Ode to January and a Journal

...a month to “allow yourself to be spelled differently”

Borrowed from my journal on an island in Greece, 1986

Once upon a time, there was a wildly curious but wildly terrified nineteen-year-old girl. She realized one day that her curiosity was wilder than her terror, so she decided to throw it away and step full-force into her wonder. Plus, she wasn’t at all sure about why she was so scared. She liked wild things.

She looked at it as a game of blood-sport. Started to make choices that didn’t please anyone but herself. Started to do things that people questioned, and even berated her for, because they weren’t what she was “supposed” to do or be. She was even called “selfish” just for choosing to do what she really wanted to do. It wasn’t like she was doing anything illegal or cruel. Just stuff she really wondered about. And wanted to learn from and fasten to her heart. And even things that she longed to become. Oh well. She knew that her choices wouldn’t be popular, but she never thought that they would be threatening to people. Either way, she knew that she had to make them despite the consequences. Her life depended on it. And yes, she knew that she was very dramatic. Shouldn’t life require that of us? I mean, we die at the end of this thing.

It seemed like there was only one option: she would allow herself to be wildly misunderstood. What people thought of her didn’t matter. Because she started to see that life was going to be heartbreaking and beautiful all at the same time, and if she didn’t make choices that served her, then she’d never make it through life in any way that felt true, never mind free. And THAT was scarier than anything she’d ever imagined.

So choice by choice, she went. Sometimes she found herself very much alone because of it, and requisitely misunderstood. But there were glorious gifts along the way: in people, places, moments of pure joy. And every so often, she even felt…special. Not in the ways she was supposed to be special. But just…special in the way that everyone should feel special. At least to themselves. A deep, wordless, knowing that there’s a light burning in us that no one can see, but we know it’s there. She felt like she needed to know more about that light. More so, she felt like she needed to be the keeper of it, because sometimes…it threatened to go out. Especially when she let other people see it, never mind keep it. That was her job. Luckily, no one asked to warm their hands by it. She wouldn’t have known how to let them if they had.

In all this, she found a safe place: the blank page. She started filling up pages and pages of blank books. In fact, she was never without her blank books— sometimes just simple pamphlets she picked up, and sometimes hand-made, leather-bound books. Always blank though. Never lined. She’d had enough of the restrictions and requirements of lines. She needed her thoughts and her words to be big and loopy and unabashed. It was the beginning of her freedom from supposed-to-be.

It came with a cost. Of course it did. But what was the alternative? A life spent making everyone else happy, staying neatly and precisely and preciously in their parameters? She knew that pursuit would never work, because it would never be enough for those people. She would be always dancing. Always trying to be a greater swan for people who wanted her to be a swan. She did not want to be a swan.

So she cut her hair and bought a bunch of baggy clothes, and a backpack, and found a clever way to go far away from “home.” She was only nineteen, so she didn’t have a lot of choices in the take-to-the road department, but she chose Turkey over other people’s Switzerland, and Greece over other people’s France, and a troubled Yugoslavia over other people’s London. And she did a lot of it…alone, but always with her journal. She liked it that way. Her journal didn’t judge. It didn’t blame. It didn’t ask anything of her but to fill up its pages. And even then, it didn’t really ask. It just offered the possibility of its page and called her to put pen to it in whatever way she wanted. Because the truth was…she still cared what people thought of her. It was her dirty secret. Seemed to her that the biggest threat to that light was that she was somehow ashamed of it.

But one day, sitting on the steps of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, she thought…maybe it shouldn’t be a secret at all, all these curious words that attempted to define that light. Maybe she could turn the shame into something that people could relate to, somehow. Maybe there were other people out there who felt like she did. Maybe she could write from her light to theirs. Somehow.

Borrowed from my journal, 2018…inspired by the above

Once upon a time, there was a still wildly terrified, and still wildly curious fifty-two-year-old woman who knew for a fact that everyone was special, including her. She had raised two wildly free children and that had been her life’s goal, outside of being a writer and published author. She had achieved those goals. And now she was alone in Empty Nest. And she was scared. Really scared. She didn’t know why she was so scared. She had a cozy home in the mountains of Montana in a lovely little town full of remarkable souls. She had a good job that helped people find their own way to their own light through the power of the written word. Her way. In fact, because of her job, her life was full of other wonder-ers who had also walked away from “supposed to.”

And maybe because she was scared, when she wasn’t helping other people write, now she spent her time filling blank pages, not in journals anymore, but for public consumption. That was the thing she loved most, aside from her children. But she knew it wasn’t really love, was it. It was obsession. It was essence. Life force. Light force. Like a disease she’d caught as a nineteen-year- old in Turkey that she couldn’t shake, and didn’t want to shake. Why would she. It was the ultimate keeper of her light. Or at least she thought it was. So, alone in her house, she stoked her words with all of her might.

But as time went by, the light required more than mighty words. The light needed her to stop looking inside herself for it. The light needed her to lift her gaze.

So, like her nineteen-year-old self, she decided to go far away from home. She had always wanted to go to Morocco. Something about the color and the spices and the Moorish architecture she’d seen as a young girl in Spain. She wanted to sit for a long time in places that didn’t require anything from her…and just be. Allow herself to be “spelled differently,” as the poet Emma Mellon writes. She wanted to go alone and sit on park benches and on ancient steps, under towering archways, and under olive trees’ shade…and not write. Or mother. Or help anybody. She wanted to bum around and not have plans. Maybe take a nap in a park, instead of always doing doing doing. She wanted to be be be. In fact, she knew she had to. She really wondered who she was outside of all of her roles. Even outside of her motherhood and her book-writing. Who was she without those roles? She knew this wasn’t a selfish or special question. It was a dire matter. Because, what if the light needed her to trust that it would burn all on its own?

In short: she needed to re-introduce herself to herself.

So…this January…she is going far away again. Someone is taking care of her cozy home and she is going to pack a small bag, and get on a plane and wind her way to Morocco for a month. She’s not exactly sure what she will find there, and that’s the very reason why she is going. She hopes she will find her motherless, writerless, teacherless wonder again. And cast fear aside so that the future can give itself to her. Maybe she’ll now, finally, be truly free. She’ll find out if that’s possible.

Borrowed from my journal, New Year’s Day 2024

Hello, journal. It’s been a while. I’ve missed the just-us of this specific pen to paper. (And yet, I think we both know that if these words amount to anything that might help someone out there in the way of wonder and light-keeping…I’ll likely share them. Forgive me. Yet, you always knew you were ultimately a stepping-stone. And you know how I love stones.)

Morocco me was free. Spelled so differently. Galloping a Barb Arabian stallion on the beach was free. Listening to the call-to-prayer was free, reminding me to stop and honor the inner sacred light that will not go out, even untended and unbidden. Then last year it was Costa Rica for a month. Standing on a platform over the jungle canopy, eye-to-eye with scarlet macaw couples that mate for life, stepping past the highly poisonous spit-spewn venom of a far-de-lance snake, walking down molasses-coated roads, with monkeys swinging from tree to tree, to watch and linger before tangerine sunsets…was free. And now January and I have a clandestine and iron-clad pact to meet each other in an annual and necessary cleanse. January is my re-spell. My re-introduction to myself.

Some years I’ve splurged. Others I’ve saved (COVID was helpful in that way, but I still took my own January pilgrimage that year— just to the other side of Montana). Each January since that Empty-Nested sad place in 2018, I’ve travelled somewhere new, to, in fact, spell myself differently. I’ve deliberately chosen places where I wouldn’t necessarily recognize myself. And yes, places that scare me a bit. Who will I be in this foreign place that is home to someone else? Someone who might be just as scared to come to Montana. Places that call me to live light-forward, because fear-forward never works when you’re really out of your comfort zone. I mean…really out of your comfort zone. I’ve learned that when I’m only sort of outside my comfort zone, the fear hits most. But way out of it: there’s the free zone.

So this year I’m going somewhere I’ve wanted to go since Fourth grade when I wrote a report on Charles Darwin: the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador. One of the free-est zones in the world, when it comes to living apart from what our “civilized” society has done to itself. These are a chain of volcanic islands that seem not to care about us, and I want to sit in that carefree suspension. I have zero expectations, though I would like to see those boobie birds’ blue feet. And for a girl who has never liked pink, a flamingo in the wild would be such a lesson in what pink truly is. And if I can sit for a long time, trying to match the speed of a 150 year old tortoise, I know it would be good for my blood pressure, and probably my soul, too. What will it be like, swimming with sea lions and iguanas, and watching Sally Lightfoot crabs side-stepping along the rocks and white sand, snacking on sea lion placenta? I guess I’ll find out.

I’m bringing a new, blank-paged journal, but I’m not pressuring myself to write anything in it of consequence. Darwin did that work for us. I’m just going to go slowly. Wordlessly. With binoculars.

If anyone asks what I do for a living, I’ll say: “I’m a light-keeper.” That ought to make them run in the other direction. And I want it that way. I no longer need to justify my wonder. And I’ve realized along the way that the only thing I was ever scared of…was losing it. I now know that is impossible. Maybe I’ll write in my journal. Maybe not. The light lives regardless.

If you want to spell yourself differently, consider investing in one of my 2024 Haven Writing Retreats in Montana. You do not have to be a writer to come. Just a seeker. And a human who longs to wander in your words. Learn your craft. Find your voice. Haven truly meets you where you need to be met. I’ve seen it change lives over and over again. Email: info@lauramunson.com to set up an intro call.

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