Journalling

Eagle Vision Cover by Allan Weir. 
... black and red Haida image...

... my 2018 note book ...

For years I have kept copies of letters I write – at first letters to my parents, then to my siblings, the to my children, and now to everyone in my extended family.

What used to take a stamp, or more, depending on how many pages I wrote, now only takes the effort of uploading into a blog.

I call those my memoirs.

Maybe they are journaling as well.

Two autumns ago, when I was in Victoria, I noticed that Rebecca had a small notebook that she took with her to lectures and into which she kept copious notes.

I thought I might try that practise so I purchased an 8-inch by 6-inch red and black book and would take notes as she did.

At the same time, someone told me that there is a new practise while annotating texts, to use certain symbols, so I went out to the web and read how people do that – and I kept notes – my first entry in that small notebook.

... my Table of Contents ...

Added to that, I had started the practise of collecting recipes, pasting them into old day timers – well, really the one I was using, but I could use the January pages for the recipes, since they had been filled up with old notes and were of no use to me anymore. I glued so many recipes into those pages, that I needed a Table of Contents.

I just glued an empty page into one of the front pages as well: #1 Rogers Whole Wheat Bread, #2 Grandma Jarvis’s Lemon Squares, #3 Quick Pizza Crust. You get the idea – just recipes that I might want to go to quickly and have at my finger tips while I travelled and was invited to cook in someone else’s kitchen.

... my 2020 Brownline Daily Planner
I tape an old card ("4 Noble Women" by Lou-Ann Neel) to the front of this book
to differentiate it from older, black covered Daily Planners.

The Table of Contents became so valuable to me, that I began to transfer the idea of making a Table of Contents to other notebooks I was creating.

I am a person who is not gifted with a lot of imagination – at least the kind of imagination that comes with expanding borders.

So it has taken me until this week to figure out that there are many kinds of journaling – and one kind of journaling that I have not recognized is these small notebooks: my day timer and my notebook.

... Saturday and Sunday ...
no notes on these pages ... yet ...

I treasure the random notes therein: a bit of opera, some National Theatre Live, the Indigenous Justice Summit, the characters in the Netflicks Peaky Blinders series, and a lecture by John Borrows on the Anishinabe 7 Grandfather’s Teaching, to name a few in the interest of showing that there is no connection between them, except that it is me taking the notes.

This week is the one where I have come to understand that these small note books are a different kind of journaling: me writing about things that rarely appear in my regular journal.

Arta