Sometimes it is just the act of moving a pen across the page that makes me feel good, no matter what is written (or drawn). Is it that thoughts are being expressed? I am not sure. Why also do I enjoy seeing pages fill up in the journal so much? A form of capturing a process, evidence that one existed during a period of time?

I have a real love for journals, blank books. I can hardly resist looking at them in a bookstore, and almost every time I go into a bookstore, I buy one. I always have several new ones at home so that when I fill one up, I have a selection to choose from, to choose the next one.

No matter how much work I do on the computer, how much easier it is to type than to write by hand, there's something about writing on nice paper with a pen that fits my hand that just feels right. I don't know what it is, exactly, either, but it's a very satisfying process, and very satisfying to look back at a journal with every page filled.

Just this weekend I took a stack of old journals from a bookcase and stored them away so I could use the bookcase space, and I opened a few of them to random pages, reading brief passages from the things I was interested in, or worried about, five or ten years ago. A history, meaningless to almost everyone else but me.

wish jar journal: what it is