Tag: Journals

HOPE

As the fog of the past few days slowly lifts, I think of it as a symbol of the old year fading away into a bright new year.

Looking at my glass star hanging in our bedroom window.

In looking back at 2024, I marvel at how fast it went. And so much happened. We had a fun, month-long road trip traveling many miles and visiting several friends in the southeastern part of the states. A precious, baby grand-daughter was born in the spring. We went camping with two of the grandkids, agonized over a family member’s health diagnosis, and had visitors from Norway in the summer. 

And then…we started the process of building a house in the fall. It was very stressful and fun, exhausting and exciting, all at the same time, and it changed the tempo of our lives the second half of 2024. 

Fog hangs over the field outside the back of our new home.

Now that we’ve settled some (and really are happy in our new home) I hope we can start up some of our old routines, yet create new ones too. I hope to get back to walking daily, reading and writing, going out for coffee/lunch/dinner, traveling, feeding the animals at the farm, blogging more…things I enjoy doing, along with continuing to decorate and “de-box” (new word???) our new space. 

The word hope has been so much of this past year’s prayers and dreams that I am bringing it along into the new year as my word for the year. I will continue to hope and pray for healing for others and for continued good health and new growth for myself. 

My new year’s resolution is to try a new style of journaling. Tomorrow, January 1, 2025 I plan to print the word HOPE in large letters in my new journal, as we begin another year, in all its uncertainties and wonder.

Up in Flames

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.