On the Burning of Journals During the Pandemic
Yesterday, I burned all my journals.
For decades, I kept journals. Not just the handwritten “dear diary” sort of thing, but pages and pages of thoughts, meanderings, judgments and hopes, printed out from my computer and meticulously catalogued in binders.
They went with me from New Jersey to New York to Georgia and back to New York, from passion to passion to passion (Renaissance re-enacting, graphic novel writing, professional acting in the City, close contact with a particular rock group, reincarnation studies).
They were how I measured myself, how I could tell where I was in the moment and where I was headed.
They’d been sitting in a box in our basement for nigh on twenty years, untouched since I moved in with my now-husband and found a settled, fruitful life. And when we started clearing out the shelves and rearranging space down there, I found the box and realized I had absolutely no desire to re-read them, or relive those times.
For some, journals can be talismans or TARDISes, and welcome ones. For me, they were million-word-thick remembrances of how I simply didn’t see the world in a realistic way, and set myself goals and fantasies that were never coming true at best, and detrimental to me at worst.
Burning the journals was deeply cathartic. I’ve already taken from those experiences what I needed in order to grow and mature. In return, I’ve gained a compassionate understanding of why people blunder around in their own souls — a quality vital for being a good intuitive counselor. But I don’t need to wallow in the old memories to retain that.
Did my actions shock some people? Absolutely.
“But they were your LIFE! How can you DO that?”
And my response comes from my conception of what happens to us once we leave the body for the greater All That Is.
In these limited forms, we see the world from a point of view that encompasses duality. It’s now vs. then, us vs. them, good v. evil, and on and on.
But once we transition out of the body, we are no longer restricted in how much we can take in, and the personalities we constructed to get us from birth to death are merely a small part of who we are in total.
That means, when we transition, the soul takes from its earthly journey the lessons it needs and desires for growth. The rest is dissipated, just as the words in my journal are now so much ash on the wind.
Does that also mean that “we” don’t matter? Yes — and no. We incarnate on earth to learn things we couldn’t learn otherwise.
So down here, we face darkness, we face negativity, we face all those things that raise themselves up when your consciousness is limited, and it sees these things as “real” instead of constructs. But once this particular incarnation is done, the grievances, the fears, the anxieties, the problems are all shed. What remains are the good and the positive. And that is the truth of your soul.
As we plow on through the years of the Big Bug Adventure, with politics gone crazy and the environment clamoring for change, take the time to dispense with the negatives.
Burn them out of your mind and heart, and look closely to find any of the positives that came out of the recent past— because there will be some.
Whether it was more time to do some self-work, a chance to see what your life was like simplified, or an unexpected blessing, it is every bit as important and life-changing as the pandemic and all its attendant challenges.
