My commonplace book

A few weeks ago, my friend Krista shared articles on Facebook about commonplace books: How and Why to Keep a Commonplace Book and Project: Start a Commonplace Book. I hadn't heard of commonplace books before. But anything with book in its name is worth a look.

Wikipedia says this, " Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator's particular interests."

In other words, commonplace books are a place to record stuff. 

This made me happy because I've always written down stuff.  I've always bought journals and notebooks and filled them with notes from talks and quotes from books. For years, I felt slightly guilty about this. These empty pages were meant to be journaled in, meant to be filled with my thoughts, right? 

I've finally come to peace with my non-journaling self. I write essays and articles. I don't journal. It is ok. All is well.

But, my jottings have been scattered in random notebooks--a couple graph paper legal pads for school reading, a pretty one for spiritual reading, a red spiral bound notebook that caught other stuff. 

So, now that I had a name for what I do, I went over to Office Depot and stood before the notebooks, then walked across the store to the journals and walked back to the notebooks and back to the journals and finally decided that my first 'real' commonplace book would be pretty. I chose a squarish journal with quality pages. I like inky pens, and thin lined or graph paper sometimes bleed through.

I chose one with a groovy cover because of the pleasure of it. 

Apologies for the bad lighting. I'm writing from bed this morning and couldn't be bothered to search out a non-blanketed surface and natural light for the pictures.

I'm keeping a running list of books I'm reading on the inside cover. Many of these are essay collections for school reading, though, who am I kidding really?  I'll be reading essay collections forever. They're my favorite. In the words of Philip Lopate, I "lo-o-ove essays..."

The list. Three of these are mine, and I am happily underlining. The others are from the library.

In books that I own, I underline, I like writing out quotes that strike me and coming back to them later. 

Page one.

The reasons a sentence strikes me vary--some of them because they are so true, like this from Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder's biography of Paul Farmer, "A minor error in one setting of power and privilege could have enormous impact on the poor in another."

Others because an author has captured something that I have tried to, like this description of a snake, from Scott Russell Sanders, Writing From the Center, "The rope of muscle jerks and vanishes so quickly into the weeds..."

Months ago, I was trying to capture the quick slither of garter snakes that I remember from my grandparents' house in Michigan. I won't steal Sanders' description, which is so much more vivid than what I ended up with. But it struck me. So I wrote it down.

Righthand page filled with quotes from David Shields' Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, which is startlingly cool.

I was trying to find a passage that struck me in Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy and flipped back and forth over the pages until I came across it, a passage about God's love that I may use for an article. When I found it, I opened my commonplace book to record  and found that I had already written it down. "The fondness, the endearment, the unstintingly affectionate regard of God toward all his creatures is the natural outflow of what he is to the core..." I had been thinking about how I want my love for people to mirror this, I don't want to just put up with or love by not being impatient or unkind, but I... wait, that's for the article or a post...

I added a little to the quote, the part that I had been thinking about and will keep circling around this idea.

Now, back to the physical world around me...

Eddie is a solid cat, but not quite as big as the picture makes him out to be.

Yes, we let pets on our bed. I like to tuck my feet under Pepper. Don't judge.

Later this morning, I'll be driving two and a half hours to Avon, west of Indianapolis, for Justin's soccer game. He left on the bus at 7am from school after getting home late from a gig north of Fort Wayne. After the game, I'll whisk him up so he can make another band gig this evening.

Scott and Anna have activities closer to home today, an appointment this afternoon, picnic with internationals this evening. We're working laundry and straightening up in between. And did I mention the dishwasher is broken? Ahhh, the life of the mind.