How to Be an Effective Journal Writer

Mood Book, Inspiration Board, Journal, Diary, Notes, Saving Words: which do you do?  Perhaps more accurately, Which do you wish you did?
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“We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”  Joan Didion

     "The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess."  Joan Didion

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Pic, above, here.
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"The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily — perhaps not possibly — chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation."  Eudora Welty
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"The frame through which I viewed the world changed too, with time. Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame."  Eudora Welty
 
Pic, above, here.
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Each Garden Design, above/below, centuries old in concept, yet newly created.  Where are you upon their path?  Don't like?  Want?

 
Pic, above, here.
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Which garden/s, above, have a guild?
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If life, at its most abundant, happens at the margins, what are the margins in all of these gardens, above?
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All of the gardens, above, have complete layers, well known dozens of centuries before Christ's era.  Can you name them?
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Somewhere along the way, we lost these things.  Layers of our own survival.  Accepting roadmaps of those layers instead of reading their territory.  Each of these gardens, above, pure signal, no noise.  When did we settle for noise?  Why?  Pics/words today carefully curated, 30+ years curated, with experience deep/broad/hard/fun/frustrating/joyful/sublime.  Don't like any of the gardens, above?  That's fine, you're not ready.
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A friend, now in her 70's, from earliest friendship, always jotted in a notebook.  Seeing her do this I knew I wanted that for my life too.  Several notebook purchases later, and a decade plus, still nothing "jotted in a notebook."
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Much time passed.  Then epiphany, I had begun filling those journals/notebooks.  Organically.  How often a day's reality entered?  Perhaps....never.  Sublime truths from days of life?  Unlimited.  Strangest of all?  From the collage of realities in those journals, with specificity, exact replicas appeared in my life.  Without effort, or seeming forethought.  No mission statements.
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“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains?”   Walt Whitman
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"Walt Whitman asked in his diary as he contemplated what makes life worth living after a paralytic stroke, then answered: “Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”  Maria Popova, Brain Pickings."
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How to be an Effective Journal Writer?  Buy notebooks, journals, want to be an effective journal writer.  WANT to be.  Breath.  It will arrive.
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At the front end, all I wanted was to design beautiful gardens.  Little realizing I was asking for, life.

Garden & Be Well,  XO T
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Eudora Welty, below.
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Pic, above, here.