For the past 5 or 6 years, I’ve created a vision board at the new year for the year ahead. It sets out my intentions and desires and dreams.
Last year, 2024 didn’t have a vision board. I wasn’t feeling the energy to create it. I didn’t have any visions. My head was down as I ploughed through some projects for others.
I missed the focus of creating a vision board as well as having some kind of loose map to move through the year. I was feeling lost last year in so many ways and I didn’t want a repeat this year.
So this is my vision board for 2025 and it lives on the wall at the bottom of my bed. So I get to see it and focus on it every morning and every night.
There’s nothing major on there in terms of big changes and tasks but it does focus on being more present as well as focusing on experiences over material things.
I want to feel all the feels and still be standing afterwards with a smile on my face. There’s a lot of gratitude grounded in this vision board as well as wisdom. As I know what makes me tick and what brings be joy but there has been times in the past when I haven’t been prioritising them.
2025 is all about my needs and wants and desires. And not in a selfish way but in the way of how can I expect other people to treat me well with love and respect if I don’t give myself this.
Or as Maya Angelou said it , much better than me …
So this is the intention for 2025. I’ll be back to explore and share how I am supporting this journey through routines and rituals and attitudes.
Sometimes, I can feel my energy stagnating. Or being leeched away into activities, projects or circumstances that I want to be in but which if I allow it take me away from what is important to me.
I do great work and I enjoy facilitating/ creating/ coordinating it. Changing lives and bringing joy and opportunities to others, for others.
But sometimes, I have to strengthen my boundaries and batter down the hatches in order to make sure I can show up the best version of myself for myself and others.
The last couple of weeks have found me running low on energy, patience and creativity. I’ve been giving away a lot of myself, time and energy, and focus.
So the next chapter to the end of 2023, is focused on me taking back what’s mine. Taking back my time, my energy, my sparks and directing them in the directions that feed my soul. Which fuels my dreams and confidence in my voice.
And it starts with preparing my next visual journal. I’ve returned to a trusty old faithful. A pink pig sketchbook. And I’ve set up on my kitchen bench with paints and the gift card.
Every time I go into the kitchen, I create a spread. I smear drops of paint across the page with the disused credit card. I can feel my energy, my excitement and joy rising.
This simple act of moving colour across the page fills me with joy, wonder and ideas. My creativity has been lit up again and I’m looking forward to filling these pages.
I’ve been leaning into my gratitude practice, but sometimes I’ve forgotten and let the simple task of listing one thing per day for which I am grateful for, slide.
What can I say, habits are made to be broken as well as upheld. And the bad habits always seem to be the ones we hold onto. While those habits that can actually benefit us and bring some joy, peace and happiness into our lives, we fuck up!
Gratitude is one of them. Gratitude helps people feel more positive about their lives. It fosters positive emotions as people reflect and savour and relish good experiences and events and relationships.
Gratitude improves people’s health and makes them more satisfied with what they have rather than focusing time and energy and regret on what they do not have.
It’s been proven that being more grateful makes you happier.
Well I could always do with being happier. Everyone could. And that is not to say that I’m not grateful for the life I have, the life I’m living and the people in it. But I could do with a reminder and become more consistent in my appreciation and gratitude.
Hence the next 28 days of gratitude. Holding myself to account in order to re-engage with this positive habit and hold on to happiness.
I want to wring out as much gratitude for each experience and happening and being in my life as I can. As life is a gift but sometimes I forget. So today we begin again.
It’s day one of my gratitude practice.
Today I am grateful for the lie in I managed to have before being woke up.
But I’m not complaining as I was woke up by Miss Ella for a cuddle. I’m grateful for my morning cuddle in bed with my daughter.
I’m grateful today for the hot black fresh brewed coffee that helped me wake up fully and engage with the day.
I’m grateful to have completed a big application and submitted it today and it helped to have company while completing this work.
I’m grateful for the time I got to be alone and focus on the tasks I had to complete today and not be distracted or interrupted.
I’m grateful today for the chocolate I managed to stuff into my face after said application was complete and I could rest
I’m grateful to be able to lie in bed now, warm and sleepy and write this gratitude list without having to think too hard about what or who I am grateful for today because I have ample choices to draw upon to share.
Every year for the past 6 or 7 years, I’m chosen a word to guide me through the year. A word that I can use almost as a beacon to lead me through the year ahead with purpose, focus and grace.
2021 saw we embracing the practice of ::SLOW:: after 2020 and pandemic forcing everyone to slow down. Once things started to open up again, to some degrees, I didn’t want to give up the space and creativity and peace I’d found in moving and being at a slower pace. So I purposely leant into slow in 2021, and it saw me well.
Each guiding word is not discarded at the end of each year but through practice they become incorporated, embedded really into my way of being moving forward. So 2022, will see me continue to practice ::SLOW:: because I have learned so much about myself and others through it’s adoption. It has changed the way I operate in this world and for the better.
So considering this, the natural progression for me, building on 2021, is to adopt {BE} OPEN as my word of 2022.
For me OPEN means being open to opportunities, vulnerabilities and ideas.
Using OPEN with {BE} is a reminder to go gently and with grace. Using {} around the word ‘be’ is giving me, my state of being a virtual hug. I’m hugging myself through this process of opening up more to opportunities, vulnerabilities and ideas.
{BE} is offering love to myself. {BE} OPEN is offering action to open, even though I know ‘being’ has nothing to do with ‘doing’. Being is just being, just being me. No need to produce or shine. Just be simply open to what is there right in front of me.
{BE} OPEN to opportunities is not to shut down straight away but to move out of my comfort zone if something is offered to me as a possibility.
{BE} OPEN to vulnerabilities is being more of an open book. Showing up more and more authentically me and not being afraid of sharing my emotions, feelings and thoughts. Having my honest heart on display and giving and accepting LOVE.
{BE} OPEN to ideas is continuing to be the life-long learner I’m accepted myself to be and to continue to play and experiment within my own practice. To remain open to new adventures and explorations and not be afraid to take leaps, even when I’m getting older and maybe stuck in my ways.
With 2022, I’m practicing how to keep an open mind, heart and soul to whatever comes next. Viewing being and developing myself not as a chore or battle but as a blessing.
I was attempting to complete my second round of #100daysofblogging while also creating a poem a day for National Poetry Writing Month in April. I was going well. I past the mid-point, and I just ran out of steam. And I also think enjoyment. I wasn’t really inspired with what I was writing. I think I was writing for writing sake. To fulfil the challenges and not my soul. Sometimes this works for me. I know in the past, I’ve created daily words for years and thought nothing about it. But I suppose I’m getting older and wiser and also figuring out what’s important to me and no one else. What my gut has to say about things takes precedent.
I have been writing in other places though during this impasse on the blog. I have a piece over on Medium for the The Binderful Blog titled, ‘Learning to Stay Inside,’ and documents my journey with the Coronavirus. I have also returned to my mixed-media memoir and I’m happy to say we’re in love. We spend a lot of time together getting to know each other again and working out what’s working between us and what’s not. We’re open and honest with other, basing our relationship on our vulnerabilities. I’m more than satisfied with how things are working out between us. I know I have to keep honouring this process by turning up each day and just touching in.
Turning up here today to find some words I needed for the memoir, meant I took the time to read over some past posts. See where I was at different times over the last five years. While reading, I gained a sense of perspective as well as pride for what I have created here. I love my website, because it’s attempt to present me and my process to the world. And it’s not polished or professional but it is real. It gives you a glimpse behind the curtain. It’s honest and vulnerable and it is so me.
So I’m not going to beat myself up for not completing a challenge. And I’m also not going to beat myself up if I miss days, or weeks before coming back here to blog. I’m learning to treat myself with more grace. And how that’s looks it still a work in progress but I do know as Michelle Obama wisely said, it is becoming.
” Becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. It’s forward motion, a mans of evening, a way to reach continuously towards a better self. “
I sit on the bed, cross legged,
window open. Hearing a kid
scream, a car engine revving.
And there, just then, a seagull
flies by carrying bunch of leaf
and twine in its beak. Say you,
what you building? Stealing?
It’s now I’m aware of the trees
trees outside coming into leaf.
Buds unfurling like green ton-
gues with beard and feathery
flower clusters. What tree are
you? And why do you reach so
to the sky as if all that matters
is to grow and thrive? Zooming
traffic, loud, draw my attention
away from nature, from inside
But that’s usually the case with
modern life: a distancing from
our true nature with incentive
of moving faster, go anywhere,
produce anything of fake worth
as if our life depends upon it.
Not even two week gone yet since I’ve had surgery on my spine and there’s a voice in my head saying you should be doing more. You should be further along in your recovery.
I didn’t sleep well last night, if at all. So I’m going through my day being super critical and super negative in my outlook. Today, I can do no good. Nothing right.
Before I allow myself to wallow any further or spiral downwards any further, I need to shift my energy.
I get creative. I’ll be sharing a new series over the weekend but for now not only getting into the creative flow helped but also considering what I’ve already achieved this year, helped in an upward swing in my thinking, self-reflection.
This year saw me complete not one, not two, but three ‘100 day projects’. This has never been the case before. I’ve never been able to complete one #100dayprojects before never mind three!
So what was different this year in my approach, my thinking, my practice?
I’m not sure if I can pin it down to one thing as I do believe it was a combination of things, such as timing, tasks, enjoyment, accountability to self etc. But I think the main reason came down to my perspective. I set the challenges, I chose the focus, the timeframes, the mediums. I was in control but more importantly I was doing it all for me. I wasn’t completing a daily piece of art for anyone else, for their approval or appreciation. I was doing it for me and how it made me feel while doing it.
Stuff the end product it was all about the process and how for that time I set aside to create all self-criticism and doubts and fears were turned way down low, to nearly a whisper.
So I’m taking this process and applying it again when the self-criticism and doubts and fears rear their ugly heads during my recovery stage. I’m getting creative, luxuriating in the flow because here I happy and at peace and in the flow.
Living Wild Studios 