I’ll share a couple of photos here with you. I’ve been trying to scribble into journals for ages. Here in the first photo, you can see a motley collection. The leftmost six are old magical journals from mostly the ’90s, and most of them are not full. I got most of those little journals at Waldenbooks at the mall back when Waldenbooks was still a thing.
A photo from me on the floor at an awkward angle in the dark using the flash…this is actually the bottom left nook of what I use for my altar space. That paper sticking out in the back? Apotropaic little charm: my take on Abracadabra.
The two black Moleskines that follow are a straight-up journal and a dream journal/daily journal I filled up back in 2013? Then we get to the magical journals since I restarted my practice. In order, they are: Antic Delights, Connoisseur of Chaos, Raven Singer, Other Phantom Children, Dream Squalls, Fog-Choked Choirs, Calamity Gaps, Lapis Mind…
And there at the far right is my copy of Evolutionary Witchcraft.
…The Shining Plain, and then I started using Leuchtturms–Hunt for Stars, The Forest Floor, Seas Black & Roiling, The Strange Girl, Dark Sky Symmetries (out of sight here), Vibrant Chaos & Shapes, Many-Colored Self, The Sound of Shining Light (I flirted with big fancy ones again–changed back to Leuchtturms), Powers & Potentialities, and Burning Wind Dance. I finished off Burning Wind Dance, “book XIX,” last night, and I’ve started journal #20, The Starlight Hosts about Me. Their titles come from phrases that jump out at me at some point as I write, and my categories here on the blog reflect whatever journal I’m working on. I also use the current title as my blog subtitle.
I was pretty drunk when The Starlight Hosts about Me emerged.[1]
Anyway, I’m actually impressed I’ve gone through twenty books-worth of magical rambling since 2013. I average about 2-2½ months these days for a journal, and I do transcribe them (daily, when I can manage). My transcriptions tend to be, with the Leuchtturms, 90-pages of two-column 12-point type, single-spaced, not counting footnotes. Burning Wind Dance wound up being 34,413 words.
A lot of them are rambly, ranty, weird, dreamy, repetitive, and so on, so don’t think I’m generating “rough drafts” even, at that rate. They include magical records and note-taking and reflection.
I know many folks have shelves filled with journals and such, so I’m not competing, but I thought I’d mark this milestone (bookmark?) while observing how one of the ways I’ve marked my own magical calendar is through these books. And, well, something about that seems pretty cool.
Featured Image: ninocare/Pixabay
[1] I also have a ton of drunk-Quendarin to make sense of at some point. Many of my footnotes tend to be me trying to make sense of whatever Quendarin I pulled out.