creativity

Blogging in 2025

| Sheree

Hey I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I’ve created a blog post every day so far in 2025. I don’t want to jinx the process by mentioning it. But many moons ago, I created a blog called ‘Everyday Creativity’. The aim of this blog was to be creative every day for a year and share it. I shared images, text, quotes, poems, reflection. Small stones were around at this time and I enjoyed creating them to remember moments.

Whatever was calling me that day was posted. I loved how it kept me engaged with my creativity. It also broke down some barriers I might have constructed about what is art and creativity. I realised that there’s no reason so be so precious about. Or put it on a pedestal.

I believe we are all creative and we just need to give ourselves permission, as well as the time and space to play, to create.

Getting Things Straight

| Sheree

Have you ever been camping?

This weekend saw me away from home at The Outdoor Connections weekend. It’s a weekend away for grassroots groups who are working to diversify the outdoors. Groups and organisations who connect with grassroots communities to offer opportunities outdoors with nature.

So Earth Sea Love CIC, me as Creative Director, was invited along to take part. And I went with Kiwi, my converted campervan, with the hope of camping out on the site of the youth hostel where everything was taking place.

That didn’t go plan as sleeping in my campervan wasn’t allowed on site for what reason I do not know. So each evening, I left the group to try and find a park up for the night.

Stanage Edge, Park District

I’m not complaining though as I found some lush spots to park up and rest.

Now I have returned home, I’m still a bit out of sorts. Not quite landed yet after my time away. So a way for me to get grounded is to make another handmade journal to use for my daily pages moving forward.

Well no sooner than I’d finished it, yesterday evening, that it’s full today. All I can say is that I must have had a lot to process. I know I did use it as my next to-do list after my last journal was used for the same practice. And it’s just helps me get things straight. Clear the decks and start again. Begin to work my way through the things that need to be done.

Fugitive Practice

| Sheree

For those of us who live at the shoreline… Audre Lorde

It will be 10 years this August that I started my visual journaling practice.

Then it was called Dreaming on Paper, as I completed the course of the same name by Lisa Sonora.

I needed a safe space to explore the tumult of my feelings and thoughts. I was going through a traumatic experience of escape really. Escape from the life I’d spent the past 12 years building up, that was took away in the flick of a Facebook post.

I ran away from the public, the writing community, my home as I travelled into the Scottish Highlands and Islands. To heal.

Visual journaling helped me heal. Helps me continue to heal.

Overtime, I’ve come to understand my visual journal practice as a fugitive practice. Within these paints, images and words, dreams of freedom are planned out and eventually come to fruition. Projects, happenings, events – all on my own terms.

I mean, the whole point about escape is that it’s an activity. It’s not an achievement. You don’t ever get escaped. – Fred Moten

Within these visual journal spreads, I work out how to escape, how to get outside white supremacy culture while still having to be living on the inside. Coming to terms with the thought of that the outside can only occur from the inside. Being here.

Visual journaling is me trying to create an opening, a break in the fabric in which to slip on through into the otherside/ outside, into the woods running between the trees with the dogs barking at my feet. Creating beauty, creating a beautiful space in which to linger in while the terror rages around me.

Visual journaling is a safe space, is a nurturing space, is a free space.

Goofing Off – Day 9

| Sheree

I made a journal this week.

Recycled a print out of the Darkling manuscript.

I needed to get centred, grounded, focused.

So I stitched the printed sheets together into a book.

Then I applied paint to each page, blotted off any excess.

I had a journal of colourful pages.

I had a safe vessel to capture all my thoughts feelings and to-dos.

I had been feeling overwhelmed.

Like treading water and getting nowhere.

Creating this journal was fun.

It felt like goofing off my day-to-day responsibilities.

This journal helped me get my ducks in a row.

And tick(le) them off into the sunset!

Endure

| Sheree

This wasn’t the way he promised it would be.

Bare floors, five to a room, babies’

faces lined with hunger, piercing

cries towards an empty oil lamp.

Love squeezes out of lives.

Boys shooting boys as regular as angel

dusting on banana leaves, long

and glistening. Violence standing

caged on corners with broken

standpipes, living next to dread.

The seething and faltering silence

as the dreamed for life

bobs on a distant horizon.

The moon is nowhere in sight.*

*Laventille, Smokestack Books, 2015

Show Up In Fullness

| Sheree

I’m practicing how to show up in spaces, alone and with others, in fullness.

I’ve used wholeness before. Striving to get back to that sense of being whole, as we enter as already into this world. And then for the rest of our lives society and culture pull us away from our wholeness. When we realise, usually when much older and not giving a fuck, we spend our time and energy attempting to get back to that wholeness. This is a practice too, but to be whole sounds final and also out of reach.

Fullness. While fullness seems something that can be embraced now. In the present, moment to moment. Fullness for me gives the middle finger to those who have criticised me by saying I’m too much. Too Black. Too fat. Too loud. Too enthusiastic. Too Alive. Too much.

Fullness is me embracing my too-muchness and giving off that ‘don’t care less’ energy.

I’m showing up in fullness. Come join me.

I was told I couldn’t be one!

| Sheree
Time to Dress Up

When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?

When I was five I said to my mum when I grow up I want to be a lollipop lady.

I saw a lot of lollipop ladies as I walked to and from school each day. Not only did I love the bright yellow uniform and the hat. But I also loved how they had the power to stop traffic.

Lollipop ladies just walk out into the road put down their lollipop stick and stick up a hand and the cars stop for them.

I thought that was cool.

But the main reason I wanted to be a lollipop lady was because they were always smiling. They always greeted me with a smile and a good morning or the question, ‘Good day at school?’

Lollipop ladies not only looked like they were enjoying their job but they were also sharing that joy with others, even if only for the little time it took for me to walk across the road in front of them with the cars at bay.

They were smiling.

So I wanted to be a lollipop lady when I was five and I told my mum. My mum said I couldn’t be a lollipop lady. No, she said. Maybe when you retire but not until then. You can be anything you want to be Sheree, she said. Save being a lollipop lady until you retire.

I better start filling out my application then as I’m getting old (er).

When my journal matches my moods

| Sheree
Current Squeeze

March is nearly over. I spent a lot of it getting ready for a trip that didn’t happen. I’m still sore around the wound but will share here at some point.

The journal above which I share is the journal I created for my travels. It’s an Elle Decorating Magazine which I’ve repurposed. I pulled out the images and text I wanted to use in my visual journaling and then painted over the remaining pages.

It’s rough and ready. Messy and grungy and in the process I didn’t realise how much it has reflected my mood.

It’s not perfect.

I’ve been all over the place in terms of my moods these past few weeks. Serene and blissed out to stressed and anxious and angry.

And this messy, at times ugly, journal has captured it all. And I am grateful for its space and non-judgmental welcome.

I’ll be back here over the coming days to share the spreads that have been created in this journal. Just so you can see a bit more of my process and practice.

One more thing. The back of this journal was converted into a mini guide book to take on my travels with me. Since I didn’t make that trip, I haven’t been back into the back of the journal. I was also contemplated chucking the whole thing and start a new journal as I felt it would be painful and annoying to continue to use the journal as its purpose was for my time away.

But instead of avoiding the pain and frustrations and disappointments, continuing to use the journal has meant I haven’t run away from the feels but have allowed myself to sit with the feels.

I’m not sure if that means I’m a glutton for punishment or if I’m just all in with this life, my life of attempting to thrive rather than just survive.

Still showing up in this journal, just created from a magazine man, has given me the time and space to work through my feelings and come through feeling grateful for my life and the people I have around me who care about me and love me.

Visual journaling, it kills me in how it’s such a powerful tool for staying present and connecting with the self. Amazeballs!