WTJ Week 3 - With SOME Pics

I keep looking at the dribbles I wipe off of my white ceramic tiled counter top in front of the coffee pot and thinking 'THOSE are the coffee spill images my journal ought to have!' and am entertaining the idea of using the journal as blotter/mat like someone else has written they've begun using their journal in place of a coaster. Do I dare? I think I might beginning with tomorrow morning's pot.

That's the wonder of sharing all these baby steps, giant leaps and abandonment we're all putting into Wreck This Journal - isn't it? No matter WHAT we do/try that we've never done/tried before, it's progress!

My 'progress' this week extends beyond the journal and I feel an impulse to brag and I won't do it elsewhere but I will do it in my journal post because I wanted sooooooooooo bad to show I'd done some of what other wreckers had done. I credit the WTJ experience with inspiring the stubborn determination it took to persevere and teach myself to download pics to my new computer from the digital camera my daughter in IL passed off to me, find and learn how to use a program that would resize the enormous files her camera produces, and another one that would assemble some of those pics into a collage-type presentation. These pics show little new that I hadn't already written of, except for the cover on which I claim collaboration credit with Keri Smith - after all, ultimately the content is becoming more and more mine, prompted by Keri's direction.

While much of my time has been spent educating myself re: my new puter, camera and photo editting - I've made my paper chain from that page in the journal coloring half of the chain links only because I rapidly grew bored with coloring those little strips (serendipitously that makes it easier as well to locate the fruit stickers page for adding to), did some additional burning (the additional burn area resembles the profile of a bear's head), wrote 2 of my fave quotes on the outside edges ('You don't know what you don't know' & 'Life is what happens when you're making other plans') and I've been having to plan out how to accomplish some of the other WTJ prompts.

Arthritis prohibits me from being able to climb up someplace high (even my stepladder is now a useless piece of junk to me) so I have finally hit upon the idea that probably the only way for my journal to take a significant fall is for me to toss it UP in the air, maybe from the edge of one of the drop offs of the multi-level topography of our 'yard'. Only draw back is that means a likely soft landing and I'm not quite sure I'm satisfied there's ENOUGH wreckage probability in that.

As for asking someone to do something destructive to that page - seems to me my daughter, Rachel, who initially gifted me the journal ought to have that 'honor' and so with a bit of additional wreckage still to be added by yours truly I plan to mail the journal to her and have her send it back. That ought to qualify for also mailing it to myself as well with a pit stop along the way.

I very much like what Jamie had to say in her Vlog this week about attachment and trust. When I thought about it, I came up with 'trust X action = confidence', which I'm lettering as a sign to go in my desk space. If I trust I can do/be/write/sew/draw/paint more (even better?) additional material and act on that trust to do so I'll produce/become more confident approaching the doing, being, writing, sewing, drawing, painting I envision. Kind of like strength building exercises at the gym. Multiplication! Everytime I (we) DO an exercise in wrecking, I'm (we're) producing added confidence.

Limited or lacking confidence is probably my greatest inhibition in most everything I desire to do. One of the blogs I visited the past few days wrote about participating for the first time, after long desiring to do so, in a drum circle. Her confidence was minimal and she feared being seen as a phony but you could tell in the passion with which she wrote about having done it she found it exhilarating. Don't we all crave/hunger for exhilaration? Maybe my equation should be expanded...(trust X action)+ confidence + action = EXHILARATION! (SIGH - wish for once I'd paid more attention in algebra)