Thousands of words, hundreds of pages, years of journaling…up in flames… Intentionally.
A few months ago, a friend and I were talking about what to do with our old, personal journals. I’ve had mine sitting around for a while thinking I’d reread them, but I’ve only glanced at them and reread a few entries. The most interesting was writing out 40 days of prayers during Lent one year.
The content of our journals were our feelings at the time…my journaling was more therapeutic than anything else and so I decided I didn’t feel the need to keep them anymore. The same held true for my friend, so we decided to burn them, together. We would create some sort of ceremony making it an event of some significance.
And so we did.
She came over and we built a fire in the fire pit in our backyard. We said a prayer, and sat around talking about all the memories we accumulated over the years, while throwing our papers into the fire.
One memory that surfaced while we were talking, was from years ago when all our kids were school age (our two families got together often and had many bon fires over the years). We would get together at the end of the school year, build a bon fire, and the kids would throw in their collected school papers from the past year into the fire.
That is what my friend and I did…We threw out all the written pages of our learning over many years, hopefully maintaining wisdom from all the experiences we had.
Amen.