I first began keeping a journal in 1971 when I was travelling through Europe and India for two years. It became a lifelong practice that over the past 50 years has filled a small wooden tool chest with at least that many journals. Most include photos, quotes, pictures of people and places that inspired me, and in the later years, doodles.

From August, 2020 to August, 2024, I wrote 6 journals. They encompassed a period of profound inner and outer change. Covid began that winter and my life moved inside. At the height of the pandemic I lost my sister and was unable to cross the border to be with her. I began to doodle, something I’d always loved, but these were different. They became a doorway to self understanding and I felt driven to produce them.  Soon I was teaching others how to do it. In those same years I taught an online course called Discovering the I Behind the Eye which allowed me to learn from and with 20 remarkable women. Then in March 2021 my husband of 50 years was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and told he had 12 weeks to live. That journey and the grieving that followed were also recorded. Less than a year later I found love again and felt as if I was being reborn. All of these profound changes found their way into my journals.

Recently I showed a few of these pages to a friend. Her response was so positive that I decided to share some of them here on my new website. As I read and photographed each entry it reactivated all the old emotions, but now I could see the journey, not just the difficulties along the way. The blogs begin in 2020, a period of dying and grieving. They end in 2024 celebrating rebirth, love, and renewal. Please forgive the little corrections and imperfections. I chose to leave them in because as we all know, “There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”