{"id":1046,"date":"2011-02-14T16:13:07","date_gmt":"2011-02-14T21:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/?p=1046"},"modified":"2011-02-14T16:13:07","modified_gmt":"2011-02-14T21:13:07","slug":"retiring-a-family-journal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/?p=1046","title":{"rendered":"Retiring a Family Journal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Recording Life's Tossed Salad<\/p><\/div>\n

I’ve reached the end of my current family journal.\u00a0 I started it in August, 2010 and finished it in February, 2011.\u00a0 Its dog-eared pages are full of things I’ve jotted down, real ink on real paper, over the last several months.\u00a0 Today, oh boy!,\u00a0it’s time to bring out a nice, clean new one.\u00a0 I love doing that.<\/p>\n

Here’s a sampling of what I write in a family journal:<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 Ideas for blog posts, essays and magnum opuses, 2.\u00a0 Shopping lists, 3. Telephone numbers, 4. Word plays that entertain me, 5. Notes I take while doing family business (dealing with doctors, insurance, bills, mechanics, and so forth), 6. Insights on life and love and God, 7. Garden notes (seeds to order, garden planning schematics), 8. Rhymes and poetic phrases, 9. Smart alec thoughts\u00a0that occur to me\u00a0during meetings,\u00a0 10.\u00a0 An interesting epitaph copied from a tombstone, 11. Travel plans and itineraries, 12. Whatever else I want to jot down.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I don’t like segmenting life into pieces, forcing it into compartments.\u00a0 Is Sunday the only God day?\u00a0 Is work bigger than Monday through Friday and play bigger than the weekend?\u00a0 Can I have a searing insight\u00a0commuting on the bus or a creative, literary thought writing a routine memo at the office?\u00a0 I celebrate the juxtapositions of life, the tossed salad that gets thrown into our bowls.\u00a0 The whole mash of it is part of the adventure of living.\u00a0 One way I enact that is by carrying the journal (open to the shopping list, of course)\u00a0in the grocery while I shop, blending mundane shopping with the stirring literary, or else the mundane literary with stirring shopping.\u00a0 I also like the sense of risk, carrying around and using\u00a0a notebook that gets more precious as the entries mount over days, weeks, and months.\u00a0 It helps me value a moment.\u00a0\u00a0Also,\u00a0moments of value are worth a risk.<\/p>\n

I’ve been writing in a family journal for about three years now.\u00a0 The great thing is that there are no rules.\u00a0 I don’t have to write something every day though I can if I want to.\u00a0 I could only write shopping lists.\u00a0 I could record a brilliant idea for a novel or pen a Daily Sentence.\u00a0 I could\u00a0jot down an address or a reminder to do something.\u00a0 I could write a word I hear and love like rondure<\/em>.\u00a0 I date each entry because I want to be able to remember the state of the salad on any particular day; remembering and reminiscence are part of the deal.<\/p>\n

Life is a sloppy thing, lurching or soaring, sprinting or just sauntering along, and things and ideas and colors and sounds and tastes and smells and people and ups and downs get all mixed together throughout.\u00a0 So I keep a notebook, a family journal, to record it all and keep me on track in the midst.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve reached the end of my current family journal.\u00a0 I started it in August, 2010 and finished it in February, 2011.\u00a0 Its dog-eared pages are full of things I’ve jotted down, real ink on real paper, over the last several … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,13],"tags":[96,60,95,1078,94,1076],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1046"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7352,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1046\/revisions\/7352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}