Keep Moving

 Temperatures still hovering around 100. We are still cozied up to the AC. There is no other way.

My sleep schedule has flipped around again, so that I'm sleeping at night. I get about six hours of sleep or so then take a small nap mid-morning. I am finding that when I am awake, I don't feel as zombified as I do when my sleep schedule is reversed and I am staying up all night and sleeping all day.

Today when I got up from my nap, my order from Dick Blick was sitting out by the gate. I had ordered five hardcover sketchbooks and one softcover mixed media sketchbook that I use as art journals, a set of five Sakura Gelly Roll pens, and two Tombow brush pens that came with a small canvas pencil bag. 

New journals (with some old journals and books stacked on top).

 

I've been going through my old journals, kind of, just to date the covers. 

Old journals (with current journals and art supplies stacked on top).

 

The dates overlap (and gap) by a lot because I have always tended to start a journal and then put it down, sometimes for years. Then I pick it back up again or start another journal and then find the old one and work in it until it's finished and then I go back to the new one. I do whatever it takes to keep moving forward and keep the fear of the blank page at bay. There are years when I don't pick up an art journal at all. And I don't just keep art journals, I also keep non-art, strictly written journals and I keep an online journal (more than one, actually), and I often just write on what is at hand, everything from legal pads to 3x5 cards to sketch paper and so on. 

I feel like I never write anything, but then I look back at all my journals and think, when do I ever have time to do anything when all I do is write? My oldest journals go back to high school and are packed away in a trunk that I haven't opened in seven or eight years at least. My newest journals are in a couple of different bins on our bookcases and in various places in the casita. When I finish one, I tend to stuff whatever is lying around into the front cover and then stash it wherever. I found lots of things in the stack of journals when I pulled them out to date them, including the program from an arts and crafts fair I did almost twenty years ago, a book of Day of the Dead stickers, embroidery patterns from a coloring book I wish I could find now, and lots of pages of writing that didn't have another home at the time. 

Here's the thing: I never, but never go back and read my journals. Like, never ever. When I've tried it in the past, it's been painful and embarrassing. It doesn't matter if it's something I wrote last week or something I wrote thirty years ago, it's all the same, like examining old jars of vomit. (This is not true of my old online journals, oddly enough. Those, I actually like to go back and read through. I guess the difference being that when I journal online, I try to make it comprehensible for others who might be reading whereas with my hand-written journals, it's whatever is happening and a lot more feelings, good or bad, and confusion and ugliness without editing or filters to make it palatable to anyone else.) Sometimes I'll skim through an art journal and think: Oh, that's a good drawing. Sometimes I look at them and think: What junk.