like hell when your mirror is shattered and you have to start all over again with a newborn shaft of light or whatever stuff it is that makes words and dreams. But it's noble I guess. Or hope.
Beginnings are freedom.
So how do you start a new journal? By ruminating on the old one that was neatly and horribly stolen from me in the Puerto Montt bus terminal? By wondering how the hell it can be worth it to pour my soul and my secrets into something so impermanent?
Oh I don't know of course. There was so much beauty in that journal but there was intense suffering too--maybe it's better in the end to let it all go; to be baptized by the frigid winds that blow here at the end of the world. Goodbye heartwrenched pages of first-kisses and Tibet exploration and musing at Carleton and on dark Kansas highways. Goodbye to resolutions about family and enlightenment written on the roof of my beloved Bodh Gaya Vihar, and goodbye to my goodbye to my Sangha. Goodbye to that place where tears splashed on the page from raw loneliness. Goodbye words; you are made of air and mean nothing, just like this cloak of a "self" I wear skating through life.
But of course I have to build it up again. I am not enlightened so I bought a new journal to replace the old one, and goddamn you impermanence I'm going to fill up these pages with the contents of my soul. Again. It's like finding the strength to love someone again; to climb up the mountain after you have fallen, again . This process may be truth but it stings like hell when your mirror is shattered and you have to start all over again with a newborn shaft of light or whatever stuff it is that makes words and dreams. But it's noble I guess. Or hope.
Beginnings are freedom.
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