Leave a Trail — Strode Curious Mind Journal

Write the path as you go — this journal is for the kind of thinking that doesn't follow where the map points.

Muriel Strode

"I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail."

There's something fitting about this particular quote on a journal. Muriel Strode was a writer. She left her trail in words — published in 1903 in The Open Court, a journal of philosophy and science. The pages she filled are the reason we're still talking about her. Writing things down is how trails get made.

Every page you fill in this journal is the act the cover describes. You're not just carrying the quote — you're doing it. The trail you leave isn't the tee or the sweatshirt. It's this. What you actually write down.

The Design

Two warm burnished rules divide the cover into three movements: the first refusal, the alternative, and the declaration. AND I WILL LEAVE / A TRAIL. is the largest and most upright of the three — the conclusion the poem was building toward. The rules mark the pauses. Muriel Strode wrote this in 1903 and meant every one of them.

About This Journal

• Hardcover journal — durable, structured, built to travel
• 80 lined, cream-colored pages — easy on the eyes, easy to read back
• Built-in elastic closure and ribbon bookmark
• 5.5″ × 8.5″
• Quote printed on the cover

Who It's For

The person who thinks by writing. Who works things out on paper before they work them out anywhere else. Who knows that the trail you leave — the real one, the one that matters — isn't made of footprints. It's made of what you were willing to put into words.

Start here. Leave a trail.

The same declaration is on the Leave a Trail Tee and the Leave a Trail Sweatshirt.

Muriel Strode, in Plain English

• Lived: 1875–1964, American poet and philosopher
• A writer who understood that putting words on a page is its own kind of trailblazing
• Wind-Wafted Wild Flowers (1903) — the poem this quote comes from, published when few took notice
• Her trail: a body of work that survived a century of anonymity and finally has her name back on it
• Not Emerson. Not Thoreau. A woman with a pen and something precise to say.