what not to write in a journal

Not long ago, my friend and I were talking and the discussion came to our journals and the sorts of things we filled them with.  We were each adamant that the contents were never to be shared --that in fact, we could barely stand to read our own words.  We declared that we must have a "journal burning" well in advance of any foreseeable personal demise so as to prevent the discovery and examination of our deepest (most inane) thoughts.  

And for a while, I did not write.  

I have always kept a journal ... at some points in my life, more faithfully than others.  It is a practice I learned from my great-grandmother.  Every morning she would rise, dress, and brew Sanka.  Then she would move into her TV room -- which was really just the extra bedroom -- outfitted with a television, her chair, and her things within easy reach on a kind of table that they must not make anymore -- a combination sidetable with a lampstand running up through the center.  There she would start her day by reading the devotion in The Daily Word and writing in her diary.  Though she impressed it upon me that this was a personal and private practice, this much I know; every day she began, "Dear Diary,"... 

It was she who gave me my first diary.  I was able to write, I remember that, but I must not have been older than six or seven.  It was blue with flowers and it had a lock and key.  I don't have it now, nor do I do not know what happened to her volumes.  She was ninety-three when she died.  She must have filled a mountain of diaries and I wonder what she wrote for all of those years.  

I don't remember all of what I have written over my own years but what my friend and I were so troubled by were the things that we found ourselves writing lately.  I have long practiced the technique of putting down whatever comes to mind but the problem with that is, for so long, it has been the same thing.  When I stopped, I was determined not to write again until I had something different to say.  Here is what I decided; the journal is not a whipping post -- not a catalogue of faults, not a to-do list, not a litany of plans for self-improvement.

The thing about writing is, if you let it be, it's a method of travel.  You can make your way back to things that you thought you had lost or move beyond anywhere you've been.  Writing is not just an act of symbolically representing the things you know -- but a process where mind and experience and life goes farther -- without limit.  

I'm writing again, but with different rules.  I want to be transported.  

(write a poem and use the following words:  moth, angle, cloth, tangle ...)

tangles of memory

woven into ragged cloth

moth-eaten holes where truth might have been

light passes through the weave

and bends

shining through at odd angles

there are shadowy places

there has to be light to make shadows