'They Have You in That Box' - Unless....

One last story on this subject, this one from a rainy night in a Vermont library when a couple dozen people came to a session I gave about setting your truth down on paper.

It started with someone raising her hand to ask what the difference was between writing a journal and keeping a diary. A puzzler. We decided maybe a diary was something you expected others would someday read, while a journal was perhaps more persona – or was it the other way around?

What we were talking about was the practice where you took up your pen every day and just scribbled away, hoping to figure out what you were getting at.

“So is there one place where YOU personally write down everything?” somebody asked me at one point.

“Well, maybe not everything,” I answered truthfully.

“So you censor yourself?” someone else asked.

“We all censor ourselves,” said a third person over by the windows.

“My children don’t know the real me!” exclaimed a woman in the back.

“They see you as their mother,” replied someone up front, turning to face her. “They have you in that box.”

“Then will they never know us?” asked another. “Never know who we really were?”

It was a great session.

At the end of it somebody asked why we wish to journal at all.

I groped around for an answer. To relieve our burdened hearts, I said. To catch ourselves at our most honest. To say, in however shy or oblique a way, how much we appreciate the beauty of the little world we find ourselves set down in.”

But any truths I may have spoken were nothing compared to the truths I heard uttered in that workshop, at the end of which I was so dazzled I forgot to hand out the Contact Information cards I always carry as a way of holding on to people. As a result, though I can still call up most of their faces, I don’t have a single one of those good people’s names.

That didn’t matter so much, as I knew even then. What mattered was that they had each other’s: as I packed up to leave that warm room, they were all busily swapping phone numbers and addresses.

Ah, to have found my voice and used it all these years: what friendship and accompaniment it has brought me! And how happy I have been to think that I can now help others find and use their voices too!

Where's Waldo?

I never did say the week before last that I was writing from the Mexican border practically. Sometime when I travel I don’t say so here, even though this place is the place  of all places here I try to be utterly honest. Maybe it’s some sneaky thing left over from childhood, some need keep a thing back, keep it for myself, the way I did with that cat’s-eye marble I saved in an old cigar box as a small child and took out to play with when we got sent to our rooms. My sister Nan and I got sent to our rooms quite a lot for some thrilling piece of mischief Nan had thought up for us. We LIKED being sent to our rooms, she would remind me as we were led away to our separate confinements and that was actually true, at least for me. I used the time to blow spit bubbles and play with my secret treasures. I think she used it to think up more mischief.So that's one part of it my holding back about where I am as I write. Another part comes from realizing how dumb it is to tell everybody everything, show your money to strangers so to speak the way an uncle ours did as a child, riding the train all by himself in his short pants and his little wool cap. Why not give out my Social Security number while I’m at it?Finally if I’m honest I’ll admit that part of is it that it’s always slightly wrenching for me to leave home, even for a while. Thus if I don’t say I’m away I can pretend I’m still looking out at the world through my own wiggly window panes, still passing that same bad patch of grass you pass when you circle our corner-lot house to get to the garage. If I don’t say I’m away I can pretend I’m still there in that house I leave from every weekday morning at sun-up to go to the Y. (This is also true: If I don’t say I’m away I can tell myself I’m actually AT that 9am Pilates Class.)Anyway I’m away now, as Wednesday's post indicates, only this time I'm the only one who went away while everyone else stayed home. This means I'm sleeping alone in a giant bed over with a ceiling fan silently paddling the soft air overhead. The sheets are clean and cool, and it's pitch dark  until  almost 7. Yesterday I ate a great meal of salmon, asparagus, rice and a nice glass of wine. I also walked and read and time-traveled with my old partner in crime. No getting sent to our rooms this time. Also for me, no Pilates. :-)