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Note to readers: Christina's journal entries are added periodically as the seasons of the year roll around. To read previous journal entries, choose from the menu on the right.
June 2006: Journal Entry #3
Dear storycatchers,
It's been a couple of quiet months at www.storycatcher.net. I have been caught up in a very busy teaching/consulting schedule and revising Life's Companion, my earlier book on journal writing. Its publisher, Bantam/Random House, is going to re-issue it next year—exciting news based in part on the up and coming success of Storycatcher. The editing work was not something I had planned for in the first months of this year, so it got squeezed into plane rides and weekends, and the moments I would have devoted to more actively building the Storycatching movement. Now, the manuscript is back in New York getting retyped and tuned up for 21st century readership.
I wrote Life's Companion in 1989-90, and Bantam released it on January 16, 1991, the day the United States government ordered the air strikes that started "Desert Storm." In the midst of protest/support/confusion, and media frenzy (remember Generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf standing in front of strategic maps explaining strike by strike how the war was progressing?) here came this lovely, quiet book about journal writing as a spiritual practice. My radio tour got lost in all this, but the bookstore appearances were an amazing phenomenon and an illustration of people's deep need to make story.
 On nights when I was out with my new book in hand, sometimes nearly two hundred people crammed into bookstore meeting rooms, spilling over couches and folding chairs, notebooks in hand, and a kind of quiet desperation on many faces. These were thoughtful people looking for a way to make sense out of what was happening. I would read from the book and talk about the need to hang onto the thread of our own life stories in times of crisis and confusion, and how writing could help us dive deeply into the spiritual to seek explanations that could serve the long perspective. Then we'd write: 10, 15, 20 minutes in which a community of mostly strangers sat and wrote their hearts out. The evening would close with the invitation to read. We'd sit in receptive quiet waiting for the stories to come forth, sort of Quaker meeting with journals. And one by one, people read and others listened and we were in that space I now call "the ear in the heart."
In the span of 15 years we are back at war in the Middle East in a conflict of ever increasing scope, devastation and consequence. The sense of bombardment, the 24/7 expectations of availability, the intrusion of our technology, as well as its gifts, has all increased exponentially. The world is so much more with us, and so is the need to claim our stories in order to steer our lives. I come back into my focus on Storycatching with a renewed sense of now more than ever...and I invite you to spend some time adding your own stories to the chapter excerpts, the couples aloud in bed comments and to check out new resources and Storycatcher entries. I hope you will spend the summer looking for opportunities to ask questions that open a story, or take a few minutes to sit in morning light and write. We need our voices to ring clearly into the world.
What do you steer by in the chaos and choices of an ordinary day?
Let's start there.
Tell me that story.
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