Wrecking my Journal

Dirt

As the name of my blog hopefully implies, my goal in writing these posts is to not only get over the trauma from my car accident last September, by ultimately finding the beauty within the damaged.
Now several months into my blog with not much progress, I have decided to begin analyzing my journal, in hopes that I gain some insight to... life?

For those of you that are unfamiliar, Keri Smith is a wonderful woman that has created the concept of the "Wreck This Journal". As readers of my blog, I find it highly important that you all understand the directions that I am following when I complete the pages in my journal. 

1. The journal must be carried with you everywhere.
2. Instructions must be followed on every page.
3. The order of completion is not important.
4. The instructions are open to interpretation.
5. Experiment. 

So similar to my actual journal, I'm not really going to follow any particular order when I blog about the things I have done with my journal. Except now, maybe.
One of the first pages I did instructed me to "RUB HERE WITH DIRT". So that's what I did.

If we're lucky, as the blog progresses, these pictures might gain higher quality. 

 But only if we're lucky. 

So, that's some dirt, on paper, yeeeeeah.

When I started this page, I literally just went outside, and smudged both of the pages entirely with a dirt-sand combination that just happened to be right outside of my door. And only was it once I had the whole page covered that I realized I wanted to make something a bit more noteworthy and, well, artistic. This flower, is far from how I typically draw such things, but I still like the way that it looks. The mountain range of the left page came quite a while later, after I acquired some inspiration from a wander in the woods. I'd like to say that my little mountain range here is a spitting image of the master piece I was looking at along the horizon-- but that would be a blatant lie. In all honesty, this is just the best I could do whilst finger painting-- however, I think with these, there is a lot more to them what initially meets the eye. 

The flower, though not what I had expected, is a reflection of how even something as messy as dirt can  create something of beauty. Now, I don't say this as a new and ground breaking concept, but the point is, I didn't expect my creation to necessarily look good, because, c'mon, it's literally dirt on paper. But as I was making these two, truly astounding pictures, I found that I was actually not only making the paper a bit more shiny, but I was starting to glimmer as well. 

For those of you that don't often spend time rubbing your hands in dirt, there's something special that happens where all of the little flecks of sparkly minerals cling to your skin, and make you look ultra tan and glittered. But there truly is something beautiful about letting yourself get a little messy just for the heck of it.

This is the "ah-ha" moment-- by getting more messy, I became a bit more beautiful and real. Furthermore, by literally destroying a small portion of the book, it became so much more beautiful than just a blank page. 

As I continue to blog my way through this book, my goal is to keep these thoughts in mind, because some pages will definitely be harder to complete than others-- due to the fact that it is a bit of a moral dilemma to destroy a book, even if that's how you follow the rules.