A Trail Through Leaves: The Journal as a Path to Place

To Wyoming artist-writer-naturalist Hannah Hinchman, the blank pages of a journal are a clarion call to awaken the soul, to celebrate being alive in the world, to get to know both the wilderness of our inmost selves and the "unpredictable and potent" natural world. Hinchman's respect for the miracle of our five senses, and her passion for what they can tell us ahout the world, is contagious. "Start with a smell, like a crushed marigold leaf, the sea, coal smoke, " she advises the would-be journal-keeper, and from such raw materials begin to "decant the stuff of life" into journal form, "where it remains fresh, still tasting of its source." Writing and drawing in a journal, she abundantly proves, is one way to live more fully in the present, and discover what in the world one wants to make one's own; for ultimately, "the act of recording a life ...is also the act of creating a life."