ORIGINAL POST DATE: January 30, 2006

On my list of New Year's resolutions, the very first one was to write or sketch something on every page of my daily diary. Now that January is coming to an end I can report that I am 1/12 of the way to achieving this goal, having something on every page for the whole month. I realized soon after beginning my 2006 diary that I needed to be a little lenient in my interpretation of what that first resolution meant. Rather than forcing myself to fill one page on each exactly corresponding day, I allow myself to fill more than one page a day if the urge strikes, and to skip days and then go back and fill them on another day when I feel I have something compelling to write about. My approach is to never face the blank page with a feeling of obligation. This more relaxed method to Daily Diary filling has been much more successful for me, and compared to the months of empty pages in my 2005 daily diary, my 2006 diary has a nice full feeling to it already.

Here is an excerpt from my Moleskinei Pocket Daily Diary from January 13th:

"I was changing the sheets on my bed when I spied a little metal object that had fallen into the crack between the bed frame and the wall. It was my pocket size statue of St. Anthony in his little nutshell of a metal container. This made me wonder: Who finds St. Anthony when he gets lost?

I found this tiny item last summer in the local antique store, a secret little man in a secret little tin. It looks like the kind of thing a spy would stash stolen microfilm in, in a Get Smart kind of way. But when you open it up there is this tiny metal statue of St. Anthony holding an even smaller baby Jesus in his arms. It is such a small thing to be the object of so much potential devotion, a secret of faith to carry in ones pocket, a thing so easily lost."