To journal is to engage in the rebellion for expression… to cultivate an inner life’s relationship with the outer world… in a time and context where so much of human expression is being legislated against, censored, brainwashed, beaten out of us. In a time where we are so socialised into shame-culture that we often unintentionally become the vehicle for it ourselves.
In a time like now, many comparisons could be drawn with George Orwell’s novel 1984. A novel that tells the story of a man, living under an oppressive totalitarian system of extreme censorship, that decides to secretly keep a journal. In the writing of this journal, his life for a moment re-explodes back into possibility… intimacy, creativity, love unfolds.
It feels salient to me that the journal is the pathway into this self-discovery, this bid for freedom of the human soul within a system so hell bent on destroying it. This is because the journal is somehow the most private and secret way that one could externalise the imagination…It is small, easy to hide. It requires simple tools, a notebook and a pen… technologies so very available… and even if there was a lack of those… anything that made a mark meeting anything that could be marked… is journaling.
In a sense, cave-painting was the first journaling.
We make notations of our experience, so that it may speak to other moments, other times, potentially other people.. But if not that, potentially ourselves. The idea of the other, this projected possibility of dialogue, even in the absence of no one… it does something magical to the circumstance… it opens a portal for this infinity to speak to other infinities. In this way, all writing is a kind of sigil, a sigil for the expressive communication of a moment to reach beyond itself, to be in intimacy with other moments.
In a world of so much disconnection, in a political climate that encourages division (not only between us but also within ourselves… how many parts of yourself have you tried to disown recently?) journaling allows us to re-weave back together the interconnectedness of all things… and in doing so, cultivate the energy of uniqueness, that is the vibration of nature itself, and thus plugs us into aliveness and the regenerative moment.
What I’m saying is, to keep a journal is to radically cultivate your inner life and its communication with everything else… its to heal the divide, and fix the communication breakdown that would then allow us to recalibrate our world to the symphonies of love and art and creativity articulated through both of them. Let’s exist in more detail. Let’s refuse to become uniform. Let’s resist capitalism’s over-simplifications. Because they may have the money… but we have the imagination that everything in potential came from.
So, do something radical, grab a pen, and write. Allow the voice of your soul to unfurl in the midst of a world trying to silence it. I am standing here beside you. We are creating ourselves. This is real. Let’s become.
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