One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom.
~Anne Morrow Lindbergh, War Within & Without: Diaries and letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1939 – 1944

CRYSTALLIZING JOY

I've adored my now 24- year- old nephew Andrew since I received my brother's call telling of his birth and something in my heart burst open.  He's always lived in another state; our visits are treasures.  After he leaves, I pull out my journal, my heart sad in his absence. I've described sitting on our back stoop in morning sun while he rounded up slugs in our lawn,  playing board games and helping each other to win, and hanging out at local airports amid the smell of jet fuel so he could scope out planes, a passion of his.  As I fill the page, my heart soars with joy to carry me forward. A Captured Moment from a visit to him in Baltimore where he went to college:

Waiting for a table at the French restaurant while big, white flakes of snow drift down outside, I am struck by you in dark coat and gloves, holding a newspaper, seated in the bar area.  You look dashing and debonair, elegant and older. A preview of who you will be.

Seeing those words, I am alive in that moment now, the slight smile on his face, as if I am looking at a photo or as if I am back in Baltimore standing next to Andrew.  I smile.

DISPERSING GLOOM

Equally valuable was recording a sharply painful moment at my father's deathbed.  His last words to me in his final lucid moment were barked in a command, “Hands off!”  I quit holding his hand, slumped back in my chair.  Intellectually, I came to understand that he needed not to bebe to disturbed in his passage from this life; it was his time to disconnect from us.  But I carried the emotional hurt like ground glass in my chest until I could write about the moment:

Hands off. My father’s eyes open abruptly, blue pupils as pale as a tired day, voice garbled through dry mouth but words strong.

My sister’s hand flies off his right shoulder. My hand flies off his left hand. Birds startled from the nest by a cat, our hands play dead on our laps.

In the wide-eyed silence...His eyes close. Untethered, he returns to the solitary grasp of his death.

At the feeder hung low just outside the window, a finch takes seed, the bushes behind him bare, holding winter hushed in their fingered branches.

After I wrote, I could viscerally feel my chest lighten, expand, breathe fully again.  I had felt like a victim of the hurt, but I empowered myself as creator of art out of what had happened.  I had dumped the pain onto the page, where it was held beautifully.

WRITING A CAPTURED MOMENT

The joy of my nephew's visits and the ache of my father's last words live in my journal as Captured Moments, a technique I learned through  Journal to the Self: Twenty-Two Paths to Personal Growth by Kathleen Adams.  Adams writes, “tThe Captured Moments journal technique allows you to celebrate and savor, preserving in prose the glory and anguish, the serenity and sorrow, the pleasure and pain of your life.”  For me, the technique preserves sparkling moments and provides relief from and clarity about pain—similar to talking with a good friend.  I find my journal to be a friend always there.

A Captured Moment stores an instant just as a photo will.  Before you pick up your pen, you might want to close your eyes and invite the memory into your mind's eye.  Let the moment come to life.  Let it flourish again.  Write in the present tense and from the senses, filling in sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures, as well as sensations and feeling.  Captured Moments are creative play.  They are brief—two or three paragraphs.

Captured Moments can maintain awareness or create awareness.  Imagine having a series of Captured Moments that recreates a wonderful vacation or that embraces steps into recovery.  A weekly or monthly Captured Moment could record the best and worst moment of the time period. 

Adams writes, “A bedtime story on Grandma's lap...the birth of a child...an exquisite autumn leaf...a surprise visit by your dearest friend...a parent's funeral...catching crawdads in the creek...a breathtaking sunset...the heart-wrench of a broken love affair...

These tiny moments of intimacy, yearning, beauty, despair, exhilaration—these are the moments to capture and hold forever in your heart.”

What moment calls to you now to bring fully alive in your journal?