Journal

I teach a lesson at church on the second Sunday of the month. This year, our lessons come from the Teachings of Wilford Woodruff. He is a very interesting man and took his responsibilities very seriously. I have been sitting here this morning reading the chapter that I am to teach my lesson from and pondering what I am going to say. The chapter is on Journals and the importance of keeping a record of our lives. I have never been good about keeping a journal. When I was young I always thought of it as a Diary. You know, you put your secret love crushes and squabbles with your sister in a Diary. All your private personal thoughts that you would never share with anyone. I think that as a 12 year old, I even created crushes just so that I would have something to write about. I have since come to realize that there are many different forms of journals. Journals can be those private musings. They can be an elaborate scrap book, or they can simply be a detailing of the days events. One friend of mine said that her grandmother's journal was mostly a recording of the weather. She had been a farmer and the weather was very important to them and keeping track of it's cycles. As I was reading all of this, I realized that I have in fact been keeping a journal for the past several months. This is my journal.

You can call it a blog, a virtual scrapbook, whatever, but that's pretty much what it is. It's my public journal. I have written my feelings about my family, my knitting, and what is going on in my life. It is amazing what you can learn about people simply by reading what they choose to write about. One of my stumbling blocks to a hand written journal have been that I felt that I had to record earth shattering emotional baggage in it. After all, if you are in therapy or something, don't you write down all your feelings in your journal? I don't have a lot of earth shattering emotions, and if I sit down to write all that I feel I think that I would be a weeping mess all of the time. So, I have been more drawn to the scrapbook type of journal. It involves pictures, little mementos, your thoughts, etc. Of course the problem with this is that it requires glue and such. This is why I like my blog.

I like my blog. I like that I can include pictures, or just type and jabber. I am a much faster typer than I am when I hand write something. My hand writing is clear and legible, but much slower for some reason. I like that I am actually writing for an audience, or can pretend that I am. I am more free to discuss things that I may not actually say if it wasn't written down, but I probably won't talk about things that I shouldn't be dwelling on. If it is so personal that I won't write it here, then I don't think that I want to record it anyway. My kids and my kid's kids don't need to read that either...lol

So, thank you to my virtual blogging community for inspiring me to blog, and to keep my virtual scrapbook/journal. Thank you for letting me share my life and my obsessive knitting. After all, if a farmer records the weather because it is important to her, maybe my grandchildren will read this some day and see how important knitting was to me in this part of my life.