More than 30 years ago, I started writing in a journal. I never missed a day. They were spiral notebooks. There were approximately 15 spiral notebooks, and they were about 100 pages each; I wrote for over a decade. The entire time I was married to my second husband, who was a Rage-A-Holic, and all of the grief that occurred in that marriage - it's in these notebooks. I am destroying them today. I have kept them and held onto them, and thought there would be a reason to have them around, and about a month ago, I said "This is enough."
I bought a shredder today; I thought I was going to burn them, but shredding them is fine. I'm not reading them. No one will read them. It is time to let them go. There is a part of me that realizes this is a huge step in another direction. Just letting go of something like that; all the little shredded pieces go into the recycle bin and they will go off into some biodegradable location, go back into the earth. I'm okay with that. It's an interesting time to purge. Today there is a violent wind storm; (MANY areas have lost power;) there is a continuos howling going on outside, howling by the wind, and my windchimes are quite musical, oddly, while the shredder is purring. I did not think this would be the music of change, but that's what it is today.
I move on and the bits and shards of paper will go back to the earth and make a new tree, perhaps. I am one. I am a new tree. I have "turned over many new leaves" - and left many things, too. Anyway you look at it, I have shed the old, by shredding those journals. I feel oddly lighter.
