Journey Jars, 2001–2003

Deeply ecstatic that I had found the perfect medium for my work, I set out to change the world via words of wisdom that the masses would unroll from their fate-filled Journey Jars. That was the period from 2001–2007ish, with the most golden of those years being the first two or three.

Back then, Journey Jars were mason jars filled with vellum scrolls tied with sisal twine and printed on in grey Papyrus font to both feel ancient and also meld in to the translucency of the paper. Words are fleeting, clarity is durable — was the whole idea. It took quite a few sales and types of voices suggesting it for me to eventually add bark-top cork stoppers to finish it all off.

As a side note, I lost much sleep upon ordering thousands of bark top cork stoppers to fit the thousands of mason jars I had ordered, because things had to be done big or not at all, you see. Days after the dusty, cork-crumb-spilling boxes arrived, I finally opened one and attempted to put it atop a mason jar’s opening. To mine and my credit card’s chagrin, the cork dropped all the way inside. Either the Portuguese cork farm cutters or the Canadian middlemen had decided to shave a little off the side, pun intended. It took more than a moment for me to realize that the existing lid rims could be screwed on and make for a nice gold trim around the cork top and all was well. I certainly never would have ordered cork had I known it was such an unreliably measured or quality-controlled thing, and I certainly never would have benefited from this ‘mistake’ unless I had gone headlong into buying things wholesale to make sure it could scale.

So I suppose if the side note can be taken as an illustration of the bigger picture, I had to do what I had to do in order for Journey Jars to unroll in the eventual way they have. There simply are no mistakes — only resistance to trying and just trying. I have made exponentially more missteps than conscious moves toward the good. And even when I have stumbled, tripped and fallen into the good, it has taken me a little bit of time and stepping back to recognize.

What all this should tell you is that we barely have an idea what we’re doing to benefit tomorrow. It seems that the only thing we can do to the detriment of tomorrow is to do nothing. Inspiration paves a path, but not one lined with torches. We have to find it with bare feet, divert from thorny patches and toe in to where it’s smooth.

Back to the history of this whole thing, the first few years of making and peddling Journey Jars was filled with a euphoric connecting with real people after almost five years of writing and mulling about in that heady space of high level thought about genre and tone and platform.

I’m not sure if I wouldn’t have done better to just start trying to sell whatever I had from the beginning, but I don’t need to be. Edging things forward today is all that matters. Whether that feels like progress or regression is just a feeling; we have to begin so we can continue.