I’m keeping my journals all in one place this year as I attempt to mark how many or how much I create and play and mark each day of 2025. And of course I missed my single week/day handmade journals that I’ve shared here and here. And of course I’ve moved onto another journal since my return from Paris. But this post is a marker.It’s a start in visually representing my visual journaling of 2025.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Living Wild Studios 