This has been an interesting month so far. After writing a book in one month in October, I have filled fewer than 20 pages of my journal in the first two weeks of National Novel Writing Month. I always intend to fill at least three pages when I sit down with the journal — what writing coach Julia Cameron calls “morning pages” — but there have been eight days this month already when I wrote nothing at all.
My father would have been 101 years old Friday if he’d made it past 96 years, 8 months and 4 days. I suppose he and Mom and my older brother and Red are having a good time wherever they are now, wondering if I’ll ever get into a routine where I vacuum and dust around the house more than once or twice a month.
As I write this in my journal to be transcribed into a blog post later, Dejah and Summer are settled in, Summer on the ottoman and Dejah in the big recliner, looking out the windows and imagining what dogs imagine. I hear a flock of geese honking their way across the sky in my left ear and highway traffic on the right, competing sounds muffled by the windows. Here inside the house, the refrigerator makes refrigerator sounds and the clocks tick away the seconds.
Where am I going with this? Anywhere I like. The beauty of journaling is it’s all up to me, even if I just meander from here to there filling up pages with mundane observations or stories that go nowhere or heartfelt analyses that make no sense to normal people. This is my 26th journal since April 2015, when I sat down and started filling pages almost every day.
I don’t look back and read them in order — every so often, I’ll pull one off the shelf at random and page through, looking for long-forgotten thoughts that bear remembering, embellishment and fulfillment. I’ll find an idea where I thought “I should do this” and either realize that I did do that, or that I forgot to do it but still should.
This particular entry springs from those two weeks of neglect and a desire to stop neglecting. It’s probably time that I moved on to other neglected duties, but at least I advanced this journal by three pages. It’s good to be back.
