Journal Pages Department
For just over a week now, I've been making myself get up earlier to write three pages in my journal. (Blame Julia Cameron.) I'm beginning to rebel a bit (maybe balk is a better word) against these three pages. I'm not questioning the value of the journal writing, just the arbitrary notion if it having to be three pages.
On the other hand, why not three pages? Perhaps there's no other reason than forcing myself into the discipline of just sitting down and coming up with words enough to fill the assignment. Goodness knows it's not as if my inner dialog, my narrator/commentator doesn't constantly spew out enough to fill my journal in the course of a single day.
It makes me kind of wonder about this inner voice. I mean, it's me, or at least a part of me, I think. Why, then, do I sometimes get so fed up with it? Why is it negative when I want to be positive? Why won't it shut up and let me go to sleep when I'm exhausted?
There's the notion that this voice is sometimes not me, but a demonic voice--I'm not sure I'm willing to accept that, but I can't discard it either. I believe that the enemy is capable of influencing our thoughts, but is he able, and does he make it a practice, to mimic our internal dialog? That's not a question I think I can resolve here and now.
It's enough for me to wonder if the "Be still" part of the command "Be still and know that I am God" means that I should also somehow silence the mental chatter. Is that a trick that some people have figured out?
Of course, there had to be a time when I wasn't always chattering inside: before I knew words to chatter with. What was going on inside when I had to words to talk to myself in?
I suppose I could just as well ask what goes on inside my dog Sammy's head. You know that some level of thinking and reasoning is going on, but how do you express it without words? He must somehow think with pictures, smells, sounds and sensations.
And from here my mind leaps to this: Is it a part of what's wrong with our society, that people today are losing the ability to think clearly in words because we've managed to cast doubt on the idea that our words actually mean anything?
"In the beginning was the Word." There is a Word that has real meaning external to any thought that I have or that others have. It may be that our words are only echoes of that one real Word, but the are echoes, and therefore, by definition, the share some of that one real Word's characteristics.
Words mean things, even our sloppy, ghostly, insubstantial words. I believe that some day we'll have a chance to speak words in a language that is more real, solid, and substantial than we can imagine.
(And here I thought I wasn't going to get anywhere with these three pages today.)
Roy M. Jacobsen
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