Life Is Like A Book And Every Day We Write Another Page

For as long as I can remember I have written. First in Diaries as a young girl and then in journals.

There is just something about a book filled with words that someone wrote by hand years before. When my Grandma died. Everyone was choosing memorable keepsakes they wanted that would help them to remember her. I happened to choose her little 5 year diary.

Photo of my Gram’s Diary

It was such a treasure because it was written between the years where she met my grandpa and had my mom! Now if you know me at all, you can imagine how special that is to me.

Pages from my Gram’s Diary

Whenever I pull it out and read it on those rare occasions, I like to picture my grandmother as a young girl, coming home from a date, excited and in love, flopping on her bed, pouring her heart into the allotted tiny little spaces reserved for her in a five year diary.

Part of my story is centered around my journaling. Not only are those books the keepers of my life’s journey but they are a reflection of my own mantra…. I have said over and over again to my kids and their friends that…

Our lives are like an empty book and every day we write another page.

We can look at our books as pages waiting to be filled and embrace them… or we can feel that we don’t have a lot of chapters left. In my case I have to admit feeling kind of stuck, as if I have a lot of torn pages with erase marks and crossed out words all over them. I am fighting  to find my way back to grab a new chapter and hang on with dear life and yet … it is hard when you are tired and older and looking back at  all those old journals… reading and remembering and wondering what the heck happened?

As I sat there reading all the journals in front of me, I couldn’t stop. I read them all.

My journals have been an interesting way that I have captured my past. Like photographs I have different snapshots in way of words on pages. Recently, I found a box of old journals and my Mantra kind of came true for me….

The first journal I pulled out was filled with silly, sad poems…  

first about wanting to fall in love and then about falling  in love and then the rest about my broken heart.

The next was filled with poems from my first marriage. Once again, falling in love and then a lot of writing about what went wrong.

Between having babies  and finally going through a divorce, I found about five more books filled with prayers and poetry and pleadings to God to make it better.  Finally I found one that is not finished about my life now… Once again, the falling in love and struggles and joys it has brought me.

My blog kind of has replaced my journaling in the way of writing in a book. Though I still love to shop for them and buy them as gifts or keep them just in case I am inspired to go sit on a hillside somewhere and write a poem.        

Someone once told me that if anything happens to her she wants to make sure that she has someone appointed that will burn all of hers. I find that so sad. Burning my journals would be like killing a part of my soul. In a way, my words will keep me alive once I am gone. I am so glad that my grandma saved hers.

In my next few posts… I am going to share some of my poetry that I found. Some of them are pretty silly, some are sad, some are quite good and others pretty bad….but they all are parts of me from different times of my life….

Come with me if you like….

Here is the first one…. I wrote it after finding a book that I must have found a few times during my life because it starts out with my son as a baby, and then starts up again with my daughter being born and a lot about my struggling marriage and then I must have found it after I got my divorce and found a lot of pathetic poetry and then a few years later, I was writing about my new marriage… There I was holding my very own quote in my hands… my life written out as a story in a book. Funny how it all came full circle. I was facing my own advice. Knowing it was time for me to listen to myself.

Yesterdays’ Pages

Same Book

same heart

same eyes

same tears

Lost inside the memories

 locked inside the pages

lost in the

rolling around in the grass

laughing

kissing

breathing

dreaming

living….

Yesterday;

 young and stupid

and

so in love

 just on the edge

of tomorrow

Now yesterday’s

filled pages.

Diane Reed

2013