Journal

Books about diaries or personal journals

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For many years I’ve kept personal journals. I don’t mean blogs (though I’ve kept a few of those as well in recent years), but paper journals that I write for me alone. Journals (or diaries) have been an important outlet for me since I was a teenager, though I’ve kept them more regularly at some • Read More »

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess

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If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the Goddess in ancient belief and myth, why She vanished, as well as why women have been treated so abysmally at certain times in history in nearly every culture, this makes fascinating and disturbing reading. It’s just a theory, mind you, and I find myself hoping he’s wrong. • Read More »

Why I won’t tell you my New Year’s resolution

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I’ve never been one for New Years resolutions, with one exception. In January 1995 I was determined to do two things: 1) lose a lot of weight and 2) take on and complete a large, intense creative project, one with depth, one that I felt passionately about, one that was personally risky, emotionally and in • Read More »

Winter in Yellowstone

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In spite of it freezing up Firefox on me (hopefully a problem unique to my computer setup), I’m sharing this awe inspiring video from PBS of winter in Yellowstone. The wildlife footage is some of the best I’ve ever seen, including a pack of wolves taunting a herd of elk stags, and a red fox • Read More »

Painterly advice that can help with all creative efforts

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I’m not usually a painter, though I love the medium, admire great painting, and can’t help dabbling now and then. You wouldn’t think advice for painters would help me that much to nurture my whole creative self. But then I saw this post at JanasJournal.com:

Drifting between big projects

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I’m finally shopping my novel around, so I have more time to take care of the rest of my life. There’s something about a book-length writing project that shuts out too much else from the range of my attention, so I’ve decided that unless I sell this novel it’s going to be smaller creative projects • Read More »

After the fires

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The local birds seem to think our yard is a good place to visit while the last bits of fire and smoke die down, and they’ve come through in flocks as well as individually. At one moment this morning they seemed to be throwing a bird party in our side yard. I stepped outside and • Read More »

Butterflies

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This has been a good summer for butterflies in my little corner of the world. I’ve seen a lot more variety this year than in past years, and yesterday I sighted a Western Tiger Swallowtail in a pepper tree in the yard behind ours. It surprised me, and at first glance I thought I was • Read More »

Emily’s journey home

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We had to say goodbye to our little gray cat Emily today. We think she was about 20 years old, but we’re not sure, because she adopted us just over nine years ago, appearing in our back yard to steal our puppy’s food. She had a lot of problems, resulting from having nearly starved on • Read More »

Past perfect, present imperfect

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On the perfect yellow rose rested a dewdrop as perfect as the rose in every way. It slid down the petal with a most perfect grace, then fell to the rich soil below, content to find its place. I will never be as perfect as the dewdrop, yet in my awkward way, I have my • Read More »

Edgar Allan Poe

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Dear Mr. Poe, Thank you for the poetry, the stories, the mystery. Happy Birthday. Respectfully, a fan * * * The Raven (excerpt) And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s • Read More »

Journals, past present future

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Turtleheart asked in “Journaling Stuff” (link no longer active): “Do you regularly keep any kind of personal journal, online or off? What works best for you?” I started out journaling on looseleaf notebook paper, as a girl. Sometimes I bought colored paper or a spiral notebook for a change. Later I collected bound blank books • Read More »

Need and greed

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I’ve been keeping an eye on my greed recently, my attachment to the material world that pulls me in and makes me desire something. We live in a world where one is considered just a little insane if one doesn’t value the material, the necessity for money that we call practicality. There are degrees of • Read More »

Coping

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I think there is a certain amount of unavoidable grief in every life that we simply have to learn to find ways to live with and still function. Not every illness is treatable, some of us have to put up with pain, and we inevitably lose some people we love. The older we get the • Read More »