February 13, 2007
Tuesday 

A woman rarely becomes a poet because the fathers tell her to keep her body closed and the mothers agree. If you want to write, you will have to be as open as the sea. Apertura illuviosa.
            — Pablo Neruda, 1904-1973
                Chilean poet and political activist
                quoted by Deena Metzger (to whom the remark was made)
                in A Sabbath Among the Ruins

Today is the eighth anniversary of the founding of The Silken Tent — A Journal of Personal Essays. It is also the ninety-sixth anniversary of the birth of my mother, who died in 1993.

It was coincidence that brought the two events together. A look at my paper journal from January and February of 1999 shows that I was spending a lot of time pondering regrets and wondering what to do with the rest of my life. I was reading Evening, a novel by Susan Minot, whose central character is in her final illness:

She scanned the shelves of her life . . . After she was gone there would be no one who knew the whole of her life. She did not even know the whole of it! Perhaps she should have written some if it down . . .

I’ve been writing some of it down steadily for a little more than fifteen years, with more spotty chronicles going back to 1980.  I use 8.5×11 top-bound spiral notebooks I buy at Millersville University’s campus bookstore. I use two sides of 75 sheets, for 150 pages a book. The passage above is found in Notebook #8, numbered from 1992. Last month I started Notebook #22 of handwritten material, produced along with several hundred of these online essays and a crate full of fiction in various stages of development. It appears, then, that I’m writing at least twice as much as I was before.

It’s a convention of the online journal community to mark your “journalversary.” I did so from 2000 through 2003, but neglected it (by way of neglecting the online journal itself) the last three years. In 2002 I wrote:

I was thinking about energy, about perpetual light, about the energy of the past, the present, and the future, about how it might be possible to become connected with all the selves I ever was, about how I might come to wholeness and redemption.

I am not just thinking about energy these days, I am moving with it. I am writing more stuff and better stuff than I ever have before. I have more people in my life who encourage me in everything I do. If you are reading this, then chances are you are one of those people, and I bless your presence in my life.

In my paper journal for February 1, 1999, I noted that a friend had asked in an e-mail, “Are you writing anything I’d like to read?”

I am now.

I am as open as the sea.