Words from the heart

Everything He Touches Dies.

I am your journal. You made me once and now you can make me again. Allow me to explain…

You were wondering how to use up all the nice prints you’d made over the years. Maybe eight years, maybe more. They were lovely prints, full of color and form. You found incredible ways to combine them all, often in ways that went against most people’s thoughts regarding mixing, matching, clashing, fitting, cutting, and assembling. Once you’d learned how to selected the hues and apply them to the papers, you couldn’t stop. It was pure joy turning out print after print. Until.

Until you had filled bin after bin with wild and less than wild reds, yellows, violets and there were no bins left to store them. They were thrown into a big jumble because you didn’t know what to do with them once they were printed. You never considered the why, just the I need to. Almost none would end up framed. You never considered what size paper you should use and certainly what size frames was appropriate. Why should you? They weren’t intended for sale. It was only the ecstasy of creating them that impelled you to keep on.

Then you stopped. You didn’t forget about the lovely, colorful papers, but gradually you started to ignore them. They reminded you of your terrible lack of follow-through, your lack of focus, your nonexistent plan to do something with them. Plus, they seemed so flawed, with a blurry outline or a smudge where it shouldn’t be. Better to toss them aside and hope the papers could figure things out for themselves.

That wasn’t happening. And because it wasn’t happening, it became useless to make more prints to be tossed into the bins and increase the overflow. Sometimes, if you bothered to look as you walked by, the paint-filled papers took on an ugly appearance, as if the pretty colors were all running together in loud smears. You vowed to get rid of the countless stencils, some of which were purchased, others made by you and just as successful. Those stencils were occupying several types of magazine holders and you’d forgotten the designs you had.

For a while you were successful in establishing a balance between the nice papers you’d enjoyed making so much and the guilt at having abandoned them. You tried other things, I know, and some of them were also rather successful. You drowned yourself in fabric for a while, and that could have gone on indefinitely. You made brilliant quilts, curtains, clothing, bags of all kinds. Once again, you were hungry for colors and patterns, although you never asked yourself why that was so.

I know that sewing reached its limit as well, and you had nobody left who would welcome your creations, nobody who wanted to snuggle inside the cover made so fondly, nobody who needed a travel case with a zipper, nobody who might welcome a hand stitched table cover or laptop case. You wearied of the books you’d gotten for patterns, so you began giving them away, hoping they’d find a better home than you could give them. Fortunately, you were able to keep from thinking about the hundreds - thousands - of dollars spent on books with instructions, and the exodus began. Mostly it was books, but you did manage to part with some fabric. You won’t allow yourself to think about what still remains. But I digress.

At one point, while panicking about a life with no purpose (yours) your eyes wandered back to the pretty papers that were (in a way) the cause of it all. You had to confront your problem. You thought long and hard, finally realizing that you’d never cared about centering designs perfectly on a sheet of paper and really never wanted to frame your work, much less sell it. What would you charge? Five dollars? Ten? You’d only started printing and painting because you could turn the results into books.

Books. Your first and only love, and yet you had forgotten that. After all, you hadn’t been the most faithful person to anybody. People weren’t a priority, but the reality within our pages? Well, you needed that. So finally, finally, you realized there was a solution to the uncomfortable truths scattered among the papers that lay haphazardly in bins. The solution? Just make books out of them. The more accurate term might be journals, but they count as books, since they’ve got covers and pages, too. There’s a difference, however.

Journals don’t start out with words. They do have images and colors, though. And maybe lines in order to guide the writing. They just don’t have words. Until. Until they are written in. So here I am, your journal, resting on your nightstand or your desk, waiting. I’m in no hurry, but you should be, because my heart nestles next to yours. I am one of your creatures, kind of a miracle. Waiting, but not smiling, since I am not human, am an inanimate object. Maybe.

You made me, maybe did not plan how I would turn out, but simply following an idea or a hope. You chose my pretty colors - although all colors, whether paint or human races - are pretty. You chose to make me, as should happen with any baby, and after the papers were done, you shaped me. You gave me a simple form, and it’s a good one. I have twenty eight pages and a simple pamphlet stitch for binding. I was inexpensive, but now you have me, colorful and anticipating. I might even have some advice for you, which is a bit ironic, since as yet I have not acquired any words. Let me see…

This will be a simple task, but I see it as essential to your survival now. I am asking you not to walk on by, like in the song, but to stop, and use me. Choose your mist elegant (serious, rich, hopeful) ink, fill your favorite fountain pen, and write. Write your heart out, and as you do, write your heart into me, love my surfaces like your own body, let my fibered texture permeate your fingers, talking and singing your reasons for living. Without me, you will depart and be only silence. I offer you every square centimeter of myself to serve as a repository for you. Give me all you have, even if I’m a mere object, and I’ll keep it safe for you.

Write your heart out, I say. I might be your only hope for survival and I care for you. After all, you made me and anything you write in this space of mine is ours. We can be immortal together; otherwise, we both disappear. Your story with you, and my nice pages with me. We ought not go silent into that dark night, to paraphrase the Welsh poet.

We must not go silent.