Welcome to Episode 58:

I was sipping my coffee this morning with a pen in hand, a notebook and I was thinking how to write this share. All of the contradictions of writing diaries or journals started to tumble out on the page, because journals no matter what are reminders. They are a pin point in time. They can be so illuminating and revealing, and they can painful and heart breaking, or just merely fabulous, because there you are, you were there all of the time.

LISTEN HERE TO THE TRAVEL DIARY PODCAST SHARE

Writing diaries is not foreign to me, as I have been some one who has put pen to paper in a notebook since I was eleven since I was first was given a diary with a padlock, and even though I had nothing interesting to say it was just a safe place to find some self expression. I guess it all began there….

Some of my diaries I have kept and some I have thrown in the fire place, it turns out if you write journals for thirty or more years that they are going to take up some space. The only ones I have really hung onto are my travel journals, obviously I would never want to erase them in any way, but I guess I have realised over time what a great resource they are…. And I think another beautiful layer of the travel journey…. They can be very practical too, reminding one of certain details, or events and moments that took place, and then they can be a wonderful way to just spend a moment at a cafe, writing and musing over events, concerns, any dramas, all of it, all of it I think is , I know I have said this before but I think the journal is a great companion, it can be an anchor for the days and a life line if needing one. Sometimes it can just help you get your head clear, and that always makes for a better day…. Mostly I just love the memories they evoke, writing things down can be super for reliving the moment down the track, or maybe even twenty years later. Write it once live it twice kind of thing…

`A happy moment after a fine lunch in Milan and some writing time too…`

Musing over this share this past two weeks I was thinking about the art journals too, when we had a family trip to Europe I got the girls a visual journal with white pages, some washi tape and one of those Instamatic cameras that take photos and print them on the spot. I have fond memories of the girls taking images of the Notre-Dame and Santa Maria Novella and taking the little slide out of the camera flapping it around like butterflies to get the image to develop and then later at the day back at the apartment they would glue and tape all of their images and write details from the day. Those diaries are cherished objects to me now…

`Maddy with the Instamatic Camera in Florence….`

And what do these people have in common? Jean Cocteau, Cesare Pevase, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Kurt Cobain, Frida Kahlo, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Anais Nin and John Ruskin…. They were all Diarists and writers of a certain moment in time. And they found solace on the page, and for some of them their diaries were published for public consumption too.

Sometimes my diaries are just a bunch of thoughts, or quick scenes, or things I ate, and the restaurant. Sometimes they are deep and full of observation. Sometimes they just say where I am. My best diaries from traveling were scribed when alone, but all of them no less are unique and significant regardless of the detail, they were a moment, a simple moment, a holy moment, and one that will not be repeated….. I love what May Sarton wrote in her book Journal of a Solitude, “I’m here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened”.

For Sarton it was writing in her diary that gave her the space to catch up with herself and connect again. It was her springboard. I think it can be a great way to take care and sometimes to work out the best foot forward.