When you read this, I will be on a plane headed for Italy for a 10-day vacation. (To say I am wildly excited is an enormous understatement.)
My friend Karleen Koen sent me a journal for the trip. She wrote in the accompanying card, “It doesn’t matter what you put in here… just put something!” The thoughtful gift prompted me to think about the importance of keeping a journal while traveling. The journal enables me to revisit Italy after I return to Texas, and the descriptions of place will give me the seeds for developing memoir pieces, essays, poems, travel and culture writing, etc.
Because I’ve been to Rome before, I know how sensual the city is. I believe Florence, Assisi, Sienna and Venice will be equally so.
I have written the five senses inside my journal because I want to be aware of how I taste, see, touch, hear and smell my surroundings as I move through this country and experience its culture.
Through my senses I will experience a heightened awareness of my journey. I will be more fully present in the “now.”
I should focus on the experience rather than the documenting. I don’t need to record much—I can record snippets, employing the economy of words that a poet or a Zen master wannabe would use, so that “shimmering images” ignite with the flash of memory.
Karleen is right; it doesn’t matter what I write as long as I keep some kind of record to elbow my ability to recollect (as in re-collect) the memories of my trip.
Au revoir.
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