I've started a new project recently, I took one of the beautiful bound journal books I've received from my friends, and dedicated it to be what I'll call here a "Book of Records". It's not a journal, though in a way it is a journal, for it includes my most inner thoughts. This book will contain a certain aspect of my thoughts, and will be dedicated to hold a specific topic only and all I can think of related to that one topic. This "Book of Records" I've started will include all my thoughts those related to religion.
A journal, a diary, is normally a book that records your life and your thoughts about everything, and as you all know, I already have one of those. The need for a new type of book came a while ago when I started researching Paganism as part of the research on religions I've been doing. The idea to make my own Book of Shadows or Grimoire has always been really tempting, specially because in my own way I have been recording in my journals all sorts of verses, spells and mantras that come to me at any time. (Oddly enough I have not recorded my favorite mantra of all, which is "I believe I can fly". ^_^ You should try saying this over and over when you are facing a big test or something that seems difficult. If you can feel it, if you believe you can fly, you get filled with a lot of positive energy and you over come the test successfully. Try it out one day!) However, like it or not, I am not Pagan. I'm just another Generic Christian, like many, many others on this side of the world. This doesn't stop me, though, from reaching out to experience the world and God's mysteries through my soul and my senses, perhaps in a naive believe, that I can't reach out and touch God, and God will be out there reaching out to touch me too, without following the stiff structures imposed by a Church.
A "Book of Records", can be built in any way you want, and can be kept in any way you want. Electronically, on paper, typed or handwritten, recorded like a tape or an mp3, published as a podcast, a streaming, a blog, or a videocast, following a structured order or simply as a collection of thoughts thrown there together to keep them, or to later be summarized and distilled into a book or an article, it can be dedicated to any topic you want. It could be a book where you record all your cooking experiments, and also your thoughts on this or that spice or ingredient. It could be your very personal record of drawing experiments, or your work or relationship journal. It can be your food-journal, where each day you record what have you eaten. It can be your craft-book, where you experiment with new ideas for scrapbooking, or try out a new sequence for a piece of jewelry you've been working on. (I can perfectly imagine that: in a book with thick pages, you glue or fix somehow little pieces of necklace, or a single dangle or earring you've been thinking of. Maybe it's not finished, maybe it's an idea in progress and you don't know how to continue it. Maybe you don't have the beads, but you have an idea of what you'd like to do, and make a drawing, or maybe paste a picture of a piece you'd like to improve or reproduce.)
And yes, why not? A Book of Records could also be the place where you experiment with something that might not be understood by others. You may record ideas of a life as someone else, you record your impressions on something that could trouble others. It could be a book where you write different versions of your own obituary, or you write the obituaries of all those you love or hate or simply come to mind. It could be the place where you experiment and play with the idea of having a different sexual orientation, or religion, or race, or political view, or belief. It could be the book where you record your life as happening in another era, where you imagine each day of yours as happening in other surroundings, other places, other times. It could be the place where you record taboos that entice you, or that you are scared of and yet attracted to.
Secret or not, your Book of Records pretains only you, just like your journal. It's yours, it's personal, and it's a place where you can unload your ideas to stay there, to save them there and even to wait there until you can take them over again and work them into something else.
So what do you say? Would you try out a Book of Records?
5 comments:
I never had a journal, never wrote a blog about my daily life, but this idea is something I would go for. Well, my blog sort of already is a book of record for three important aspects of my life: cooking, travelling, paganism & nature... but I won't write certain things in it, as it's public. I once had something like a grimoire years ago.
I would love to start a new one, since all my old records were plainly copied from books and internetforums without really thinking about it or adding my own experiences.
I have what I call a "book of ideas" though, where I collect things I saw in magazines, like presents to buy, beautiful interior design, probably an article about a special diet or ayurveda. But me stupid, I forgot it in Austria.
have you thought about how to organize you book of records? since I want to start a "grown up" collection to replace my almost 10 year old "grimoire" I've been thinking about it but couldn't quite figure out whether to make it digital or oldfashioned...
"Book of Ideas" might be a better name than "Book of Records". Well, I'm building this first one handwritting it, nothing special, and probably will used post-its or markers to point out things like "this is part of my philosophy on religion" or "this is something I read in a book that gave me ideas", or "this is an interesting spell I found", "this is a rando idea that came to me recently" and so on. I guess there's no easy way to do it, and it depends on how you want to work it. Perhaps, if you want to keep it on paper, do it in a folder or a three or four ring folder, and use divisions for the main topics.
One think I particularly like about this idea of the book of records is that you don't need to keep it neat and orderly. Write in segments, fill it with drawings and pictures, collage it... allow the charm of a little loose disorder to take care of keeping things hidden from prying eyes. This way, whenever you decide to read into it, and open it at random, you'll be surprised at what you find.
There's order in the fact that only one topic goes in it - even if that topic has many, many related topics and sub-topics. It secures a flow. Harry-Potter-speaking, this is your pensive. Just throw the things in it, and let them simmer, cool down, stay. Then, when you want to do something with it, go for it, fish among your records for the pieces that suit your need.
It's free-flow-writing. And don't worry if you can't write down everything at once! You can always paste more pages, add post-its, clip more info, write it down in another page and add little notes like "it continues where the next blue star is" and so on.
When we meet, I'll show you how I'm dealing with my Book of Records, and then you can ask me all the questions you want! :-)
Yeah, a ring folder might be the be st idea, I already thought about it. If you wrote it in a notebook it's hard to find things without having an index at the end. That would work too but it requires quite some maintenance.
I like it when collections look the way you described it but it freaks me out to know that I got the information somewhere but can't find it when necessary. Guess the way of free-flow-writing is something I have to get used to step by step. :D I'm looking forward to seeing yours then :D
Well, in a book like the one I'm building is intended to be a drafting of all sorts of ideas, with no index to put no order in it. Perhaps I was also inspired by the way I used to keep my work notebook. Topics were pretty much in disarray, so in order to get all my notes from different meetings on one topic, I had to page over and over the whole thing. Eventually I developed a "system" where I designated a given sign or color to each topic, so if I wanted to look for, lets say, all my notes on "chocolate pudding" I would look on the margin of the pages for all the brown dots I draw. This also helped me do crossreferences during meeting, as so, if someone mentioned the chocolate pudding and said something important about it, I noted it and imediatelly put the brown dot on the margin.
The idea isn't originally mine. Bookkeepers and auditors use it when auditing, to cross-reference things and find things that relate to each other, by making markings on the margins with different color codes.
I'll most definitively show you mine, and hope you don't laugh at it! (You'll understand when I show you...)
Gracias Libe! A veces también se me pasan los meses sin tocar el diario, pero cuando lo saco y le dedico un rato a escribir me siento tan bien y tan... liberada! Tener un diario es algo maravilloso.
Con el Libro de Pensamientos - por ponerle un nombre adecuado en Español - la idea va siendo tomar algo de esa idea y dedicarla a un tema en especial. Lo mejor es que no necesita ser precisamente de escritura, sino que es un repositorio de todo lo que se te ocurre de ese algo. No sé si los Libros de Pensamientos ya existen, pero creo honestamente que serían una gran herramienta tanto en el campo creativo (tanto artístico como artesanal), como en el investigativo.
Me alegra mucho que te haya gustado!
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