What do you do with your old written journals?
I have filled Moleskines and various paper journals dating back to 1998. Almost 30 years of writing. When I fill one up, I go get another one. And my daily writing practice has continued on to this day.
I had been kicking around projects for a couple of years. Maybe I’d collage them, or make paper for new drawings. And they’d just been sitting there, on a shelf – old documentations of my train of thought, my Artist Way morning-page stream of consciousness, to-do lists, joys and annoyances, achievements and failures according to my small artist ego.
This was occupying creative energy I did not really want to invest.
So I burned them. Released them from my shelf, from my psyche, from my need for them to be anything more than what they were – a place to receive thoughts in that moment.
I realized I didn’t need an archive. A library of my thinking mind – ew.
In this season, in my spiritual practices and meditation, I am learning how to detach from thoughts. I’m not trying to stop them (because I can’t). Just, to create some distance between them, and the ‘observer’, as it were.
This little burning ritual was nice (I even had a wee dram at 9 in the morning to honor the occasion – it felt right).
It’s one way of dealing with the mental clutter 🙂