Every Day Carry

A Love-Affair with Journals

These days I’m realizing I’m not an artist in the typical sense of the word.

Yes, I do large, stand-alone works, some of which are for sale here on the website.

Yes, I occasionally have art shows and display my work.

Yes, I have a studio space and Do The Things associated with art-making, and own several easels, tripods, and the like.

Yes, I have merchandise and prints available.

But the older I get, the more I engage with art, the more I uncover the truth of who I am called to be, the more I find that words like “artist” kind of rest like ill-fitting clothes upon me. I am… more… faceted and multi-dimensional… than a single attribute. I desire to not be constricted.

Perhaps it’s the ADHD.

As long as I can remember, I’ve shifted from one artistic discipline to the next — poetry, music, painting, writing, drawing, crafting — as effortlessly as swimming in water. My mother called me “fickle,” a word that still cuts today, and peers often looked on in dismay as the thing I had devoted my creative life to last week lay abandoned for the new muse as I reinvented myself again and again. I lived in a world of wonderful possibilities, and the pursuit of artistic adventure was too inspiring to resist. How, I ask, can one live their entire life not seeing what’s over the next hill?

The one constant has been my journals, which bear the notes, scribbles, and doodles of all the things that pique my interest throughout my day, things I feel important enough to jot down, and things I must remember for later.

Journals allow me to be myself.

Unlike a gallery show, which requires a cohesive artist statement and unified collection of work in a single medium with a central theme, my journals transform with me from moment to moment, day to day, year to year. I have a box with all of my journals from 2015 on, the only ones remaining of the journey from high school through college, the early years of life in Washington, and my subsequent exit from a marriage turned abusive. Nine years of scribings out of over 20 (am I really that old?). I go back through them about once a year to remind myself where I came from and where I’ve been. But the message is bigger, and more filled with hope: in perusing where I came from and where I’ve been, I can also see how far I’ve come.

I get tangible testimony to the growth in my artistic skills on every page filled with sketches, poems, dreams, scribbled music notation, prayers, diagrams of projects, plans, and more.

I get an overhead glimpse of the faith walk from my pre-Christian mess to my current state of intimacy with Christ.

And it’s a comfort in a world that seeks to boil people down into their job, make them cardboard cutouts of themselves.

Amongst the pages, it is not just a life, but a intimate portrait.

I gather up my things before leaving the house, and the last thing to be packed in my grey messenger bag is my worn travelers’ notebook. I leaf through the small 3 x 5 inch pages, glance at my itinerary for the day, and then fold it shut, securing it and the pen, two pencils, and waterbrush in the leather cover with a elastic band. It’s almost time to upgrade to the A5 paper size — something a little bigger and more fitting for the size of work I do these days. But not yet. The Celtic cross charm I affixed to the inner bands nearly a decade ago, a blindly prophetic act to my impending salvation back in December 2018, jingles as I settle the bundle inside my bag. I exhale and grab my keys.

Ready to go.

The world awaits.