It’s my mood these days. I feel like I am saying goodbye to something, like I’m on the verge of something saying goodbye to me – I can’t make out. It’s a good, bittersweet kind of nostalgia, the kind that makes me extra sensitive to kind and beautiful things. A tip-off to what is at the …
Category Archives: journal
A Gift to Myself
When you’re down, there’s nothing better than to give yourself a gift. Mine is this: to start writing in my journal again, every day. My present self will go to a trusted place every day, my future self will be happy we got the habit back, and all the good things that are happening will …
Stones, Stones, Stones
We had a glorious weekend. After 5 days of noise and dust, the patio is finished. I’ll take a picture of it once the coming rains have washed it clean. The challenge now is to level the surrounding soil and clear it of stones, stones, stones, and to grow grass and plantings around it. I …
I got NOTHING done!
Amie’s idea of cleaning up As I was vacuuming I deplored (again) how often the work of a homemaker is lost. It is lost when half an hour later the flour gets spilled and a day later the dust bunnies are convening under the sofa again. It is lost when the dishwasher is full – …
Amie’s First Journal Entry
Amie has often expressed an interest in my journal – in the book itself (the journalist Moleskine) and in the process. I haven’t been writing in my journal regularly, but over this weekend revived my resolution to do so. This morning I pulled it and she asked if she could have a journal too, just …
The Leaf and the Cloud by Mary Oliver
Driftwood Every year, once a year, I need to return to that long poem by Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud (published in 2000). It is a poem like life, with everything in it, only magnified and condensed. I can’t say much about it, only that it reverberates deeply with me, and comforts me, …
The Puffin Zine (part 2)
Some more pages from my 2004 zine The Puffin! Pages 9 and 10 make me laugh. I like the second last drawing (page 11) best of all. I still remember that meal in detail: how the food tasted, what we talked about, the atmosphere in the kitchen, even at the end of what kind of …
My 2004 Zine The Puffin (part 1)
Years ago, in 2004, I put together a (literally) small “zine” called The Puffin. It was a zine for family and friends, inspired by Dan Price’s awesome Moonlight Chronicles and Danny Gregory’s Everyday Matters blog (before he became so insanely popular). I just happened upon the original .jpg version of The Puffin – I no …
Amie’s Map Book
The second project I started right after Amie was born fared better than her now defunct Baby Journal, in that it is still up and running. It is a Map Book, or Place Book. I love maps: topographical ones, city, architectural, personal, subjective, objective, three-dimensional, temporal…Â you name it. From the beginning of Amie’s life I …
Amie’s Baby Journal
From the moment Amie was born, I started a daily baby journal. I have been keeping a journal since I was 14: sometimes it’s a habit, sometimes a refuge. So it made sense that I would make a separate journal for my daughter, addressed to her and relating the events of her young life before she could …