journal ninety-seven

i've been keeping them for 34 years. here on substack, i hope to share little windows into these journals--and my life--as i move to spain. but what is it i am attempting?

i started my 97th journal last week.

as a freshman in college, an assignment in my very first drawing class was to keep an art journal, a sketchbook of sorts, but words were allowed. I never really stopped since then, thanks to professor vermeulen.

i was in awe of professor vermeulen. she was everything i hoped to be as an adult: a professional artist, always completely put-together, classy but artsy all at once. slender, like no woman on either side of my family. naturally graying hair coifed in a perfectly smooth low ponytail. i may not have managed to follow in her footsteps in all of these ways, but i will always be grateful to her for encouraging my drawing style—and getting me started on this addiction to keeping an art journal.

there have been years where i have only filled one or two, others where i’ve easily filled six or seven. when i lived in spain i filled journals non-stop.

my journal will, as it always has been, a repository for it all, sometimes more words (as professor vermeulen admonished me that freshman year of college), but always documenting my experiences along the way in both words and visuals. unpolished, captured without pretense, “messy little attics of the mind,” as susan boyt says. and thanks to modern technology, i get to share bits and pieces of it here with whoever might be interested in what i am attempting to do.

what am i attempting?

i have thirty more years on this earth, if i am lucky, and i am trying to just not waste them. to slow down and do less—in order to do more of what matters.

less. more quality.

the antithesis, in other words, of what is driving america into its “end of an empire” era, and driving me away from her as she does so. i am hoping to piece together a life that is that antithesis, on the north-eastern coast of the iberian pensinsula in the south of europe.

i don’t know where these thoughts, or this life, will go. but i know i will be documenting them in my journals—and sharing them with you here. let’s at least attempt.