This topic may not pertain to you if you don't keep a journal. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I am an avid believer in journal writing. It is a stress reliever, a creativity booster, and an educator all in one. The things you learn about yourself and different writing techniques are endless. Consider a journal to be a narrator of your life/thoughts.

I want those of you who do keep a journal to take an entry that you find to be different from most; an entry with ENERGY and elaborate on the thoughts you jotted down in that entry. Take that single thought/idea and pick it apart piece by piece and make something beautiful out of it.

My entry of choice would be the entry I wrote about settling down:

It hit me today, while listening to the radio on my way to class. They were talking about remembering their first phone number from the first place they ever lived.

765-5175 Massachusetts
281-6399 Pennsylvania
248-5159 Massachusetts
928-0407 Connecticut
963-2080 Connecticut
764-8211 Massachusetts
267-1837 Massachusetts
764-2354 Massachusetts

I remember all of my telephone numbers. The sad thing is...I had all of these telephone numbers in a 4 year span of time. From 6th grade to 10th grade, these are all of the places I've lived.

I understand now why I can not commit; why I need constant change. It is due to my inability to settle. I moved around so much during my most impressionable years; the years I learned the most about life and myself. I got off on the wrong foot of life during those years.

My goal in life is like any others... To build a beautiful home that I can call "home" and live happily ever after there. Will I be able to do that? Will I be able to face the fear of settling down and commit to my life-long goal?

At this moment in my life, I do not know what I want. I am facing these dead end streets with every hobby, job, relationship. Am I bored with them? Am I scared of them? I am out experimenting with my life. It's my newest project-learning what my life is. Who is the girl behind the mask?

Journal entry; 8/1/__ Going upriver, pass some houses, no walls, thatched roof, folks are naked, comfortable, Some fishing, kids swimming. Paradise and poverty all wrapped together a, balance of both. I want to go further into this jungle, farther from all of the world I know. I'm not trying to deny my world, this world is seducing me...with its beauty, its mystery. I can't explain this place, maybe I should live here, raise a kid here along the river bank, listen to the River, learn from the kid, grow my soul.

As I re read these words from a dozen years, I think immediately back to the photogragh exercise, the kid with a bucket of kittens. The feelings are the same, I want to be important to someone. I'm heading for my wild place, my hideout. I'm gonna have myself brothers after all. I'm going to vanish into a world so wild and foriegn that it is the definition of mystery itself. I returned to "The Mother" the jungle as metaphor for the womb of life. From that place, from that womb, I found my brother...in that finding, I found me.

As a footnote to this, as I lie on my bed typing this post, a beautiful copper kid is lying beside me. He is 14 now, much older than the little wild boy I first saw all those years ago. He's working on his English assignment. It's hard for him, English is not his first language. He and I are a long way from that River bank, he is not my brother, he is my son. Adopted, and now living here with me, he, too, is in a world foriegn and mysterious to him. He is my second son from the jungle, he has a brother, now in college, whom I also adopted. They have taught me much. We go back there as often as we can. Next summer we'll be there for a couple of months. Once again I'll be home, along that River, In that jungle, with my brothers.

How could I improve the style of writing in my Journal?