From my Journal

July 9, 2024

I don't do this but sharing an excerpt from my journal. Written on Sunday morning when I woke early for karate…

Pissed off with the audience and community quotes disappearing from my e-book. Will have to re-read or let them go. But will they disappear again before I can transcribe them. And there is no need to transcribe, I just love using my fountain pen and all the notebooks I have collected. I rarely go back to the quotes. Maybe I can quickly scan through the chapters and rush on. Ya, why do I write? What are my demons and obsessions?

It’s raining and my attention divided itself. I want to listen to the rain and I want to finish this darn book. But I’m going to stop that stupid, fervent, reading and listen to the rain. How should I describe it’s sound. A loud hushhh that drowns out other sounds, with an occasional — what they call pitter patter when the water hits a surface, like the ledge or the window. Too high up to hear it hitting the ground below. I suppose I must rouse myself and see if the window needs closing. This fear, this hope that it (the fear) will quiet before I leave. This absolute desire to not leave, to sit here in the light of the floor lamp while thick clouds darken the outside, and just read, or write, or listen.

There were dreams… “A winding road, a steep descent, we’d gone down it — me and two other women, but then we couldn’t find our way up. It felt treacherous and not quite even smooth, even on the way down but the climbing was worse. The road seemed more ‘broken’ and there were confusing branches that made me/us unsure of the path up. I wondered how I hadn’t seen them on the way down, why I hadn’t hesitated. I made at least one wrong turn or deliberate(?) fray into a crumbly road I hadn’t seen earlier…”

Is this a portrait of my life right now? I plummeted, plunged, or slowly drove into a gorge and need to, want to find my way back. Isn’t this here, this sitting, allowing myself to be ‘diverted’ by the sound of this rain not a way to do it?

The light has suddenly brightened. I can see the shape of the trees more clearly. It is the sunrise or have dark clouds dissipated? Throughout the day the trees, the way they look, change with the changing light — yet of course they never change within themselves. How do I look in some places to some people, and different, though I am the same everywhere.

Should I risk another caffeine bump? I don’t want to wake. A black or green tea at least perhaps!!

This is the last week before the week of leaving. There is a low, low, sinking feeling lingering. Always, always, always. I want to feel less insecure about the future. Many mornings when I feel scattered I rush to contain the feeling. But today I think I allow the panic. How much can it be really? Not that much more than when I push it underground and like lava slowly melting hard rock I feel, a constant sense of rumbling and shifting of the ground under my feet. Never stable, never secure, never still. 

Really time to go. I will need to cab it today. 

I’m not being lazy and trying to get out of writing a blog post. I felt it right to do this. How many thoughts go through us in such a short space of time, particularly when we are still in that vulnerable space of not quite awake. And how we contain the fears and move through our days with only a few perhaps recognizing we are shaky inside. I did this waking early and writing in my journal on my last day in Phuket when we had to be up to catch our flight (which anyway got delayed). I loved the gentle bed light, the cup of English breakfast, the soft CM nib of my Pilot Prera gliding over the Midori paper. The flow of nothingness and everything-ness that morning thoughts can be. Do you notice your morning mind being more open, softer, at once slower and faster, than the rest of the day?