January 3, 2010
Sunday

Hurry, hurry, open every door! says my heart.
            — Mary Oliver, b. 1935
                American poet

Since the winter solstice two weeks ago I’ve been using The Sacred Journey, a diary/journal/workbook that, in terms of layout and design, seemed to fit my needs as if it had been designed for me. The weeks start on Sunday and the spaces for each day are the same size. (I hate the usual business design with weeks starting on Monday and smaller spaces for Saturday and Sunday.) Each double-page spread offers the days of the week on one side and an almost-blank page on the left. The almost-blank page contains a faint gray circle with a mandala-like symbol inside it, also faint gray. It is exactly the format I use when I engage in my morning C&C (Coffee & Contemplation). Writing down the names of the people I love and the concerns I pray for and making a colored mandala out of them is an idea I adapted from liturgist Sybil MacBeth, whose Praying in Color changed the way I approached my prayer life.

The Sacred Journey’s method offers a lot of suggestions for finding meaning in the natural world and choosing objects and ideas from everyday life to serve as personal symbols. I put no faith in traditional astrology and find the casting of rune stones or tarot cards an amusing diversion rather than a reliable method of counsel about how I should proceed with my life. So although I have the book’s companion symbol cards, I haven’t “pulled monthly symbols for the whole year.”

In recent days I have been reviewing the private journal work I did during 2009. I got 50 pages into the third 150-page notebook this year, an astonishing amount of production for me. A large chunk of it was done while I was in Georgia from early March to early April, and as I ran my eyes over the long passages in purple ink — the indication of how productive I was on my fiction work — I remembered the energy and the focus I found there.

Last night I received an e-mail from the pastor of the church in Walhalla, South Carolina where I had enjoyed so much hospitality and spiritual nourishment during my Georgia sojourn. We have written to each other from time to time over these eight or so months since I became first a temporary member of his congregation and now a friend forever. He sent a link to a website about storytelling that reminded him of me.

Remembering Georgia and South Carolina was just what I needed. On this night before I go back to work, carrying both fear of failure and fear of success, I pulled up the picture below, of the open door of the cottage I occupied at the Hambidge center in Georgia, and found my symbol for January, if not for the whole year.

You come too. Open every door!

From the Archives
January 3, 2005 — Happy Birthday, Back to Work: This was by far the darkest morning of the year. A thick cloud cover made it seem like the middle of the night when I went out for the paper. It was, however, nearly 7:15. It was drizzling some and I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt up. I stooped for the paper and shook the moisture off the plastic sleeve, and when I straightened up I saw, through the droplets on my glasses, shrouded shapes under umbrellas moving like mushrooms along the sidewalk. It was the neighborhood kids on their way to the bus stop. School is back in session.

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