A New Journal

I recently started a new journal, which is one of my favourite things to do.

For one thing, it’s very satisfying to finish up, to fill up, an entire notebook. I’ll have been carrying it around for days and weeks and months, and then, the final pages to that chapter of life. The door slams shut in triumph! Or perhaps a whimper.

This one I started on January 1st of this year, and it’s come along with me on my various life errands and sat open with me hunkered over it, late into the night. As I finish it up, I flip through the previous pages, and I wonder about the things that happened, the things I want to remember, the things I want to forget. The pictures and scraps of things glued and taped in, the scribbles from various tiny fingers. I think of Austin Kleon’s practice of weighing his notebooks before and after he fills them up, and while I don’t have a scale, I feel like there’s a different sort of cosmic weight in each filled notebook as well. Each journal is a marker of time and all the life that happened in its pages.

And! It’s also a delight to pick out a new notebook from the several that sit on my shelf, awaiting their turn at adventure, stickers or stamps or labels to be put on, the first lines to be scribbled in. I have a growing collection of vinyl stickers collected over time (who of us is not putting forth their best efforts in emergency preparedness, in their own ways?), and each time I start a new journal, I sift through it to pick out the first few stickers that will attend life with me. I don’t fill up the cover completely: over the span of a journal, I’ll add more as I go, squeezing things in and around, finding the perfect spot for the various flat and sticky gifts the universe offers, maybe a mushroom cat stamped into a corner. One needs to leave room for things to happen.

Decorating the cover is fun and sentimental and a reflection of that season of life, but what I love most about starting a new journal is the inspiration I feel to begin writing. Journalling has its ebbs and flows for me, and some days and seasons I write more than others, but there is something spring-like about a new notebook. The clean pages, a fresh start. Lines waiting to be filled! I love it all, and I feel my fingers itching to start into it.

Over the last several journals, I’ve been finding a poem to go on the first page of a new journal. Sometimes I already know which poem I’m going to pick, and other times it takes a while to find the right one. It’s an offering to the future, a prophecy, a joke, a wish, the full moon in the sky, something warm to hold. Sometimes it is prescient and sometimes it is foreboding, but always, you can find the threads when you look.