Journaling

Keeping some sort of journal is helpful. My mother taught us that, but she also taught it to her school students, and to children in her care at Christian Education Camp of our Yearly Meeting of Friends. For a child, it is helpful in creating writing skills. Journals help families determine what happened when events take bad turns. We worry about privacy and confidentiality in a world where people have ill motivations. But reading old journals takes a person back through their trials and helps them be reminded how they arrived at where they currently are. A journal can be written many ways with any focus. I am not good at writing down daily events. Sometimes I'd like to capture everything people say to me in a day, or everything that happened. But recording everything is impossible.

What made me think about journaling was returning to Phillip Gulley's fiction books about the town called Harmony. I have recommended them to a friend who is going through a difficult situation with a pastor.

http://www.harmonyseries.com/

What made me connect this to journaling was that even though we can write much from memory, there is nothing like having a detailed written account of events that affect our lives. We struggle through the trials in our lives, but when they are resolved, we move on to the next and virtually forget about the entire event and struggle until someone else's struggle reminds us of it. Some of these events need to be written down for all of us to remember. I think the struggle for immigrant rights is one of those topics where those involved in the struggle need to keep accounts and write a book about it in the end.

As much time as I spend on Facebook, and as much as I write here, it doesn't touch most of what happens in one of my days. Patients at work have life-changing traumas. Family members go through terrible events. I go places and do things that would seem inappropriate to write about. Maybe a better word would be insignificant. There are discussions and events that I simply can't put in black and white. I think about them. They affect me.

Today I have 3 big events. I am going to the Farmers Market in hopes of getting more peaches; hoping the chefs publicized as planning to be there (Yay!) won't buy EVERYTHING. But I can go to another farmer's place if I need to for peaches. I am going to go to a Stampin' Up party that my husband's niece is putting on for a fundraiser for their church's youth program. And then I am going to take my older daughter back for her second year in college, a 3 1/2 hour drive one way. That will be probably a 9-10 hour event.

My husband, meanwhile, will be building a small shelter for my sheep and putting up an electric fence for them with a new solar charger I bought a few days ago. I feel like I should be helping him.

This blog is decidedly rambling. It is an online journal. It isn't focused on one political project or one specific topic. There are threads of topics that are important to me. When people around me express interest in learning something about what I'm doing, I sometimes think I should make it a public process here and do a photo story. As the weather cools and my broken toe time draws to an end, my focus' are cleaning up this old farm house, setting up our small sheep herd at our new residence, homeschooling a 5-year-old and returning to work in a hospital during an economy when many people are losing jobs that support their livelihoods. I fast every Tuesday for those who are imprisoned for trying to make better lives for themselves. The locusts are still around but seem to be fading, and one of my old teachers noticed publicly on Facebook that her hummingbirds were beginning to migrate.

I was going to blog about breaking my toe 3 weeks ago. Maybe I will tomorrow. There is too much to do today!