The oracle of old journal entries

What binds you to who you were

Lately I’ve been using my old journals as oracle decks. It started in earnest when my daughter was still an infant. Stuck in bed, unwilling to creak up to grab a card deck from the bookshelf, I’d shimmy my journal from the bedside table and open it to a random page for a divination reading before sleep. In a time when I was floating in a sea of my identity, my journals became a place of profound comfort and grounding.

I’d open to a page and what was there often surprised me. A quote I needed to hear that day. A dream I had forgotten but which spoke so lucidly to where I was currently standing. A bit of wisdom that I likely wrote down in a spare five minutes, but that now, in the tumbled months between, had become a tether to my deeper knowing.

In many old stories there’s a thread that weaves the past to the future.

A thread that one can follow through the forest to find home.

A thread that keeps the weaving of one’s life from unraveling—if you can just keep holding it between your fingers.

My journals became a thread for me. Something that bound me to myself, a through line that reminded me I still existed.

Some days the thread felt like the thinnest spider silk on a web left at dawn. Other times it was the slippery rope of a kite, connected to something so high up and far away I couldn’t see it. And sometimes it was an umbilical cord, some mysterious root that connected me to another, growing half. The part of me that never stopped believing in my own becoming.

Sometimes, in lieu of picking a page at random, I’ll go back and look at an entry from this same day last year. There’s always a bit of wonder to it. Wonder that I moved through whatever passage I was writing to. Wonder that the same themes seem to come up for me seasonally, twinned with the season like the scent of cinnamon.

Wonder that I still continue to grow, to become.

Today, as I watched the first gust of leaves begin to fall, golden-lime and hopeful, from the trees, I decided to look back at what I wrote at last October’s beginning.

There was a longer poem, one that has good bones and I’d like to return to one day….And then there was this, scratched on the margins, complete in only the way a scribbled down nap-time poem can be.

Yearning

river in a world 
without oceans.
to where does
the rain
return?

And so I return to myself, when there ia nothing else to turn to. I come back to the yearning that sweeps in every day of being a mother. That accompanies the slip into autumn. That lives, blessedly, in every transition.

I sit with the thread of who I am.

What are the oracles of your old journals telling you today?

*photos from an autumn years ago, spent wool-gathering and rope-twinning in Ireland