Journal Prompt: The Sacred Relics

These days I’ve been more and more in my notebooks, and finding myself having all sorts of fun, both with and without kids, glorious messes unfolding before me. Old magazines and glue sticks, washi tape and stickers, all sorts of pens and inky tools. Filling up my notebooks! Ah, the satisfaction of seeing the pages filled up with scribbles and other various life things.

And I am stumbling across journaling prompts everywhere.

Here is a bit from an old National Geographic article on dinosaurs and museums and paleontology and archeology and bones and things. It turns out that old magazines are ripe grounds for finding inspiration.

The quote says “Here are the sacred relics…Everyone puts dinosaurs in the basements. The bones are just too big to keep anywhere else.”

Knowing nothing more about paleontology than I learned from Ross, I wonder instead about what our sacred relics are, and what dinosaur bones from our past are in our basements. Things that are sometimes too big to live with and think about but that are skeletons from our past, good or bad, living in the basement of the houses of our minds. The phrase the sacred relics is delicious. Go forward, tread lightly, bring a flashlight with you. And your notebook.

Skeletons get a bad rap, but they’re not necessarily terrible events or dark secrets, although childhood can be a minefield. Just things that used to be alive and fresh and have now gone into our past, having done their work to make us who we are today. Family relationships, friendships, events, time periods of our lives, middle school, high school, university, first jobs, first homes. The dinosaur bones of life that happened to us, that we happened to, that are no longer in the flesh, and that have become sacred relics for who we are.

Journal prompt: “If I could bring a dinosaur back to life…”

Or perhaps: “The scariest dinosaur down there is…”

And in case you need some further inspiration, consider the work you do all the time to keep your basement dinosaurs looking good.

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In any case, please join my journaling club! We meet Mondays and Thursdays at 9 pm EST. I have been enjoying my cosy evenings, mostly baby free, time in my office/closet with door closed, candle lit (usually by Caleb and usually with limited pyrotechnics), and my notebook(s) and pens before me.

With these evenings, I’ve been journaling lots and thinking about journaling lots and really just having the time of my life getting back into my notebooks again. I’ve always journaled, on and off but mostly on, but the more you write, the easier it gets, more ideas flowing, all of a sudden you’re just grabbing your notebook or your journal out of the blue. I’ve been breaking out supplies I haven’t thought about or used in years (contributing factors also being baby and renovation and life), and feeling the creative juices moving around. It turns out that once you start looking for inspiration and journaling prompts to share, you find it everywhere. Julia Cameron knew what she was talking about.