Tag Archives: journaling

Taking Flight

Distrail

Distrail By Brocken Inaglory (Own work) , via Wikimedia Commons

Oh, serendipity.

This is an excerpt from my first travel journal, begun when I was rebuilding my life after a heartbreak.  I had met a lovely man who would become my husband, but I didn’t know that yet.  I also never dreamed he would become my late husband.  

I stumbled on this piece this  morning and its simple joy and excitement took my breath away then handed it back to me.  That woman was learning to take risks–on paper, in real life and with her heart.

Friday, November 9, 2001

Griffin

Every journey begins at home.  I am lying in the narrow iron bed at home and all is as it usually is.  Moxie is asleep downstairs in her crate; Gay coughs from their bedroom; Cassie whines at the door, just wishing she could be in here with Zoë and me.

I have a new travel clock and its ticking has captured Zoë’s attention.  Maybe it is strange for her to be aware of time passing by.

My first trip since Gay bought me this beautiful journal in New Orleans.  It is stiff and clean but the paper feels so rich as it slides beneath my hand.  Tomorrow, Baltimore and two nights with Richard.  I want to eat crabs, drink wine and sleep curled together with him.

So that is where this record of my travels begins—home, a narrow bed, a ticking clock.

November 10, 2001  8:00am

Flight 1044 Atlanta to Dulles

This is a haunted route.  Any plane to Washington DC has that sense of foreboding, drums in the distance or the eerie wait for night to fall so you can see the location and number of your enemy by their campfires.  Knowing one bad thing has happened and waiting for the next.

The dark-skinned man in the row behind me was stopped at the gate and his duffle bag rummaged while an embarrassed looking woman swept a metal detection wand over him, his outstretched arms and head dropped to his chest.  His shining gold wedding ring made the wand chirp.  We white women in line looked away.

Cabin lights dim and hands reach for the overhead light buttons, reflex.  I cut it close this morning, just at the gate 10 minutes before we leave.  Two flight attendants cut in front of me at the metal detector line, and when I said, “We can’t go anywhere without you!” they were thrilled to hear “someone nice.”  Maybe things are getting back to normal–I said, “Fuck you” to a stranger this morning when he fussed at me for walking the wrong way.

9:00am

One hour later and we haven’t moved an inch. This, too, is traveling—pointing yourself in the right direction and waiting for the wind to catch hold.  The pilot has reassured us that it’s a mechanical problem with the plane’s attitude monitor.  That’s so true.

10:10am

Off the right wing of the plane, there is a round white glow, the size of a small pond, that follows us on the ground.  I know it is our reflection, the angle of the sun, the same angle that makes the shadow of my hand across this page. But it is sweeter to call it an angel, to see something merry in the way it twinkles over rooftops, treetops and the flat shimmer of water in the Chesapeake Bay.

November 11, 2001  5:45pm

Baltimore—Richard’s bedroom

We had lamb in masala sauce with Mandy and Steve last night.  Listened to Marilyn babble as she served us from a plastic tea set.  Holding hands with Richard as we walk down the dark streets.  Making love on new sheets.

This morning, we ate sticky rolls and talked about going to Europe next month.  Watched a wreath being placed on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  I felt sad for the people left behind and he felt proud for having gone.  And lucky for coming back.

We walked around the harbor, watched the seals having lunch.  One seal named Lady looked a lot like Zoë.  We ate crackers and cheese by the water and watched the jellyfish sparkle when the sun hit them.  We sat in the prow of the water taxi and the spray wet my feet, but we snuggled together, our ears touching.  We joked with the gatekeeper about places for me to spend Richard’s money.

We drank coffee and lingered in the warm coffeehouse but suffered the clatter of the bathroom keys chained to old hubcaps.  We talked about other people’s problems.

And here I sit with a glass of wine in my solitude…and just as I write that, R opens the door and he and the kitty spy on a real writer at work.

He carries things for me.  He endures shopping for a Christmas ornament.  The first thing I saw this morning was the vulnerable curve of the back of his neck.  It’s been a good day.  It’s been a “we” day.  We started the day talking about football and we drove home talking about theoretical math and epenthesis.  Sometimes he explains, sometimes I do.

This is supposed to be my travel journal and here I am writing about a person.  But the best part of today was exploring the world with someone and exploring each other too.  Inner world, outer world.  Richard explained to me that theoretical math allows you to simulate reality and test variables.  I told him that writing does the same for me.

Gratitude Grows

gratitude fixed

This is the stack of gratitude journals on my nightstand.  I started this practice in 1999, while reading Simple Abundance by Sara Ban Breathnach.  Her idea is to keep a journal by your bed so that you can record at least five things from that day for which you are grateful.  It’s become an essential habit for me to close out each day and get myself in the right mindset for another run at living.  Some people say prayers.  I write in my gratitude journal.

The look of the journal is important to me—no spiral bounds, no garish colors or trendy prints.  Silky ribbons are a plus.  Sewn bindings are better than glued.  I never spend more than $20 on a journal, but I would if the right one came along.  I don’t stockpile, only buy a new one when the current one is almost full.  The right journal has to look like that time in my life.  The first journal I ever bought for this purpose (at a Books-a-Million, if that gives you some idea of how long ago this was!) had  Vermeer’s “Milkmaid” on the cover and the instant I saw it, I knew it was the right one—a place for contemplation, quiet work, simple gifts.

My earliest journals fill the bottom drawer of the nightstand.  I used to finish one and stow it away as soon as the new one was ready to use, but I haven’t moved a journal out of this stack since 2004.  The slow-growing tower signifies the archaeological layers of my life.

Here’s something interesting I discovered when I went to Google and typed:  “What do you call those layers of dirt that archaeologists see when they dig up things?”  (I have my Google language set to Southern.)  Mixed in with the strata of ordinary life, which leads to ordinary dirt-making, we find destruction layers:

A destruction layer is a stratum found in the excavation of an archaeological site showing evidence of the hiding and burial of valuables, the presence of widespread fire, mass murder, unburied corpses, loose weapons in public places, or other evidence of destruction, either by natural causes (for example earthquakes), or as a result of a military action.

Destruction layers are often found associated with a change in subsequent pottery styles or material culture artifacts, indicating an invasion by a foreign people or intrusive element.

So true.  If I read back through my gratitude, scattered among the joy I find destruction layers (divorce, death, the 2000 presidential election), new pottery styles (IKEA sippy cups), changes in material culture artifacts (size XXL yoga pants) and perhaps even a few loose weapons in public places (ahem, this blog).

Why haven’t I moved these books to a drawer or a shelf?  They come in handy as historical record.  Like when I considered having natural childbirth with Carlos, but I flipped to the list I wrote on Vivi’s birth day and read “#1 Vivi is here and healthy and beautiful!  #2 That epidural was NICE.”  Or the time that the manager of the Red Cross asked me to give a motivational talk to her employees and I read to them from my gratitude journal entries from March 2005.  I told them that those last few weeks of Richard’s life wouldn’t have been possible without the blood and platelets that they had collected, so even entries like “we sat down for dinner today” or “Richard hugged his Dad” took on deeper significance.  Not a dry eye in the house at that staff meeting.  One guy still remembers me when I see him at blood drives.  I’m glad he knows what a difference his work makes.  It can’t be easy sticking people with needles for a living.

That purple suede journal at the bottom of the stack?  That one is from 2003-2004.  I know there’s a handful of confetti from a New Year’s Eve party on Bermuda tucked inside the pages.  There are hundreds of happy memories in that purple book, but I don’t open it.  It’s from the six months that we set up house together.  A Christmas tree in the picture window.  Trips to Prague, Berlin and Maine.  Learning to sail.  Painting bathrooms, renting movies and Chinese buffets.  I can’t bring myself to look at the things that made me happy in the Before Days.

I don’t look in the red journal that’s second from the bottom.  That’s the one where I was harvesting little seeds of gratitude in the middle of the tornado.  Thankful for things like kind nurses, white cell counts, days I got to walk outside and sushi Tuesdays in the hospital cafeteria.  Even on the hardest days, I require myself to find five things that were gifts.  I wrote 24 things in my gratitude list on the day Richard died.  But I don’t need to go back and read them.

Another reason to keep a gratitude journal?  It’s fun to go back years later and discover the kernel that turned into something great.  Like all those naps that I relished in the fall of 2006?  I was pregnant and didn’t know it!  Or the day when I did know and I wrote “Every wish I’ve made on every birthday candle for the last few years just came true.”  Or on May 31, 2006, when I was grateful for my daddy’s birthday, Mellow Mushroom Cosmic Karma pizza with my friend Jonathan, a copper core sauté pan, and a “wink” from an interesting Brasilian man.

That interesting Brasilian man is picking up our kids today so I have some time to write.  You. Just. Never. Know.