Lovely World

journal 4

Another type of journal I have been drawn to keeping is the travel journal. I would highly recommend this type of record keeping. I have written records of numerous journeys, the details of which would be long forgotten if I had not put pen to paper each day.

My husband and I have done quite a bit of long-distance backpacking. We have both kept small (lightweight!) notebooks with us to record the experiences of the day, destinations, and miles hiked. The above photo shows some of the simple, inexpensive notebooks we carried with us on the Long Trail through Vermont and the Appalachian Trail.

journal 3

I have some ambivalent feelings about leaving a paper trail, especially now that I have children. I have often been quite frank in my writing, and have used writing to work out problems. I sometimes feel that even I don't want to revisit certain times or experiences. Yet, I have thrown out very little of my writing. I can think of a few torn out pages, and one journal written at a particularly dramatic moment in my adolescence (I threw it in the wood stove!).

This photo shows a handful of diaries I kept as a young teen. They are both funny and painful to read. Lots of yearning, goal setting, social complexities, and thinking I had it all figured out. My daughter will be ten years old in June. I know she will go through so many of the same things I did, yet also that she is a completely different person than I was. I don't want her to read these diaries. I don't want them to serve as a model or guide to those difficult teen years. If I was to ever throw out another journal, it would probably be one of these.

After my father died, I learned that he had kept an almost daily journal. He kept it primarily at work, so I never saw the notebooks lying about the house. My mother simply produced a box of them one day when my siblings and I were helping her clean out the house. I am glad to read them. They reveal who my father truly was - often times different than the father I saw everyday. Did he imagine we would read these after his death?

Does anyone else struggle with the issue of what to leave behind?

journal 2

Most of my journals are narratives and reflections of daily life. But, I do find myself drawn to making other sorts of journals. These typically focus on keeping track of one activity, project, or theme. I may simply buy a notebook and use that for my needs, or I may construct something to fit what I need to keep track of. I have used small and large notebooks (lined and unlined), binders, index cards, and plastic sleeves in which to place papers or images. I have glued, stapled, clipped, and folded items into these journals.

I have come to understand that I am a visual thinker. I need to see things written down to truly understand them. Lectures and audiobooks can be difficult for me to follow. Perhaps this is why I have to write down my own words, and collect together my own notes and images. The books I have kept over the years are a testament to this.

I have two very different examples to share.

First is the little black notebook above that I kept it back in my senior year of college, around 1989. It is about 4 x 6 inches. It was easy to carry around and served as a catch-all for jotting down things like: library numbers for books I was looking for, paint supplies I needed to buy for class, phone numbers, notes from museum lectures, and to-do lists. I like the freeform nature of my notes that the unlined pages afforded.

The second journal is one that I constructed while a midwifery student at Yale University in the late 1990s. It, too, is small - about 5 x 6 inches. It fit nicely in the pocket of my hospital lab coat. I made the whole book myself. It is one-of-a-kind. It is organized alphabetically and has information that I wanted to reference quickly - drug dosages, diagnostic criteria, phone numbers, treatment flowcharts, and other random notes. Most pages are made by either taping photocopies of information from textbooks on index cards, or writing directly on the cards. I used different color pens or highlighters to draw attention to important points or frequently used information. This was very useful to have at the time. I carried it for a while when I first went into practice, then it found a home in my office desk drawer.

[If you want to see any of the images in a larger format, click on the photo]

journal

I have kept a journal since I was a teenager. I suppose I may have called it a diary back then. But, whether a diary, journal, or daybook, for most of my life I have had the impulse to record my days and how I've felt about them. Usually they are in narrative form. Sometimes I utilize lists and drawings. Many of the journals have images taped on the covers or the pages within. Most have loose pieces of paper, postcards, or newspaper clippings tucked inside. On the back few pages of every journal is a list of books I have read during the time I have kept that particular one, with the title, author, and sometimes a brief note or two recorded.

My favorite format has been a 10 inch by 8 inch notebook - the academic journal size. My very favorite is the National Brand chemistry notebook (the blue notebook shown to the right in two of the photos above). It has light green anti-glare paper and each page is numbered (there are 120 pages per notebook).

I have most often written in the evening, in bed, before sleep. Sometimes I use a flashlight to keep from disturbing my sleeping husband or children.

I have lots of thoughts about journals and personal notebooks. I think I'll do a series of posts about them this week.

Happy Monday everyone. xo Maribeth

dad

Happy Birthday Dad.

4/24/31 - 11/17/98

You would be 79 years old today.

I love you.

I miss you.

You were a devoted son, husband, and father.

You had many, many friends.

You didn't like to travel.

You spent your whole life on the farm.

You loved to read.

You loved a good game.

You sometimes sounded gruff, but you had a heart of gold.

printing

I have joined a new, local craft lab. I think of it as the crafty person's alternative to a book group. The hope is that we will get together once a month to learn a new craft (or revisit an old favorite). Our first meeting was this week. The project was block printing on fabric. I was excited to try this. I have silkscreened and tie-dyed and batiked fabric, but never block printed.

We all sketched our designs beforehand. At the meeting we carved our design into a rubber block and then, using fabric ink, printed onto our fabric of choice. I knew that I wanted to make a length of fabric, so I made a design that could be repeated in a methodical way. Others in the group carved single motifs that could be strategically placed on their fabric. For example, one woman carved an ornate rooster that she stamped onto the bottom edge of vintage dishtowels.

I ended up with a half yard of off-white linen with my fox and bird pattern printed over the entire surface. I'm not sure what I am going to do with it yet.

This was a fun project, and simple to do. Lena Corwin's "Printing by Hand" is a nice resource if you want to learn more about all sorts of techniques for printing on not just fabric, but paper, walls, lamp shades, and more.

The lovely woman who created our craft lab is the creative director at Storey Publishing. She is a new friend that I met last fall while standing on the side of the field while our sons played soccer. Storey has published many wonderful craft books. Check out the link for all sorts of crafty inspiration.

white

More crochet-covered stones this past weekend. My eyes have gone a bit blurry from the close-up work, but it was satisfying none-the-less. My husband cleaned up around the garage and found some boxes of beach treasure from Cape Cod. We bring back random assortments of stones, shells, and driftwood each year. I had forgotten we had some of these, and enjoyed sorting through the small white stones in particular. The print in the bottom photo is a classic Charley Harper bird. I love how he gives depth to the picture with the sun and clouds in the background.

 

Has anyone else heard the new Natalie Merchant CD yet? It is fabulous. Although its theme is children poems put to music, it is very much adult fare. I just love Natalie Merchant. I began listening to the 10,000 Maniacs in college, and followed her from there. She has great integrity and maturity, something sorely missing in so many entertainers these days.

sister

Happy Birthday to my sister Suzanna. She has always been the little sister, coming along when my other siblings and I were well into our school years. She had a curly mass of blonde hair when she was little, and was always busy trying to keep up with the rest of us. She is now a beautiful woman, raising four children. I wish her all the best today and for the coming year.

{The above photos were taken in 1976, when Suzanna was 2 years old. That was the year I turned 10. My daughter Miriam will be 10 this year. I paused to look at this old self for quite a while, trying to remember that time. I'm the shorter of the two girls in the top photo and the one on the back of the horse in the bottom photo (I can't remember why we were on that horse!). My other sister Wendy is a year older than me. The top photo also features my brother and our family's dog and cat.}

stones

I spent the last few evenings crocheting covers for stones. I had made a few small covered stones back in January (posted here), and was interested to try some more. My inspiration for these comes from the lovely, lovely Margie of Resurrection Fern. Margie is queen of crocheted stones. Her article "Lacy River Rocks" was published in the September/October Crochet Today magazine. She provides three patterns. I made them all. They are shown in the first photo. The stones are about 4 inches across. I also began trying out my own patterns. These include the blue one in the second photo, and the red one in the second-to-last photo. That red one is over 7 inches wide.

Finding stones to cover became a process in itself. I live in the shadow of the Taconic Mountains in Western Massachusetts. Most of the rock around here is angular and irregularly shaped, even in the streams. The Mill Hollow rises up behind my house. A stream follows the hollow and makes its way out into the Green River, which empties into the Hoosic River, which then eventually empties into the Hudson River in New York. I looked for stones in the Mill Hollow stream while on my daily walks. Since there are so few smooth or round stones, it was quite a hunt, and very satisfying when I pulled one out. I also found that I learned a lot about the stream bed by spending so much time looking down into it. A mindful, relaxing practice.

I see a lot of smooth, round stones when we travel to Cape Cod in the summer. Certain beaches are littered with them. I also notice that there is more color variation to the beach stones than the ones around my home. Regardless of where we are, my family likes to discover heart-shaped rocks. They are not hard to find if you simply start looking. My daughter found the large tan one - it is 8 inches across!

The Buddha

I recently watched a very well-done program on PBS called "The Buddha." It traced the life of the Buddha and the development of Buddhism, including its spread to the West. I was so taken by the scholars, poets, and practitioners the filmmaker chose to interview for the film - W.S. Merwin, Robert Thurman (perhaps best known as Uma Thurman's dad, although I have always thought of Uma as Robert Thurman's daughter), Mark Epstein, Jane Hirschfield, and the Dali Lama, to name a few. I would highly recommend that you watch the program if you can.

I first became drawn to Buddhism in my early 20s, when I began to practice mindfulness and meditation. I was struck by the simple (well, simple in concept, more difficult in practice) way that Buddhism talked about suffering. Suffering was familiar, of course. But the idea that my suffering was caused by either aversion or craving was eye-opening. It made so much sense. The more I pulled things toward me, or the harder I pushed them away, the more problems I encountered. I think that this basic awareness has allowed me to live a more balanced life. Meditation is the place that I have been able to see my own inner workings more clearly. It is the place where I can have all kinds of thoughts, but not attach to them. There is great freedom in not believing everything you think.