SRP was originally created by author, nurse, artist, potter, and mother (among many other titles) Marilyn Shelley Leasia (aka Shelley) just a couple years before she passed away in 2018. She is as much an angel now in heaven as she was on earth. Anyone who knew her or has ever crossed paths would say the same. She created the emblem of a sleeping rhino for her self-published children's book Piano Pie, a story of her own daughter (myself) who would scheme creative ways to nudge 'Grandma With The Piano' (my nickname for Grandma) to play her keys.
Very close to the day I was born, Shelley wrote me a letter in a journal. Maybe she lost it over the years. Or maybe she did remember to give it to me once when I myself was too young to remember, so maybe I'm the one who had lost it over the years. Either way, it ended up in the basement untouched and undiscovered for about a decade.
Then one day when my 10 or 11 year old self was snooping through the basement I found it. The letter she wrote to baby Dora in a small notebook. The letter she wrote took up the first few pages of the journal, but the rest of the pages were blank. So I wrote her a note back in the same book I'd found and I hid it somewhere where I knew she would find it.
Then a few weeks later the notebook appeared. I found it in the kitchen or bathroom or somewhere unassuming but intentional. So I read her note, wrote her a letter back, and hid our journal again in another place unassuming but easy to stumble upon, which started our secret tradition that carried on until I moved away to college another seven years after that.
Even before our secret letters, I've kept a journal since I was 8 years old. I have a trunk of around 40 of them. Sometimes it feels like my trunk of sanity and sometimes it feels like Pandora's box. But when the question has ever come up in conversation "If your house was burning down and you could only save 3 things, what would they be?" My trunk of journals would usually make the list.
If you've never journaled, I'm hoping this blog might change that. Journaling has helped me through it all--from high school day dreams to the death of my mother. Journaling is a way of listening to yourself and giving your thoughts the attention they're used to giving everything and everyone else.
When she was alive I didn't dig into it much, but now that she's gone I realize she is the sleeping rhino. And even though she's at rest, her memory lives on.
Then one day when my 10 or 11 year old self was snooping through the basement I found it. The letter she wrote to baby Dora in a small notebook. The letter she wrote took up the first few pages of the journal, but the rest of the pages were blank. So I wrote her a note back in the same book I'd found and I hid it somewhere where I knew she would find it.
Then a few weeks later the notebook appeared. I found it in the kitchen or bathroom or somewhere unassuming but intentional. So I read her note, wrote her a letter back, and hid our journal again in another place unassuming but easy to stumble upon, which started our secret tradition that carried on until I moved away to college another seven years after that.
Even before our secret letters, I've kept a journal since I was 8 years old. I have a trunk of around 40 of them. Sometimes it feels like my trunk of sanity and sometimes it feels like Pandora's box. But when the question has ever come up in conversation "If your house was burning down and you could only save 3 things, what would they be?" My trunk of journals would usually make the list.
If you've never journaled, I'm hoping this blog might change that. Journaling has helped me through it all--from high school day dreams to the death of my mother. Journaling is a way of listening to yourself and giving your thoughts the attention they're used to giving everything and everyone else.
When she was alive I didn't dig into it much, but now that she's gone I realize she is the sleeping rhino. And even though she's at rest, her memory lives on.
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