I was looking for the right journal.
The one where this particular thought belonged.
Would it become a blog?
A Field Letter?
Something for the book?
I have several journals now, each with its own purpose, each waiting to receive a different kind of thought.
I opened one…
and there I was, already waiting for myself.
A month earlier, I had written about this very thing—how funny it was that I kept wondering which journal an idea belonged in. Maybe ideas were not meant to be categorized, I had written. Maybe they were not fragments at all, but one long, continually developing saga.
What might be called a life.
Now, a month later, I was standing in the same place again, holding another thought and looking for somewhere to put it.
I laughed.
For someone who spends so much time listening for coherence, I do like to organize things.
Organize.
I stopped and thought about the word.
Organ.
The heart is not the lungs.
The lungs are not the liver.
The liver is not the skin.
Each has a name.
A place.
A function.
The distinctions are real.
But no organ tells the story of the body alone.
It is only in relationship that the organism appears.
Perhaps this is what it means to organize after all.
Not to separate the pieces.
To remember how they belong.
And perhaps this is where we get confused.
We name the parts so that we can know them.
Heart.
Lung.
Liver.
Bone.
Blood.
We study them separately.
Measure them separately.
Treat them separately.
Useful distinctions.
Until we forget the filaments.
The invisible conversations happening everywhere.
Heart speaking to brain.
Breath changing blood.
Nerves listening to organs.
Hormones carrying messages from one distant place to another.
Nothing operating alone.
An astonishing coherent whole that can be studied in pieces but can never actually be its pieces.
And I wondered how often we do this with a life.
Childhood goes here.
Work goes there.
Relationships in another place.
The body has its own story.
The soul, another.
The things we survived.
The things we loved.
The things we lost.
The things we became.
We organize the pieces and begin to believe the filing system.
As though the chapter called childhood stopped when childhood ended.
As though the body does not remember.
As though a conversation twenty years ago is not still quietly touching something that happened this morning.
As though the person I was then and the person sitting here now belong in different journals.
But beneath all those categories, something has remained.
I have remained.
We organize.
We categorize.
We compartmentalize.
We separate one thing from another so that we can name it, study it, understand it, decide where it belongs.
This goes here.
That goes there.
This is physical.
That is emotional.
This belongs to the past.
That belongs to the present.
We sort and label and divide.
And somewhere in all that usefulness, something strange can happen.
The categories begin to look like reality.
The compartments begin to look like walls.
Distinction becomes separation.
Separation becomes fragmentation.
And the pieces of a life can begin to look like unrelated things scattered across time.
But I am not scattered.
Whatever names have been given to the pieces, whatever categories have held them, whatever chapters have opened and closed—
I remain.
The child and the woman are not separate beings.
The body and the soul do not live in different journals.
What happened then is not sealed away from what is becoming now.
There are filaments.
I see them sometimes.
Fine threads of light running between things I thought belonged in different places.
One experience touching another.
One knowing illuminating something I could not understand before.
One seemingly insignificant moment reaching across years to find another.
Nothing operating alone.
Perhaps a life is not a collection of chapters after all.
Perhaps it is an organism.
An organism.
Alive because the parts are distinct.
Whole because they are not separate.
And somewhere beneath all the names I have been given, all the roles I have inhabited, all the ways a life can be divided into before and after, then and now, this and that—
I remain.
There is an I am beneath the filing system.
Something that cannot be categorized into smaller and smaller pieces until it disappears.
Something that was present before I knew how to name myself and will remain when the names no longer fit.
I am more than this body, and yet I am here within it.
More than this moment, and yet entirely here.
Spirit in form.
Distinct, but never truly separate.
Sometimes I forget.
I feel disconnected.
Disjointed.
Severed from some part of myself I cannot quite reach.
And then I remember the filaments.
I follow one.
Back through the categories.
Back through the compartments.
Back through all the carefully labeled journals where I have placed the pieces of myself.
Until I arrive again at the place that was never divided.
I am.
It feels a little like finding buried treasure.
Not because it was lost.
Because I had forgotten where to look.
Maybe that is why finding it takes intention.
Stillness.
A willingness to keep looking when everything around us insists on showing us the pieces.
An ounce of belief that something remains beneath them.
The faith of a mustard seed that there is somewhere to arrive.
And once you do—
the choice to return.
Again.
And again.
Not because you have become more whole.
Because you have remembered that you were never divisible in the first place.
So I return to my journals.
The one for the blogs.
The one for the Field Letters.
The one for the book.
They are still separate journals.
I will still write different things in each one.
The distinctions are real.
The separations are not.
In my mind’s eye, I see filaments of light running between them now.
One thought reaching toward another.
One page answering something written months before.
One piece becoming part of something I cannot yet see.
A body.
An organism.
A life.
And after all of this, I am still sitting here with a pen in my hand, trying to decide which journal this belongs in.
Maybe it doesn’t matter.
So I return to the choice.
The only thing that really matters:
the choice to write it.
