WHAT I WANT TO SAY: How Writing in a Journal Helps a Writer Get There

What I want to say is . . .

Journal: March 13, 2015.

What I want to say. Often I don’t know, myself. This week is like that. Peter’s brother, Hank died; I, too, loved him deeply. And there’s been scary illness in my family. And there’s been demanding work that left me drained and exhausted. Now everyone has gone to the memorial service three thousand miles from here. I am home alone because my left hip and leg won’t allow me to sit for long flights. I want to write, but that desire fragments into a flock of wild birds that I can neither capture nor name. There are feelings, colors, images, but they fly as soon as I try to word them into captivity.

What I want to say is . . .

March 14, 2015. Journal.

I have created a small, separate journal.

It’s black, with a large black spiral that holds together the pages. It was given to me several years ago by someone who was leaving our town and as it turned out, our friendship. So the object itself holds love and pain. Spirals of both. I first started writing in it to record things I cannot explain and usually tell only to closest friends. The kinds of things I wrote about in a chapter called “Strangeness” in How the Light Gets In. Things that some people – and some parts of myself – want to dismiss as “coincidences,” et cetera. I have about ten pages of those – they are all joyful.

But the last few days have been the stuff that suggest images of hell – and so I turned the little journal upside down and backward and wrote there dreams, nightmares, and the events that created them.

What I want to say is . . .

March 14, 2015. Journal? Maybe something more than that . . .

A whiff of a poem just slid through, between my ears. But it, too, was a wild bird. The memorial service will begin in California in a few hours. Peter will play his clarinet, a gorgeous arrangement of “Simple Gifts” by ___________. Rain drips onto old snow outside my window. It makes a sad, grey music.

I have written my way toward wanting to say something about writing. Maybe this will turn into a blog entry or something. The dreams and nightmares I wrote about earlier today have become something other than what they were. They were deep sores, torn places in my psyche. They have moved out now to images I stand a bit back from, look at as if they are outside myself. Writing does that; once written, images are outside as well as inside.

Yes, this is a healing practice, this writing. Not only writing in a journal. One of the most “crafted” poems I ever wrote, “Letting Go,” in my book, Another River, which took me 37 complete drafts to finish because it rhymes at both ends of every line, (not always the first word on the left side) was profoundly healing to write. It is about leaving the church, leaving institutional religion entirely, after a small congregation had paid my way through college, rescuing me from poverty. Writing can be a healing practice. It can be a spiritual practice. And it is worthy of a lifetime of practice in learning more skill, for it can be an art form.

All of that. Now I will go make myself some lunch. Maybe these words will stay private, but I doubt it. The blog is a strange and wonderful new forum. As I write, and as the reader reads, we are friends.

Now I have said what I want to say.

(To hear Pat read her poem, “What I Want to Say,” please click here)