I’m so hooked on the accordion refill for Traveler’s Notebook. Especially when I am away from home and need to lighten the analogue load, the thin yet expansive layout of the accordion has been so giving. I took three accordion refills on our recent trip to Japan and ended up using two of them, dividing them nicely between the time before Kyoto for the first one and the time after for the second.
Based on my last experience using the same refill during the Germany/Ireland trip, I decided to dedicate the first spread page to an easy-to-glance daily itinerary. This helped counter the tendency for days to blend into one another when I am traveling, especially when I’m on the road for a long time. Since this is the 2nd time using an accordion notebook, I froze a little less when I added the first mark on the page. But still, having the pre-determined system to write down the itinerary on the first page took away the blank page anxiety I sometimes feel when I face “the very first page of a notebook”.
Once I got over the initial hump, I had a lot of fun filling the pages. My notebook, especially recently, tends to focus on my inner journey instead of the recording of an external experience, so the accordion refill ended up following a similar path. It’s a reflection of what felt important during the time of travel as much as a documentation of what we did on the trip. Some of the elements that are included in the refills are…
-
Watercolor doodle of loose scenery or a moment
-
Watercolor capture of a book cover that resonated with me so much, like this one by Michio Hoshino.
-
Notes I took from the article Frido sent to me about wisdom and a few other sources of the written world.
-
Japanese words and their meanings that resonated with me.
-
Memorable artifacts/clothes I picked up during the travel.
-
Stamps from train stamp rally (such a fun activity to collect stamps at various train stations and landmarks!)
-
etc,
The notebook has a limited number of pages, so I tend to pack a lot on each page. To minimize the visual confusion, I mix watercolor, mechanical pencil, and gel pen in two nib sizes to vary the look and feel depending on what I am adding to the pages. If there is a big theme emerging, I might use bold typography filled with watercolor paint as a title. Detail writing, like a note from an article or a lengthy journal entry, can be added with a mechanical pencil, so it becomes more of a background. This helps create a visual hierarchy and a flow to the layout.
Now that I am home, I occasionally flip through the accordion as a reference and to feel into the experience I had during our travel. I glued the refill to a page on my A5-size MD Cotton Thick Notebook, so it’s a part of my current notebook ecosystem (thick and beautiful). Being independent refills within an A5-size notebook, the time on the road feels integrated in the bigger flow of this year, yet distinctly honored as something a little different from my everyday in the canyon.
I also feel that the idea of something unfolding like an accordion is such a symbolic representation of travel and what happens when one is traveling. “Travel well. You have done everything you could to prepare for this trip, and now it’s time to enjoy the fruit. Trust that everything will work itself out”, was the last text message I sent to a friend who recently left for a big international trip. To me, the accordion refill notebook embodies the energy of letting go of our potential tendency to hold onto control and flow with whatever the moments unfold in front of us.
We don’t have any future trips planned right now (and it feels so good just to be home), but I know I will be filling the next accordion when I embark from this shore again. When that happens, I can’t wait to see how the new accordion will look and feel so different from the one I am holding today.
0 comments