What is your journal to you?

My journal, my little 5x8 spiral notebook goes most everywhere with me.  From my nightstand, to the kitchen bar where I sip coffee, to breakfast whether home or at a restaurant, tucked near at hand in my purse throughout the day, and returned to the nightstand at day's end.  It is my friend, confidant, psychoanalyst.  I firmly believe I owe my sanity to committing my day good or bad to the page. 

Natalie Goldberg said, "Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the centre of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write."

I agree.  Last year with so much loss, it took my pain and grief.  These days when death stalks a sweet friend, and we can only watch and wait, it helps to put pen to page and voice the feelings there that cannot be voiced aloud. 

It also helps to end the day by listing at least 5 things I’m grateful for that day as well, whether that thing is as simple as birdsong, sunrise or a gentle rain.  Gratitude soothes the soul.  Yes, Natalie, I’ll keep taking out another notebook and I will write, write, just write.

© Perle Champion

Old Year/New Year

It's been a year of incredible loss.  The February fire took most all of my worldly goods and the life of one of the sweetest men I've ever known. I don't miss the things, but I do miss my friend.

I pulled an old poem from my archives which speaks to me now, as it did when I wrote it at another trying year's end many years ago. 

Old Year, New Year.

Old and gray – tired and worn

many died – more were born

much was said – so little done

with the rising and setting of each sun.

Farewell to thee with tears we say

and greet the new with laughter gay

So much could, should, would have done

but alas, I’d just begun and the year was gone.

And so, today I make firm resolution

to do much more by this year’s conclusion.

© Perle Champion

Seti's Chronicles 2012 – Touch and Go.

Excerpt from Work in Progress: Seti's Chronicles - Surviving 2012


It’s still touch and go, we couldn’t and still can’t save everyone. To try would doom us all. Now the work begins. Little by little, we have to go out into what remains of our world; make contact and piece by piece reassemble society. The old refrain is true, united we stand, divided we fall. Will I live to see it done? Perhaps, some. My calling was scribe, and now we’ve come through the most perilous part of this journey, I can resume that mantle.


Where do I begin, for begin I must, to put our story in some order for the future, for our children, for posterity. I want them to know what it took to bring us through the Fall to here.


The ‘Fall’, so simple a word for that day – so trite. That crisp crystal afternoon just ten days ago stands out in high relief. A winter’s solstice unlike any before and hopefully any to come. The trees whispered to me as I left the park and crossed the busy street to meet Kiri for lunch. Seated at our regular window table with view of Layton Park my inner ear listened to the conversations here and there at the tables around the room.


"Those damn witches" whispered the perfectly coifed blond to her clone companion, "It's all their fault. Everyone at the meeting Sunday agreed." Her friend, her mirror, nodded solemnly as her eyes darted around the room.


"I tell you" the rest dwindled to indecipherable whispers, but I heard the words in my mind’s eye, the thoughts so thick with fear and anger and more. The more was an overwhelming helplessness.


I listened and wondered at the women at the table behind me. I wondered how many like her there were, who never saw the larger picture, and rather than own their part in disaster would rather kill the messenger for the news she bore somehow thinking it would save them.


Sad and wearied by the waves of negative thoughts, I sent out calming emanations throughout the room, wanting a peaceful atmosphere for this last visit to a treasured place. I lifted their fear with soothing thoughts of reassurance tugging pleasant memories to the fore of love and children and happy times. A mind joined me in the task, and I looked across to the hostess station to see Kiri approaching. Our eyes met as Kiri waved the hostess away, and gestured in my direction.


As she joined me, we mused mind to mind, "It seems many of us are loathe to think of losing all the familiar places, and so we lunch and have tea and dinner, first here, then there. "Oh, Kiri, I'm not ready to see it end; I'm just not ready."


"No one is, no one ever is ready to let go of what we know. You are not alone in that, Seti."


“Kiri, even some friends will die in the coming Storm. The ‘coming Storm’ – ‘Mother Storm’. How trite. I can hardly stand it sometimes. Damn it! It is the end of our lives, as we now know them. We plunge into the abyss. We glimpse hell. And the hardest part of all is I know I will survive. Am I really up to it? gods'us, grant it."


"Yes, you are. You are stronger than all of us - stronger than you know. And for what it's worth, I like Mother Storm best. Even now, she groans here and there; small lava flows have been sighted in unlikely places; migration patterns have become erratic - aberrant, to those who don't know. The birds know North and South are no longer constant, so they wait. They may not have far to go. They only have to stay airborne when the time comes. Will the poles shift or have we done enough to defray it?”


"Well, we’ll know soon. We've known it was soon for some time, but I want it done – I want to fast-forward to the other side. It’s been 27 years, 27 years of meticulous planning.”


"That long? By the Powers, when you put a real number on the years, it makes me feel so old. Yet, this is barely the beginning; I have a very long way to go. Kiri, I'm afraid sometimes, that I won't have the strength for the long haul."


"Of course you will. You really are stronger than you know, and we've prepared so well. Everything is in place now: the Schools, stores of food, knowledge archives, seeds and all the other sundry things to rebuild a civilization with a memory of who they are intact.


Our waitress came with tea and saké. We watched respectfully. In two small hands, with a pristine clean white cloth, she held the pot and poured first the steaming green tea then the warmed saké, pale Citroen into the small white bowls of blue porcelain cups trimmed in slightly faded gilt. With utmost attention to each small task she returned the teapot to its cozy and the saké flask to its hot water bath with no water spilt, then neatly folding the white cloth, placed just so to complete the still life before us. With a bow she departed on the cat's feet that brought her leaving us to contemplate the curls of steam.


"Oh, Kiri! I'll miss this. I have memorized every moment, the tilt of head and preciseness of movement; the curling tendrils of steam lifting the fragrance of the tea; the hot silk taste of the saké sliding down to merge with my very blood and sending warmth and well-being coursing through veins that run so cold with foreboding."


Thus warmed, we crossed to the park where the trees' song hummed in our minds: a song so old - of life and death and forever and I remembered a line from childhood, " ‘...touch a leaf and the stars vibrate…’.Leaves die and the barren trees sleep through Winter and dream of Spring. How many of us will really survive this bleakest Winter. How many of us will reach Spring?" I stopped short and looked at Kiri.


"I felt it too." she almost shouted.


For one frozen moment etched forever into my being, it was as if the Earth caught her breath. No wind stirred the trees, no bird sang, people everywhere stopped and looked around. Then it came, the birds as one lifted to the sky and the earth heaved. The day rent asunder and terror ran cold then hot on the heels of frightened people running to they knew not where.


The street rippled gray waves beneath their feet, breaking into rubbled surf pounding them into the gaping maws of asphalt caves. Buildings fell into themselves and spewed life and death onto unsuspecting heads.


© Perle Champion
Next: The Fall

Seti’s Chronicles 12.31.2012

Chapter 1 or Prologue:

Where do I begin except here, pen in hand at the window of my aerie. I look down the long and winding road that is the past and I wonder that so many of us came through to this best of possibilities.

There were times I didn’t think our world would survive, much less any of us. All the plans, the hard work, and the hope against overwhelming odds - I cannot now even contemplate - worked. It worked, not exactly, not precisely as imagined, but it worked. We are here, and we have another chance, a better chance, with so much saved this time. I look at our small cadre of warriors, for that is what we are, warriors as of old.

I come up to the very top room of this old stone home, to my sanctuary away from all the wistful eyes and hopeful hearts that daily leach my strength from me.

Only here, in this high place, at my window with the small flashlight my brother gave me hung just so to illuminate the page in front of me – how many years ago. And where is he today? Dead or alive? I only know he is not here - not here. I could not convince him to come. I think since his Phyllis died – his wife of 29 years – he doesn’t care if he lives or dies. Life has become a chore without his helpmeet.

I imagine him on his farmhouse porch, whiskey in hand, toasting me even as the earth rent asunder and saying “Here’s to the end, I had a good run.” And He did. He loved and was loved, he worked with integrity, brought a beautiful healthy child into the world. He lived his life his way and now with Phyllis gone, he’d just as soon pass on and will not run from death.

Doubt among the masses still exists, but many are grateful. The old enemies are still among us as well: envy, greed, fear of the unknown. But they are old enemies – known enemies; we’ll survive them as we ever have. It is enough, at least for me, that we were not literally sent back to the cave. We saved so much of who we are and what we know, that civilization will not take an eon to rebuild this time.

It’s still touch and go, we can’t save everyone. To try would doom us all. Now the work begins. Little by little, we have to go out into what remains of our world; make contact and piece by piece reassemble society. The old refrain is true, united we stand, divided we fall. Will I live to see it done? Perhaps, some. My calling was scribe, and now we’ve come through the most perilous part of this journey, I can resume that mantle.

Where do I begin, for begin I must, to put our story in some order for the future, for our children, for posterity. I want them to know what it took to bring us through the Fall to here. The ‘Fall’, so simple a word for that day – so trite. That crisp crystal afternoon just ten days ago stands out in high relief.

© Perle Champion