A while ago, I got the idea into my head to make junk journals to sell on Etsy. I got a variety of papers and cardboards and ephemera together to make them and enjoyed the process.
While decluttering last month, I found my stash of handmade junk journals. I’d sold none. I’m not even sure if I’d put them up for sell. Sometimes as a creative, you can have these ideas and instigate them only to fall short of the finish line. Something else might take your attention away, something more shiny or you could allow fear and doubt to step in and paralysis the process from moving any further.
I’m not sure what happened with these junk journals but I felt the urge to just use them on my return from Iceland.
I need something that’s self contained and discreet as I put myself back together after the time away. I felt free and unhurried and playful while away. Now back I have to slip back into responsibilities and worries and demands from others, and to be honest it’s a rough textured blanket against my skin at the moment.
I’m still remembering and wanting to be with the smooth soft caresses of Iceland. And dream into the landscape.
So maybe keeping the bar low. Just making sure I turn up to the page daily and working out the feelings and kinks is enough right now.
Almost like beginning again. Each new day is day one. No pressure and no comparisons just be. I feel attempting this in a clean journal, a clean slate is doable at the moment.
Hence cracking open my homemade junk journal and just allowing whatever needs to turn up, turn up.
I’ve been thinking of moving to the Highlands, buying a small cottage by a loch and swim every morning.
There’s a river too, that haunts the glen, between my cottage and the mountains. I feel it, breathing within the shadow of mountains.
I know this is not just a pipe dream. I know someone who’s done it, made the move across the border, living a blessed life.
I’ve been thinking of an open fire where I’d bake bread with the sun rise and when ready sit sit out on the porch with thick slices, warm and buttered. Dripping butter and the air smelling like home.
My home.
I’m thinking there’s one village store miles away. I walk every other day for exercise. On the way, I bird spot. Blackbird, moorhen, blue tit, eagle.
Small talk with the store owner might be difficult after long moments of silence in my cottage by the loch. In the silence I can hear myself better.
Being a water woman and a mountain woman, I will welcome the solitude and the haunting rolling out before me as nothing would hold me back.
i try to connect beauty using words as healers of possibilities from the state within, the voice, a teacher, a sage, where my poetry winters, where I can see the ‘I’ like a clearing through the trees, where imagination lingers inch wide mile deep, conjuring for change and connection. i try language, not to trick or demonstrate my intellect, but to spark simple, stretching blossoms into ‘we’ rather than ‘them and us’. from the state without, i’m a beast, caged and muzzled. swallowed. cornered and supposedly cowered, i come out writing, wading into dangerous waters, owning my imagination to practice potential futures.
*“An ars poetica poem is a poem examining the role of poets themselves as subjects, their relationships to the poem, and the act of writing.” —Poets.org
Laughter and fun, with trust and communication, honesty and commitment but not in a heavy sense but much love and affection and respect and joy, I spent a long time in a relationship that wasn’t joyful and really what’s the point, life’s too short to waste time and energy on people who don’t treat you right or who aren’t happy in themselves, I want to be with someone who makes time for me and us, just like I make time for them and us, hey I get it, people are busy, leading busy lives but I’m of the belief that if you want to be with someone you make time and effort to be/do just that.
Living Wild Studios 