A sojourn is a temporary stay or a brief period of residence. My mother loved the idea of being 'sojourners', people who will only be here for a short time. This process of recording where I am on the journey, is what I call sojournering. Something like journaling, something like travel mementos, and most of all a recognition that I can't take any person, home, or event for granted; it's all a gift.
This whole writing into the void is a bit weird. I interviewed my Mom during college. I had to do 20 hours of interviews and then write it up for a literary journalism class. Every time I turned on the stupid tape recorder she began to s..l...o...w d...o...w...n and En-un-ci-ate everything. It drove me nuts! I feel like that as I'm trying to figure out how to do this. While I mean every word I wrote in the first paragraph, it's my English essay voice.
I'm full of questions and impatience as I start this: Who am I writing to and why should anyone care? Isn't my life busy enough without adding one more thing on a 'to do' list? Yet I've mostly lost the time to journal. Here at work my dog sleeps quietly under my desk (I LOVE my bosses!), but at home she's ready to play and can't stand to see me sitting around on the couch. This becomes a way to reclaim the need to process my life. Plus it means I won't have to copy email text to send to people. Now I can geekily say, "Just check my blog".
Of course then I'll have to spell out the title . . . and explain that I made up a word.
2 comments:
Hey, folks like you that make up new words keep folks like me in a paycheck.
Can't wait to read more. And see more photos. And see more of you--our last visit was too short.
well, i am just now reading all this supplemental info... verrry interesting! :) it is fun to fill in some of those 'baseline' things i'd never known.
"writing into the void" - that is exactly how i feel about the blog thing, although the occasional comment helps me feel that some of my little missals/missiles are hitting something after all.
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