New Year Turning Points

And burning my old journals

On the night of the Solstice, I made a campfire in my backyard and began the process of burning my old journals. It’s something I’ve been thinking of doing for a few years now, and the decision to move to another home in 2025 brought it to the surface once again. I have a huge and very heavy bin of journals filled with my writing that spans about 40 years of my life. Some people are shocked that I would burn them up! To me, though, it feels like a weight lifted. Quite literally, it is the heaviest of my packed up bins to move! But more symbolically, the contents of all that writing is simply a record of my mental and emotional process at the time. When I open one and read that process now, it pulls my energy into the past and captivates it there in a way that I don’t find helpful to my current life.

My journaling is so much more about process than about descriptive record-keeping, it just does not need a shelf-life. In fact, my journals are often disorganized because I will grab whatever notebook I can find when I am wanting to process my thoughts through writing, and some of the journals jump around between dates (even years) or leave off the dates altogether! It would be time-consuming work to connect the puzzle pieces in meaningful chronological order, and I simply have no interest. Also, this type of journal-writing is meant only for me, not for others to discover and read after I am gone. Keeping them around, I feel burdened by the thought that I “should” go back and re-read them, as if that would enlighten me somehow, or as one friend suggested, use them to write a book! No.

Letting go of my mental/emotional past in this way is one of my turning points as I move into 2025. It is one powerful piece of my simplification intentions, one more way to free up energy for present-moment living. I have a friend, Leo, who refers to being fully present and grounded as being connected to ‘The Living Current of Life.’ I love this description, because it implies the natural FLOW, or current, of the energy that all of life is made of. This electrical energy current is alive, dynamic, and constantly in motion. I had a mentor who would say, “Step into the flow of the ever-upward spiraling energy of the universe!”

The way to be grounded in the stillness of present-moment awareness, yet never feel stagnant, dissatisfied or limited in your life, is to palpably know at all times your connection to the ‘Living Current.’ In fact, Leo takes takes this next-level in a passage from his book:

“Want only one thing in life: the direct experience of the Living Current freely flowing into your mind, heart and body. Nothing else is important.”
-from “Paynoven,” by Leo K. Johnson

More and more, I understand the truth of this powerful passage. A related piece of advice from Leo’s book, offered by a shaman in a story he retells, is this:
“Reduce everything that stands in the way of embracing your Authentic Self.”

To be clear, your Authentic Self is the one who is always vitally aware of her connection to the Living Current. So it becomes a very valuable question, to ask: What is it that is your greatest longing? And what is in the way of you satisfying that longing, at last?

For most of us, what gets in our way is excessive mental chatter and rumination that keeps us focused in past or future, unable to rest in the exquisite satisfaction and well-being of the present moment. I look for ways to reduce my engagement with that incessant mental chatter, and to increase my felt experience of my authentic self, my direct experience of the freely flowing Living Current of life.

What I have discovered is that simplification of my outer commitments, including possessions as well as relationships, is a helpful starting place on this sacred path to my authentic Self. Meditation, walking barefoot on the earth in silence, feeling the sunshine, breezes, and rain on my skin, listening to soothing music, lighting candles, and spending time in silence with another human are all helpful. Ultimately, it’s about cultivating an experience of wonder, awe, deep presence, and reverence for the whole kaleidoscope of life, even in its most ordinary or ugly presentations.

My personal priorities have shifted, and I will be heading into 2025 more resolved than ever to allow my life to be an expression of my direct experience of “the Living Current, freely flowing into [my] mind, heart, and body.” It really does begin to feel to me as though nothing else truly matters. Imagine how this experience positively affects literally EVERYTHING encountered or desired on the life journey.

I wonder, at times, how leaving my warm, sunny nature-paradise in Florida, and moving back to Michigan’s colder climate in 2025 will impact the ease with which I connect with the flow of the Living Current. The most direct path for me is found in the experience of immersing my body and my senses in nature. This will often be less comfortable in the chilly, less sunny north! My mother sent me a book for Christmas to help me with this: “How to Winter.” It’s an interesting book, but it misses the point that the reason many of us find the northern winter challenging is because it is not our natural human habitat! We can only physically survive there because of our clever use of lots of technology. Some of us very sensitive souls feel this displacement acutely.

Most importantly, wherever we find ourselves geographically or situationally, if we are to find our way to the deep inner peace that accompanies our connection to the flow of the Living Current, we must reduce the mental and life-clutter we have accumulated, and balance our emotional response to life. As the book, How to Winter suggests, my strategies for maintaining this direct connection and equilibrium will shift somewhat in Michigan (for example, I will need more warm clothing to help me enjoy nature in the winter weather, I will probably light more candles and make more tea, and I will return to the sacred act of building fires in a woodstove often, and meditating in a sauna).

As I slowly work through the burning of all the stacks of my old journals, I enjoy this conscious, intentional act of letting go. Written scribbles expressing the haphazard mental and emotional processing of a distant former self are no longer important to me. I continue to process my observations of life through stream-of-consciousness journaling, but for now on I will let each of my journals go as soon as it is filled. What matters is the wide open space of the present moment, and the pure simplicity of feeling my belonging in the flowing current of Life as I experience each moment of connection for the first time.