I’ve been reading old journals. That’s not quite the “being present practice” of actually writing the journals all those decades ago. They really weren’t meant to be read or reread by anyone but I got curious. I’m going to be burning them soon and I couldn’t resist taking a look back.

Perhaps I saved journals from the eighties and nineties as I thought I’d write a memoir one day and could use them. Elaine Harvey, a Victoria writer, relied on her travel journals for her memoir: Encounters on the Front Line (Promontory Press, 2015). In 1980 she worked for the International Red Cross in the Cambodian refugee camps. It’s a good thing Elaine had journals to look into as it would have been difficult to remember the names of all the people she met and worked with as a nurse and the details of the horrific conditions in the camps immediately after the fall of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.

Recently I finished Lit, Mary Karr’s third memoir. She relied on journals as well.  This third memoir is about Mary discovering a spiritual practice. She became a Catholic, eventually, after proclaiming there was no way she’d pray to a “higher power” as she was instructed to do at Alcoholics Anonymous.

I know I don’t want to spend time focused on the past so I won’t be writing a memoir about my childhood or my teen years. There have been personal essays and poems but I wouldn’t want to immerse myself in times that weren’t all that joyful. I’m finding the reading I did caused some real discomfort in my back – the back I mentioned in another blog when talking about my mind taking on too much. (Busy mind equals busy body I wrote in my blog: “Back to the Body.”) This time, it could be old memories releasing themselves.

I did pick up some positive aspects in the old journals from the eighties and nineties. I wrote: “My darling children. It’s so important that they know I love them beyond everything.” (June 23, 1991)

And I picked up advice to my future self: “We need our past but at times we need to set it aside to face the future, fresh. Certainly the material objects remind us of people and events but they are not those people or events.” (April 4, 1981)

I remember Beth Powning writing something like that in one of her memoirs, Shadow Child: An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss. No wonder her words resonated with me.

Here’s what I call a “found poem,” giving it the title of “Sacrificial Lambs” from Shadow Child, following an accidental fire at the Pownings’ property in New Brunswick:

These warped and scorched things are like
sacrificial lambs. I’m willing to exchange them
for the moment that I’m living. We give up
on the list we try to make of the things that we lost;
there isn’t time to dwell on what can’t be recovered.

I think burning my old journals will be a good Solstice activity. Solstice is going to be early though as I may be still in hospital or hopefully, travelling home on December 21st.

Solstice is a turning point in the wheel of the year. It seems a good time to let go of the old. “Fire is necessary to clear away undergrowth and debris,” I’ve read.

I burned old papers in a fire pit at my friend Birdie’s house before I moved to Nanaimo from Guelph. Copies of articles and stories that hadn’t been accepted by literary journals. Multiple drafts of stories. We called in the four directions. Some of the small fragments floated in the air. Rather than grieve what didn’t happen, I sensed a real lightness and joy for letting all the disappointment go. Making room for the new life Sarah and I began out here.

Some of those well-chosen fragments ended up under glass up in a piece of encaustic art Birdie (Andrea Bird) created for me. The border is made up of bits of broken china and forget-me-notes embedded in the wax. On the back is a poem I wrote after one of Di Brandt’s:

Think of me when you think of me
as feather-like fragments,
fragile words on smouldering grey paper
burned to let go among
the leaves of Greek sage,
New Mexican cedar needles and pinon,
lavender and sweetgrass braids
while the yellow sparkles
of American goldfinches
and the purple martin
act as coming-home chorus . . .

Our connection has continued ten years later. Birdie is the friend who writes to me regularly, by snail mail, and sent me the “kick-ass care package” back in July.

“Let go of the ways you thought life would unfold,” Danna Faulds wrote in her poem, “Let It Go.”

the holding of plans or dreams or expectations – Let it all go.
Save your strength to swim with the tide.

. . .

Let go, and the wave’s crest
will carry you to unknown shores,
beyond your wildest dreams or destinations.
Let it all go and find the place of rest
and peace, and certain transformation.

“Make room in your heart for love,” Mary Oliver says in her poem “Storage” about making a “beautiful fire” of “things.”

Storage

When I moved from one house to another
there were many things I had no room
for. What does one do? I rented a storage
space. And filled it. Years passed.
Occasionally I went there and looked in,
but nothing happened, not a single
twinge of the heart.

As I grew older the things I cared
about grew fewer, but were more
important. So one day I undid the lock
and called the trash man. He took
everything.

I felt like the little donkey when
his burden is finally lifted. Things!
Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful
fire! More room in your heart for love,
for the trees! For the birds who own
nothing–the reason they can fly.