Nothing is to be Clung To

as I, Me, or Mine

I started writing a diary when I was ten years old. It was a black notebook, with lined pages. I wrote down all my inner conversations and the things I couldn’t say out loud. I glued special things into it, like a four-leaf clover I wrapped in plastic. As I moved into adolescence and beyond, I continued to write in diaries, journals and notebooks. I took some breaks, of course. When I was hitchiking around, first Canada and then sub-Saharan Africa, I was too busy experiencing to write about it. But as soon as I started having babies I started writing stuff down again, and I’ve done so ever since.

“Dear Diary” was how my vision when I was a child. My diary was an anonymous, benign entity who would listen patiently to everything I had to say. She (and it was definitely a female entity) was very supportive; knew how to keep secrets; listened without interrupting. She was older, and quite beautiful in an Ophelia kind of way.

“I had my first period on Friday 28. Not so exciting. Lassie had puppies on Friday - 7 of them. Period made me more in contact with Mummy. I wish I could do better in school.”

She stayed that way until life got weirder and I was imagining myself a poet. I read HD and Anais Nin and I tried to be as honest and radical as them. I noted down all my odd experiences, and wild imaginings and attempts at poetry. Sometimes I wrote in spirals. I had my notebook with me all the time and I was always ready to pull it out and write a note to my future self, which I think. by then the journal had become. No more benign entity. She was as hardcore punk as she could be and she usually said a rousing Fuck You to whatever I had written.

“How can this language help it? Possibly, a poem could be simply a list, a record of sense impressions. A scientific observation. Yeah. The sun. The moon. The earth. The stars. Wind. This country stinks, of jasmineof the evening, of donkey shit & of poverty and fool, that is, the fools that live for dollars and bread. The sand. The sky. The sea. The fires. We are locked in our room sliding, each into each, the oranges slip down our throats like the jasmine flower of the evening. Our eyes have little knives inside. The sheets. The bed. The floor. The hand. The mouth.”

Then I started having babies, and I wrote to remind myself. I recorded everything: all the firsts, the frustrations, the insights. I logged every change as I navigated the unknown sea of motherhood. I worried, I celebrated, I wrote about my shame and regret, and about the miracles that happened every single day. One baby led to the next, and so on. I kept writing, and recording, and learning.

“moon. head. tummy. legs.” A. Feb 24, 2003

Then we got a farm and I started farming and recording when we planted what and when the hens started sitting and which ones got eaten by the fox and how many eggs they laid. And I still kept writing about the kids, and my marriage, and my small regrets and bigger joys.

“killed six hens today. N. is sick again. I’ll make a nice soup for supper with everything home-grown. Baby ate some chicken shit, I hope he’s ok”

As the children grew and life got hugely more complicated, I continued to record. I wrote articles, a novel, and a non-fiction book. I kept on writing to try to understand the world and that tiny part of it that is myself. The recording itself became heavy, though. I started dividing up my writing into categories and I bought different notebooks for each thing. and then I had one journal where I would do a daily reckoning of the gratitude I felt and the resentment and annoyance that was usually simmering underneath.

“grateful for coffee, for the abundance that surrounds me, for my strong healthy body, for Stella, for my family”

But recently, I’ve had an urge to get rid of flab. I’m not talking about decluttering so much, when you get some stuff from your house and take it to the storage or the Value Village. No, I’m talking about psychic flab, that makes you feel heavy and slow and is a source of stress. I realized that keeping all my journals in the basement in a box was actually seeping away at my sense of self and I decided to have a look at what was in the box.

I found a lot. So much of what I’ve written over the years was just dogshit. But I found some gems as well :

“I woke up with a poem:

Like pilgrims,
Covering their sins with the white of
The lilies

Then I thought it would go into some color

not gold, but the white of a snowy hare. Not
its blood when the white fox finally reaches it. 
Not the red of the tightest slinky dress.

anyway something like that”

This morning, in the aftermath of the strawberry moon, as the wind died down a bit from lastnight’s almost tempest proportions, I had a little bonfire and burned all my old diaries and journals. I read through them all for the second time, before I consigned them to the auto-da-fe, and I spared some. The ones that were purely descriptions of my children as they grew were saved possibly for posterity, possibly for a future bonfire. I cleaned the house. I prepared the fire, and slowly burned through them, then I lit a sage stick and went through the house carefully. I felt sad, then annoyed, then exhilarated.