Returning to Soul Stories

"Soul Stories" title page

When I first started journaling (around 2003,) I wrote a lot and surrounded all that writing with a small amount of art. As the years progressed, I wrote less and did more art, ultimately arriving at journals that were almost completely visual with little to zero writing. I think maybe I just ran out of things to say and felt that the visuals (and the process of creating those visuals) said everything I wanted to communicate. However, those older journals are still on the shelf and the uncompleted ones are there, waiting patiently for my return.

One of my first journals is a large altered children's poetry book that I began in July 2007. It is named "Soul Stories." As with most of my ongoing, unfinished projects, I started off enthusiastically. I worked fairly regularly through the last half of 2007 and most of 2008, here and there in 2009, and then skipped 2010 and 2011 entirely. I returned in 2012 for four pages and then I abandoned the project again until June 2016 when I finished just one more page. This January, I felt the pull of "Soul Stories" again.

"Soul Stories" entry - Jan 15, 2017

"Soul Stories" is perhaps one of my most personal journals, a place I visit when I need to extensively document my thoughts, joys, fears, self-encouragement, discouragements, and triumphs. After my recent foot surgery, I needed to return to a verbose style of art journaling as my head felt painfully full of thoughts that needed to find their way onto the page. I'll continue on in "Soul Stories" as long as the words need to flow and then I'll tuck it away again.

Note:
In the last ten years, I have undoubtedly posted pictures of this journal's pages but I am too busy to go back through the archives and dig up links to those postings. So, as I post images from "Soul Stories" here and there, please forgive any repetition that you recognize. (If you have actually gone through ten years of Lost Coast Post posts, then go get yourself a cookie immediately and give yourself a pat on the back!) I'm sure many newer readers will be seeing these pages for the first time.