An Introduction to "Joy! With New Eyes"

"Joy With New Eyes" started as a book/project for this amazing human 

I kept journals for many years, chronicling joys, struggles, lists, pictures and highlights, but at some point realized they would never be able to read them. Cursive was not being taught in public schools or even "allowed" so... I decided to go through my journals, glean from them the gems, and let the rest go.

 “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ~ Anaïs Nin  because.....                  

"The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life." ~ Muhammad Ali

   "There are mystics and there are mechanists," she said, "and they see things with different eyes." ~ The Lace Reader, by Brunonia Barry

Now (2007) more than ever, it was time for a rewrite...

I began typing them into my computer and creating a book: With New Eyes for a number of reasons. In 2002 I returned to school and in 2006 received a BA in English. While completing that degree, I went through a divorce that, of course, changed our lives in many ways. I also began wearing glasses, adding to the ways in which I am seeing things "with new eyes".

As my path continues to reveal itself, so does this "book". There was, for example, the day I swamped my laptop with a huge glass of water, and thought all was lost. Discouraged, but hopeful, (the laptop was fried, but the data recoverable), eventually bought a new laptop, and began the process of creating yet another version. Joy! With New Eyes emerged as the result.

Here is an example of something I did not want to disappear from our story. A note one of my Mom's friends sent to me when I was pregnant, saved in a box for years, eventually became part of a vision board when my child was a toddler so that I would neither forget nor ignore these wise words:

If there is anything I have learned from re-reading journals, it is this: It is much more important to be present in THIS moment, than to be "processing" yesterdays and worrying about tomorrows.

This is the new first page of your first scrapbook redone as a gift for your 18th birthday.