• Miscellany,  Presence - 2022

    You got know when to fold ’em

    Let me tell you a little story. For a couple of months now I have been trying to write a piece about making time for presence and cultivating my mind garden. Let me tell you…it has been a struggle! I could not find a way to say what I wanted to say no matter how many times I rewrote and rearranged the words, and then life gave me other stuff to focus on. It got to the point where I dreaded opening the document because I thought I was failing at doing something I had committed myself to do. It also stopped me writing anything else for my blogs because…

  • Poetry

    Playing with Words

    Sometimes when my energy is running low and ennui is running high, I want to play with words, but they just won’t come. So I steal other people’s words and bend them to my purposes and play in my visual diary. This piece is taking a leaf out of Austin Kleon’s book and choosing words in situ. I use a black marker to kill off the words that don’t fit the story, and in this case I embellished with some collage. A couple of hours of being lost in the process was just what I needed. The next time I needed to steal words, I chose song lyrics. I love…

  • Consistency - 2020,  Consistency - 2021

    Same Storm, Different Boat

    Looking back at 2020 and my word for 2021  2020 was a very odd year all around. To put it mildly!  I had chosen Consistency as my word for the year, and I intended to put solid effort into building habits and working towards being where I wanted to be health-wise before my milestone birthday at the end of 2020. That didn’t really happen. Derailments occurred and habits came and went as stress levels ebbed and flowed. I didn’t get to where I wanted to be, but I did make a little progress, so cannot claim complete failure! And so, consistency will continue to be my word for this year,…

  • Journalling

    Handwritten journals are back!

    On the first of this year I returned to handwriting my journals, and I am so happy that I did! For the past six years or so I had been using an app to capture my thoughts and was able to rattle off thousands of words in general brain vomit in a day. It met some of my needs, but it felt mechanical and sterile. It felt disconnected somehow. I needed a change. Digital was secure and private, and I needed that during those years, I had experienced privacy breaches and I felt violated and not at all free to let my brain fall out onto the page so that…