“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; there is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.” This quote by Henry David Thoreau has hung on my wall in every place I have lived for the past twenty years. You see, I am a dreamer and I have built many castles in the air and find myself continually trying to find ways to build those necessary foundations that turn dreams into realities. One of my long time dreams is to be and artist, specifically a writer and poet. My brothers and sister are artists, graphic artists and painters. I like to draw and paint with words. My medium of choice is journal writing. I love the process of simply writing just to write. Will it lead to anything? I don’t know. Will I be a well-known writer someday? I don’t know. Will I walk into Borders or Barnes and Noble someday and see my books on their shelves or in people’s hands as they enjoy their coffee? I don’t know. For me it isn’t the product, but the process, which draws me to my love affair with writing.
My journal is like my best friend. It is there whenever I want or need to talk. I can share the most horrible thoughts my brain can conger up and know that it won’t reject or think less of me. It is always there, always receptive and open to me, always waiting for our times together. Who could ask for a more loyal or faithful friend?
My passion for writing really started while I was in high school. Mr. Moran was my sophomore English teacher. Every class we spent the first ten minutes writing anything we wanted to but we had to do it quickly and without really thinking about what we were writing. Today it is known as free writing and it keeps the critic in your head at bay. After the ten minutes were up we read our stories to the class. Mr. Moran and the other class members praised each reading for its imagination and creativity and we had fun learning to just be free with our minds and our pencils and paper. That is one of the functions of my journal. It’s that safe place to just write and not be concerned with rules or outcome or if it is good or bad writing. It just is, and that is good. I think that freedom is a universal need for every soul. No critic, no performance anxiety, no reason except the excitement of doing it. I am thankful to Mr. Moran for planting a seed that is a true foundation in my life.
I’ve had many mentors in my life who have made writing a delight to me. John Boy Walton, from the TV show The Waltons, was my dream boyfriend for a long time. He narrated the show as the oldest child of a family growing up in Virginia during the depression years. His dream was to be a writer and show after show he would write and share his stories with me (and the rest of the TV audience). I identified with him in a big way and that show added fuel to my real dream of being a writer myself.
Lillian Hellman, played by Jane Fonda in the movie Julia was another expression of my dream. My favorite scene in this movie is when Lillian is trying to write a screen play and she gets stuck, so she walks out on the beach trying to find the right words, talking to herself as the waves come up and lap at her feet. I would close my eyes and feel like I was right there, frustrated and then elated because the right word came and the story continued.
A true and real life mentor and my all time favorite writer is May Sarton, who lived by the ocean in Maine and talked a lot about her life of solitude, her writing, and her life in her house by the ocean. Her book, Journal of a Solitude, was probably instrumental in my deepening love of keeping a journal. Mentors are important people in one’s life that encourage and support us to find what our hearts are attracted to and then do
whatever that is. For me it was and still is writing, especially journal writing.
One of the top lessons I learned from all of my mentors is if one is going to want to be a writer, one must write. I had written stories and poems on and off during my high school and college days. When I graduated from high school I had planned on going to college and becoming an English teacher. I had applied to a teacher’s college in western Maryland and went for my interview. Unfortunately I didn’t have very good grades. I had A’s in English and Physical Education (the two subjects I really liked) but C’s and D’s in the others and pretty low tests scores. The woman interviewing me was more interested in what I couldn’t do and told me I wasn’t a good candidate for their school and that I should think about a junior college. The funny thing about that interview was that I noticed she had missed the top button on her blouse and had continued the error down her front. I remember thinking that I may not be smart enough for their college but at least I could dress myself properly. Needless to say that experience didn’t do much for my self-esteem but actually it turned out ok. The depression and hopelessness gave me good fodder for the hippie poet I was to become in the late 1960’s.
A great thing about journal writing is that you don’t need to be an academic wizard to write in one. No one is going to check it for mistakes or content. It’s your little hide away and no one can tell you you’re not smart enough to write in one. Anyone can and everyone should take advantage of this great freedom to live life, share thoughts, and build castles in the air in a journal.
I guess I took this woman’s words to heart because I flunked out of junior college and majored in the 60’s culture for about ten years. I hung out in coffee houses with other writers and poets, filled notebooks with poems about war, lost innocence, and a lot of existential nothingness. My best friend and I would sit around, candles dripping down Chianti bottles, drinking wine and talking about how as writers we would live destitute on the streets and then become famous after we died. I had fully embraced the writer’s life but was wondering if this was really what I had been dreaming about all these years.
Fortunately after the late sixties came the early seventies and a new movement struck my fancy. The lost hippies were turning to Jesus and it was during the Jesus Movement that my life turned around. I had an encounter with Jesus, what some might call a born again experience and my spiritual journey began. In 1973 I began an intentional practice of writing every day in a Journal. I still continue that practice to this day. I make a cup of coffee and get my Journal and Bible and I sit in bed for about an hour. Sometimes I write first, free write anything that comes to mind. Sometimes I read first and then write a meditation about what I have read, interacting with the text in order to make it mine. This is my morning quiet time, my Morning Watch, my time to get my thoughts gathered and settled before my day, filled with other people and other’s thoughts, began to need attention. It’s like offering the first fruits of the harvest to God and asking for his blessing on the rest of my activities for the day. I rarely miss a day and when I do I walk through the day feeling like something (or Someone) is missing. At the end of each month I read through the pages and highlight in different colors things that stand out to me. Inspiring thoughts, meditations to be worked on more, ideas for writing projects, and so on. Once a year, either New Years or my birthday I read what I have written through out the year. It’s like a review of what I did for 365 days. I see where I have grown, and find areas I need to grow more in and make them goals for the next year. My journal is like a living partner to me. It truly is the most important companion I carry with me in this journey through life.
I have committed myself to a life of contemplation and simplicity. I have few possessions. Among those possessions are boxes filled with my journals. A flooded basement took and destroyed my journals from 1973 to 1986. But safe and secure in my storage bin are my journals from 1987 through this very moment in time. Every time I move, which is way too frequently for me, I ask myself why I keep lugging these boxes filled with my past life from place to place. Sometimes I arrogantly answer that when I am dead and famous someone will use these papers to write my biography.
But really the answer is I still use them as writing material.
In one of my past lives I was a Camp Director. It was a summer camp but I worked year round. The main benefit of that job was I only had to be on property during the summer and could work from anywhere else I wanted to during the off-season. I chose to work from Rehoboth Beach in Delaware.
I rented a townhouse about ten blocks from the ocean and lived down at the shore from October through April for four years. I had to do about twenty hours of camp work per week but the rest of the time was mine. This became my Writer’s Retreat. One year I brought all my journals down and read through them all. I discovered that these journals were like a compost pile of thoughts, dreams and goals. Here written in these journals were my castles in the air that I had been building all these years. As I gathered the rich material I came out with several real writing projects. These are the projects I hope to develop and make foundations out of, foundations for my life, for my vocation, and for my ministry. They await my time and my energy and I believe that time is quickly approaching.
Throughout my sixty-two years writing has been the constant. The themes and contents have changed but not the Practice. I love the process of writing. I write with pen and paper because I like the feeling of connection that they give me to the work and the words. I don’t dream of being a famous writer anymore, although I wouldn’t turn down an offer if it came my way. I’ve also come to see that there are a whole lot of people who write better than I do and that is truly ok. What I do know is that only I can say what I want or have to say and therefore only I can write it. I am not concerned with the product as much as I am the process. That is why I am passionate about keeping a journal. There is something in the process of writing that connects me to my self, to the environment that surrounds me, and most important to the God who created me and loves me and to whom I have devoted my life to love and serve. Even if only God and I are the only ones who read what I write I will be fulfilled as a writer. I am my ministry and writing is a part of the process that makes me who I am.
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