Notebooks

I am a notebook fiend, have been even before I could write. When I was younger my parents had to keep any notebooks they brought home out of my reach, otherwise they would go missing (and eventually rediscovered tucked away in a corner of my room). I loved back to school as a kid because it meant several crisp new composition books that I could carry around. Knowing my love of them my mother always picked up one or two extras for me. 

When we went shopping at dollar stores it was inevitable that you would find me in the notebook section, holding the various books, feeling the pages, seeing how they would lay open. I was rather picky about the kind of notebooks I liked and could spend the entire trip trying out every single on for the right notebook. Sometimes they wouldn’t have any I liked and other times my parents had to talk me out of buying 15 of them at once.

In high school it was disappointing to me that we no longer used the composition books, but I found that I liked having binders. The days before school had me putting in the fresh new pages, carefully dividing the binders with the bright new tabs and carefully labeling them in my atrocious writing. I would then sit back and flip to each section, admiring the pages. The first few days of school I tried hard to write in them neatly, to keep them tidy and organized, it never lasted. Eventually the pages tore, little notes got scribbled in the sides, snacks would be spilled on them and the writing smudged. I knew it was inevitable, but I’d try to postpone it.

Despite my love of notebooks and paper I have always been an inconsistent journaller (is that a word?). I would go in fits and spurts, writing out long entries for a few weeks and then not touching it for weeks or even months on end. I often reused old journals years later because there was still some good paper in them. If I wasn’t journaling I was doing what most teenage girls did, write stories, story ideas and really crappy poetry. Wherever I went a notebook or two was always with me.  

When I decided to become a witch in college I spent months hunting for the perfect notebook for my Book of Shadows, trying out several different kinds of note books and pens to see which felt the best. I had several magical books on the go at one point in time… a Book of Shadows for my spells, a Book of Light (detailing my spiritual feelings which is now scrapbooked… another story), a spiral bound notebook for notes from the books I liked and even binders with lessons I did for myself.

Over time my diligence waned. I slipped into being a lazy witch and an overall “Bad Pagan” (actually I might keep that moniker along with “Redneck Pagan” for the same reason… I find it funny). I wasn’t doing a lot of work on the magical side of my life as the physical realities of being a grown up (you know, work, marriage, mortgage, taxes, wondering why the hell I came into this room) took over. 

I got stressed, I got tiered and generally pissed off at life. And then we had a tsunami of crap (granted both good and bad) happen over the last year and a half that threw monkey wrenches into everything I planned and got me even crankier. I pushed through, did what needed to be done and started to take the chaos in my life and build a new future (with help from an amazing husband, a loving family and friends who didn’t care if I ate the whole pint while talking). Things started leveling out, and I started to get on with day to day life. 

As I went through all this notebooks were constant companions. They gave me release for all the pent up emotions, a chance to get out some of the negative things I was feeling in safe manner. And when I had finally exhausted the negativity and emptied out my soul I had space to fill up with the more positive things in life. Once again another notebook was at my side. Slowly I have started writing about the brighter things I see around me. Little by little the light within is shinning brighter. A notebook absorbed my darkness and another helped me find my light