July 14, 2008 - 12:27 PM.

Name change

"New Seasons Massage Therapy." I like that, and wish I could convince myself that a practice-name change is a good idea businesswise. It isn't, but I am thinking about it nonetheless.

I have also started a more condensed form of paper journaling, season-based. I had been reading a paragraph in one of those endless terribly-written mystery novels my MIL liked to read, something like "even though most of them had seen fifty winters." Totally crapola writing; nevertheless, it made me realize that my memories of my life tend to be incident-based and tied maybe to what grade of school I was in or where I lived (when older), not so much to nature or to how I felt globally that season.

So I am keeping a specific season-based journal now -- this summer, for instance, is the hot summer of grief; the spring that just passed was the long cold spring; the winter was an easy soft wet season in which I sharpened my business focus.

I will slowly work retroactively as well, trying to get a more holistic view of my entire life if I can, poking the puzzle pieces back together as I can remember them. Some of childhood and college are vivid, and there are bits of my seven-year cloistering and of my theater years (which I called "theatre" at the time) that are easier to access as well. Maybe stitching those together will nudge my memories of the more faded times.

All this has been inspired, in the way we often are in times of death, by sorting through my MIL's things. She loved notebooks of all sizes, always having a tiny memo pad near all 4 phones and on her end table and night tables, plus a larger notebook in each purse (she kept 3 or 4 at a time), lots of legal pads to scratch on, a couple of one- or two-subject college notebooks, and from time to time (about twice a year for the last 15 years, as far as I can tell), she would decide to keep a "real" journal. Each of these journals was a nice notebook of some kind, often an "official" inspirational book of some kind, and each of them had 3 or 4 pages written in and then the remainder was blank.

This is typical, I think, of people who think they "should" journal. Somehow there are lots of strictures. The material they write must be "good," or at least Meaningful. The book they choose to write in comes with specifications -- either it must be official (lock-and-key), or lovely (pretty cover or beautifully bound), or even rigorously anti (yellow legal-size pad is popular for this purpose). They must discipline themselves to write every day or it somehow isn't real. And then -- they are unable to meet their own requirements, they get discouraged, they abandon the effort, and then pretty soon a year has gone by, something significant happens in their lives, and they find themselves in the stationery aisle or in Barnes and Noble, picking out an Artist's Way Journal ("with exercises") or similar, vowing to do "better."

I wish people didn't feel this sense of obligation or compunction with their journaling, which has always been such a source of joy and help for me that I want everyone else to feel easy about it as well. I guess in retrospect I have been lucky, that I shook off the stricturles of "good" journaling at a very young age. The first journal I remember keeping was at age 11, when I wrote in miniscule print in each daily square of a pocket appointment calendar. My mother noticed this and encouraged me to buy a "real" diary -- turquoise leatheretter, a lock, and lined pages, painted gold on the edges like a cheap Bible. I wrote in that for some while and then fell away from it; when I next wanted to write in a diary I found a gap of several months, and I really wanted to start fresh, but not having my own money or any way to get to town from our rural home at that moment, I just skipped a page and went doggedly on. From then on, I always had the discipline to finish a notebook full before starting a new one, even when I was given a lovely one as a gift (which has happened often over the years now, as people seem to know that notebook-keeping is my "thing").

So now I have six or eight pretty journal notebooks, and even though I am mostly online now (for the last 3 years especially), I have an excuse -- and more time -- to use paper again, and so I may use it in honor of my mother-in-law, who always felt she should but could have done well even without the sense of obligation.

A new season.

(Forgot to say, I am also reading the autobiography of Twyla Tharp, an enormously driven woman, and am re-inspired to continue my career and my education in the focused way I began at the turn of this year. Our lives, temperaments, approaches, and visions are almost completely different, yet there are parallels of ambition, motherhood, feminism, and determined exploration of the self and the chosen form.)

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