Know Thyself
Photo: Christy Higgins, “Caroline’s Granddaughter”, Oaxaca, 2019
As a ‘tween in the early 80s, I was bewitched by all things paper, pen, and office supplies. My neighborhood friends and I played games like “Shop Owner” and “Restaurant”, which necessitated taking orders and filling out forms. Any form would do, but I had my favorites. I remember walking the aisles of our local stationery store feeling excited about what new colors of manila folders or accounting ledgers I might find on the dusty shelves. I pined after all of the colorful stickers, decorated pencils, sealing wax, stamps, and pretty stationary sets. By the mid-80s I was a teenager and my ultimate happy place was the Hello Kitty store; it was the most novel of novelty shops as far as I was concerned, which meant enough dopamine hits to last me for hours if not days. I could never get enough of the tiny plastic purses, Japanese candies, and kitty-stamped notepads on display. It was a bacchanalian feast for a stationery-obsessed youth and I was guzzling the wine!
Collecting stickers, stamps, pens, paper, and wax was not an empty gesture; I used all my supplies regularly. At school, my friends and I hand-wrote a lot of letters, usually at the end of class after we had finished our school work (sometimes before, depending on the urgency of the information: “Just so you know, I do like Mike now! Don’t tell anyone!”) As a dedicated member of this underground teenage communication network, I did my best to keep the secret channels of information flowing. Like a paper river that involved a near-constant exchange of letters, we went into action between classes and after school. Letter writing was to us kids in the 80s what texting and social media are to today’s teenagers, only instead of likes, emojis, and hashtags, we hand-decorated our letters, folded them with origami precision, and wrote post-scripts at the bottom: PS…Stay Sweet. PPS…BFF. PPPS…I ❤️ Mike!
In retrospect, I realize these were the early signs of my future obsession with journaling. It began a few years after graduating high school when I participated in a transformational program called The Landmark Forum (previously known as “est” in the 60s & 70s). It was an immersive educational experience in personal transformation through ontological inquiry, a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being. For reasons I may write about in future posts, I suffered from low self-esteem and was looking for a remedy. While The Forum didn’t “fix” me, I was deeply changed by the experience, and participating in it put me squarely on the seeker’s path; one that would open my mind to new ideas and possibilities, and a whole new way of life. With the evolving mandate from within to “know thyself”, I started seeking answers by taking a lot of transformational coursework, engaging in “church shopping,” reading books from the esoteric section of used bookstores, and experimenting with a vegetarian diet; and somewhere along the way, my love for the hand-written word (and all of its accessories) morphed into journal writing.
Like some kind of epigenetic seismic shift, I’d become a seeker at the brink of adulthood and have remained one ever since. Journal writing has been a big part of that and it was born out of the simple habit of jotting down into a notebook important things I’d read for easy reference and contemplation later. As I tried to get to know myself better, writing became my mirror.
I’ve been seeking my “Self” and life’s deeper meaning for 30+ years now, through a variety of channels and methods, and have found the search necessary, exhilarating, and deeply rewarding. My seeker nature, however, isn’t limited to only the realms within; it is also what makes me feel open to and fascinated by the world around me. I am as passionate about art, nature, travel, culture, and food as I am about depth psychology, self-realization, and spirituality. I hope to weave my personal story, artwork, and passions into a creative and cohesive narrative that I can share with you here.
Regrettably, I don’t have the journals from those early years of my spontaneous self-documentation project (nor my letter collection from high school - a bad decision from my Kondo phase), but since 2012, I have amassed 63 notebooks and counting of journaling. This collection of journals hosts thousands of pages of personal writings, sage wisdom from a multitude of teachers I’ve read or studied with over the decades, as well as grocery lists, to-do lists, quotes, notes, doodles, dreams, dream interpretations, New Year’s resolutions, and whatever else I deemed worthy of writing down over the past 11 years. I’m calling this entire collection of journals “The Seeker’s Notebook” and it’s the central theme around which I intend to write for this blog. I’ll be sharing some of my most personal thoughts about things I’ve discovered about myself, and life, as well as some excerpts from the pages themselves. I just wish I could send the posts out hand-written on beautiful paper, sealed in wax, tucked into a tiny Hello Kitty purse.