The Old Diary Series
Canvases with Song
I tried to throw them away.
The Diaries declined...
There is an old box that has been sitting in my art studio for the last two years. Somehow it managed to save itself through decades of moves, different homes, different eras of my life, until it came to rest beside my desk and easel. One corner is broken open. The rest is held together with old strapping tape. Across one flap, written in black felt marker, are four simple words:
Old Ronda Diaries.
Inside were fifteen of my personal diaries beginning in sixth grade and continuing through graduate school, along with old photographs, newspaper clippings, love letters, early artwork, and other fragments of a life once being lived.
I've kicked the box out of the way, piled things on top of it, and wondered why so much had ever been saved. It seemed to have followed me through time only to arrive in my new studio taking up space meant for something else. I did not want to throw it away. I did not want to open it either.
So it sat.
There was an urge to burn or bury it as a kind of closure to a long-ago past. I tried a couple of times to pitch it. It wouldn't have it, it seems. One day last week I pulled a few diaries out, perhaps simply because I wanted them off the floor, for good or ill. Then I opened a few at random...
As I flipped through those pages, I don't know what I expected, but what I encountered startled me. It was not a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Nor was it self-embarrassment.
No. I found myself viscerally struck by an odd mixture of
hesitation
reverence
recognition
astonishment
apprehension
heartbreak
sorrow
affection
wonder.
I found repeated questions. I found deep intelligence.
And I felt as though I were suddenly standing at the meeting place of two sides of one life simultaneously: the life of a young girl trying to figure things out, and the life of an older woman still trying to figure things out.
I am beginning to sense life's threads weaving through time in all directions at once—a movement between age and era, memory and meaning, question and response. It feels less like looking back than entering into a conversation that somehow never ended.
And so I begin this unexpected journey.
Through diary, painting, poetry, reflection, and song, I will follow these threads as they pass from one season of life to another—the same life seen through different eyes, each quietly handing something to the next.