Journal What You Love

 Journal What You Love

So much of our lives is focused on the flow of daily minutia that we lose awareness of the value of these priceless details buried in everyday life.  Whatever it is that occupies your life’s experiences, has value.  Even journal entries which at the time seem to have meaning only to ourselves, when re-read at a later time can, in a strange and creative mirroring effect, reveal ourselves to ourselves.

Thomas Mallon mentions this in his book on journaling,  A Book of One’s Own, “The makers of earthly objects of beauty have needed books in which to sketch and brainstorm, private pages on which invention’s audacity can fly or fail, where the words and shapes and rhythms and systems that educate humankind’s sense and imagination can first come to life. . the books in question so often hesitate and shift between the person and the professional.  In some of them notes for projects are crowded by reports on romance and the weather; in others, more sober ones, the subject matter is more strictly, … the creative business at hand.  Just as the distinction between journal and diary eludes clarification, the point at which a diary becomes a notebook, and vice versa, is difficult to locate.”  [p. 119-120.]

Mallon then goes on to explore how individuals, both famous and unknown, express their personal impression and experiences in their journals.  He quotes from a vivid journaling example of an intense three-month period of experimental dance choreography in the life of Martha Graham.

“…Martha Graham intended to publish her memoirs, most of which she had tape-recorded; her notebooks were given to her publishers only to be of assistance to them in editing the autobiography.  But the means looked even more interesting than the historical end they were serving, and the Notebooks were published themselves.

   …They show creation hurrying on to fulfill itself, too busy to stop for conventional punctuation and vaulting over dashes instead.  Graham’s thoughts come very fast, and her transcriptions of them end up being cryptic and abbreviated even to someone familiar with her dances. … The notebooks are a great gathering of scraps that will soon be melted down and set dancing. [She is] trying to figure out what she has on her own mind.  Sometimes she won’t even know what that is until after a work is already on the stage.  One night during a performance of Deaths and Entrances she suddenly apprehends the meaning of witchcraft and realizes what the ballet she has already made actually means.

   … The journal that came out of those three months is instructive to the nondancer about such dancers’ difficulties as obsessions with mirrors; ‘neurotic eating’; ignorance of money; fears of early retirement; and loyalty to each other versus devotion to the late George Balanchine…” [Ibid., pp. 155-157.]

Some Words of Encouragement: (Sorry, sources lost in time.)

v     Forget your mistakes but remember what they taught you.

v     The school of experience has no vacation.

v     All things are difficult before they are easy.

v     If things are dark enough, you can see the stars.

v     Q:  Do you know how to catch a special rabbit?

A:  Unique up on it!