Diary One
Beginning a diary signifies faith that one's life is going somewhere for some reason. When Patty Sessions began her trail diary, she knew she was on the move to an unknown destination. She had faith in God's intervention in the affairs of the church that held her unswerving allegiance. She trusted her leaders. She had faith in the body of Latter-day Saints and particularly in the spiritual powers of the women who were her counterparts. She believed that the migration was necessary. She had confidence in her ability not only to endure to the end of the journey but also to use her considerable abilities to help others endure. Patty gave her perspective of the journey to the valley of the Great Salt Lake with matter-of-factness but enough poignancy to awaken us to her complexity.
“The form [of diary keeping] has been an important outlet for women partly because it is an analogue to their lives: emotional, fragmentary, interrupted, modest, not to be taken seriously, private, restricted, daily, trivial, formless, concerned with self, as endless as their tasks," wrote Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter, the editors of Revelations: Diaries of Women.
No comments:
Post a Comment