I first started keeping a journal in 1959.\u00a0 Inspired by the diary of Anne Frank, I wrote my entries to an imaginary \u201cMimi\u201d.\u00a0 I wrote fairly regularly during my last year of high school which was a painful time.\u00a0 After that it was hit or miss through my college years, the year spent in Europe after I graduated, and my years in California.\u00a0 By that time I had discovered the Diary of Ana\u00efs Nin, and my journal writing became more self-consciously literary.\u00a0 When I moved to Brunswick, Maine, bought a house and settled down, I took a dream class from Charles Ponce, a Jungian Scholar.\u00a0 For years I wrote down all my dreams, and I wrote them on the left-hand pages of my journal notebooks.\u00a0 The symbolism which connected the left hand with intuition, dreams, and the moon, etc. and the right hand with rational, linear, and the sun, became the structure of a book I wrote, called The Feminine of History is Mystery.\u00a0 On the left-hand pages is material that includes some journal entries, some dreams, fantasies, and passages from a journal I kept as I traveled in the British Isles and Brittany in France.\u00a0 The right hand pages explore much of the same material, but linearly, logically, and complete with footnotes & bibliography.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t start writing every day until 1991.\u00a0 In that journal I mention \u201cwriting practice\u201d so I\u2019d read Natalie Goldberg.\u00a0 Another book that was really important to me is Deena Metzger\u2019s Writing for your Life.\u00a0 Somewhere along the way I also read The Artist\u2019s Way and started doing \u201cmorning pages.\u201d<\/p>\n
When we got a computer in 1988, I began to type up all my old journals.\u00a0 At one point I calculated that I had typed up one million words.\u00a0 As I typed up entries that had been written 2 or 10 years before, I would sometimes be moved to comment \u2014 from the me of now to the me of then.\u00a0 The journal became a place to dialogue with myself and gain perspective on my life.<\/p>\n
I periodically would get excited about a book I would make up out of selected journal entries.\u00a0 There was \u201cDialogues with the Moon\u201d which was an exploration of the symptoms and passage of menopause, \u201cWritten in Blood\u201d \u2014 the story of childhood abuse and its consequences, the story of \u201cNika\u201d which was about an artist coming of age, and \u201cShaman\u201d which was mostly about dreams, and scenes that had appeared through active imagination.\u00a0 I would get excited about a particular idea, go through my journals choosing passages, copying and pasting in the computer, printing them out \u2014 and Bingo!\u00a0 there\u2019s a book, or at least a start on a book.\u00a0 Then I would get distracted, or triggered into despair or terror, and the project would lapse.<\/p>\n
In 1995 I was once again talking to my (now ex-) husband about the perennial project of trying to make a publishable book out of my journals.\u00a0 He usually tried to discourage me, which I thought was because he didn\u2019t think my writing was good enough, but in fact he saw more clearly than I did that whatever \u201cart\u201d I was supposed to be doing didn\u2019t include writing books.\u00a0 He asked me, if you did publish a book, what would you have then? And this sentence came out of my mouth: \u201cIt would prove that I deserved to live, even though my parents were disappointed in me.\u201d I was horrified to see that that was my motivation for doing all this writing.\u00a0 A huge chunk of my energy for writing just disappeared and I felt bereft.\u00a0 I almost stopped writing, but found I wasn\u2019t able to, the discipline was too much a part of my life.\u00a0 I think my writing changed in character, becoming more honest and less self consciously literary.\u00a0 But I did stop typing up my journals.\u00a0 I started typing into the computer again in 2000 when I began writing the \u201cGuidance\u201d passages, and wanted to have a record to reread.\u00a0 Gradually I began to include more of the daily entries.\u00a0 Now I\u2019m typing up about half of what I write in the journal notebooks, and that is the raw material for the blog posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I first started keeping a journal in 1959.\u00a0 Inspired by the diary of Anne Frank, I wrote my entries to an imaginary \u201cMimi\u201d.\u00a0 I wrote fairly regularly during my last year of high school which was a painful time.\u00a0 After … Continue reading