Journals, Grimoires & Gyms

I still haven't been to the gym.

I know, right?

I mean, I've got all these great intentions and everything, but then I just can't get my ass out of bed in the morning*. This morning I didn't even wake up until my "Pack up!" alarm went off. Yes, that's actually what the alarm is named and what it's for. It's my "thirty minute warning" in the morning and is the fourth time an alarm goes off. Yup. I totally slept through three alarms.

Now. I didn't sleep through them, I'm sure, but I turned them off and went directly back to sleep without even registering that they went off.

So instead of going to the gym this morning I reset the songs that play when my alarms go off and determined that I was going to make sure everything was packed and ready to go tonight, instead of leaving it to the morning. That way, should the absolute worst happen (I oversleep)(again), I'm still ready to roll.

As long as I'm awake by 4:30am.

In other news, I actually busted out one of my fancy new notebooks and started writing in it every night. You can actually see the journal and the fancypants pens I use in the Imbolc Cuddles picture.

I can't say there's been any stunning revelations, but it's nice to take a few minutes at the end of the day to reflect on the day and what happened. It's nice to not have to worry about self-censorship (as I do here). I can put whatever I want in there, and I do, and it's nice to have that freedom. Last night I put my goal for the Imbolc season in there, and I'm hoping that I can use it for some degree of accountability. Maybe this will help me to keep focused and on task for goals.

And then on the drive this morning, the radio show was talking about keeping journals, and spouses reading journals, and the stuff they read in their spouse's journal. In particular they were talking about a person who wrote all the negative things about his wife, how much he hated her, thought she was lazy and on and on. Then he had an affair with an old girlfriend and had written about their affair, and how he felt about her and their love and blah blah blah. Anyway, his wife found his journal and read it and, of course, all hell broke loose.

They were talking about how his poor wife had to read "all of that" about how he felt about her, how he felt about the woman he cheated with, all the dirty details and emotions and how awful it must have been for his wife to "have to" read all of that.

Oh well now.

She did not have to read all of it. She didn't have to read any of it at all, and a solid case could be made that her husband wrote it all with an anticipation of privacy. Certainly, once she'd established that he had cheated, she didn't need to read further than that.

She chose to read the whole thing and all the gory details and, well, she certainly found out, didn't she?

The whole discussion got me all riled up, I guess!

In still other other news, I'm going to an herb class Thursday evening. One of the pieces of the labyrinth I've been trying to figure out involves studying herbs and their uses, as well as how to grow, cultivate, harvest and store them. I'm sure there's a proper term for this, but I keep calling it "herbology" because I really don't know what else to call it. I figure that's just about good enough for right now. I've also been collecting various books with information on the subject, and I did a bit of research about places where I can actually study this. Like on purpose and stuff.

Of course the school that seemed most interesting to me was also a fair bit of a drive away (around 90 minutes each way). They do offer weekend courses and shorter workshops, but what I'm really interested in involves actually settling in and learning for a period of time. They offer this, too, but there are so many other obstacles to making that work. I know that's something I need to figure out and potentially it just involves taking the time to do more research to find out what else I can do and how.

For right now what this means is taking local classes that I can find and working towards collecting information and, eventually, putting it all together in a way that's useful and helpful to me.

My initial thought was to create an herbal grimoire. To take an herb, say lavender, and create a section for it that includes everything one would ever need to know about lavender. And to research this information for each herb and put them all together in this format in the end. I think that will be the final culmination of my goal, but it's something that will take some time and work to get to.

Which is probably a pretty tall order for a woman who can't even get out of bed in the morning!

*I've been so tired because I've been going to bed a little too late and then I've been having trouble staying good & asleep the whole night. The really sad part is that I'd bet dollars to donuts that getting my ass to the gym would go a long way toward rectifying my sleeping issues. If only I could wake the fuck up in the mornings!