Keeping a journal isn't so much about recording one's life as it is a weaving of illusion. On this site, we keep our Adventure Journal, where we record a once-a-week entry. It's obvious when you write so seldom that most of one's experiences will go unremembered, but even if one journals every day – nay, every hour! – the picture we paint isn't as clear as we'd like to hope.

                    Just a flower, or something more?
As writers, especially if we're writing non-fiction, our aim is to translate our experiences, via words and photos, as purely as we can to our readers. Yet even one tiny experience – sipping from a glass of water, say – is impossible to truly translate. At best, if we write that we took a sip, a reader might form a brief and dry mental image before he or she moves on to the next words.

During our adventures this week, which included rehearsals at New Glarus for the 2012 movie, long talks as we consider selling our horse Valkyrie to a loving home, a visit to my brother and his wife, and many other experiences, we read an online article about a man at Microsoft who is trying to record his entire life by photo-journaling almost everything. Apparently there is some new gadget that we can wear around our necks that takes photos of our 'life' on a constant basis. This might be the new technological trend – making our lives open and recorded so that we're all sharing every one of our memories and experiences. An online journal like the one we have here, which is open to anyone's eyes anywhere in the world, surely points toward the trend.

Yet just as a written journal fails to record our lives but instead weaves illusion, so will any story that we tell (by whatever means) fail to truly translate the experiences of our lives. We all react differently to stimuli, and one person's delicious dinner of veal is a horror fest for the vegetarian who could never eat such a thing. The 'fact' of the matter is just a plate with a meal on it, but what that 'fact' means or translates into is quite different from person to person. As our communications become more and more basic and simple, delivered via Twitter or text messages, we stand to forget that half of communication lies in the receiver.

We like to imagine that the old Japanese poets knew this fact, and wrote their poems not so much to translate an experience as to invoke an emotion – a tangible feeling of a place or situation – in the reader.

                                                               The butterfly
                                                                   Resting upon the temple bell,
                                                                       Asleep.
                                                                                          --Buson--

Perhaps even here the 'translation' fails, but only if failure equals an inability to re-create a situation that is now past. Mayhaps words and journals aren't meant to translate experience at all, but instead to act as a polite bow and a reaching out of hands as writer and reader invite each other to dance.

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