Creating gardens of notes
I have been writing lately about my travels, people, even some thoughts on the day to day in Siem Reap. It has dawned on me the blog since February has been about the wonderful and sometimes stressful changes finding this beautiful Khmer woman Alin to share life with. We needed each other for at least 10 years but how life works seems to be opportunities and desires wait as the turns in the road go. There is a Van Morrison song which I truly love about finding someone.
There’s a thing about the song which always takes me to the days and times before and just wandering so many earthly gardens of delight, frustration, sometimes sadness. What I did find which I wanted to mention is how connected things are. I create personal notes about things sometimes but rarely are they self-contained. Instead they wander to other subjects and thankfully IAWriter knows how to let me easily link to the other note. I am not a big note writer so something like obsidian or another second brain type thing is just not needed. I don’t need a second brain. I have a brain that does good considering the shape it is in. What I do need is a thing I can write effortlessly in, that is simple on the Mac and iPhone. I tried Obsidian on the iPhone. What a mess of an app. I always think someone took a screen capture of obsidian on the Mac and said,
oh we must make our mobile app just as confusing
So now to create a note talking about Alin or about travels or mindfulness or whatever else, I find that I want another note so I just do the deed while in the first note. IAWriter knows what I want and just does the work. There is no confusing and irritating mobile app to then use when I walk because the IAWriter mobile app is just as simple as the Mac version. Yay!
The garden as it were
The garden is sparse but it has notes of meaning to me. Some become blog posts or I make them into my daily journal which now lives in IAWriter too. The main thing with this playground of words is it feeds ideas into the blog or when I start writing again on this thing which percolates all the time. Story? Novel? Series of articles or essays publishing on the blog? Truth is everything I hope ends up on the blog whether it is distilled down or enhanced up.
Alin always figures prominently because she is my woman and my wife and my life. In my garden, Alin moves from flower to flower forever being happy to see the colors. I think perhaps like at BaNa Hills when she found the flowers to be real. She danced and smiled and sat down with them. Caressing and loving the colors and textures. That is my garden too.
So the little garden I plant with notes and photos and memories all spring up just because they are watered and remembered. We often return to our places we’ve gone and Alin reminds me of some small thing we found along the way. She will say,
love, in Battambang remember…
Then I act like I don’t remember and she punches me in the arm and laughs. Sometimes touches my face. Tells me she loves me and my garden grows. With more little notes of places too. I will tend this garden I am growing with memories and photos embedded.
Today she held my hand, looked into my eyes and told me she needed me forever and then she left to buy food to cook, to have time with friends, to enjoy. The garden of notes is really minor and I could delete them easily and live with the real memories but the fun is putting these down to words and seeing where the thoughts go. Little snippets of this and that. A day in Taipei. Time in GeorgeTown. A place Alin says she wants to go in an app she has that shows all the flights leaving Phnom Penh.
So easy to just find the time later to write on her smile, laugh, teasing and sensuous side that she shows only to me. That sweet, sexy, desirable side which always makes me want more. Those notes are never in my garden but they flourish nonetheless.
Perhaps I will transplant some of the moments in the notes and let them breathe another life on the blog. I know I will never just desire a second blog on some service that I hated or disliked or distrusted before. Everything is here like it should be. My take is if you cannot write on one blog why the F do you need a second or a third or a link blog. Get your delights and frustrations accounted for where you write.
Take your canvas and your notes and tramp the fields of words. I’m sure you have something in there to come out. We all do.