Compliments of the new year and welcome back! Today I thought we’d try something a little different. I present: Selected transcriptions of my 2023 (pen and paper) journal. Whilst preparing for an (initimidatingly) overdue journaling session tonight, I was struck by the few gorgeous truths I wrote on the rare occasions that I actually put pen to paper in 2023, (quite frankly I’m a little freaked out that I wrote some of these in the first place to be honest).

Discipline is a beautiful form of Self-care. It divests from the selfish (ironically self-serving) commercial version we’ve been force-fed over the years. Few people love a good bubble bath as much as I do, but we can do hard things for the love of self too. Eat that cake, sure. But also, Go (sigh) jogging just because it’s good for your literal heart. Editors note: I hate running. Screw endorphins, I gain absolutely no personal pleasure from the act of going to the gym except for the explicit self-care my choosing to go anyway represents.

Everything in nature is cyclical and seasonal. And so are you: You are a seasonal human. Accept your waxes and wanes with grace and fortitude.

I do not need the outer trappings to confirm the inner titles to be truth. Ie. I’m a creative if I chose a creative life. Full stop. Not, if I can make a living off of my creativity. Success and recognition are flowers but that is not “the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a of a tree called life”(Thank you TS Elliot!). I also decided that I wanted to lean into my feminine energy last year (the exact words were “I want to giggle and flirt and be charmed by people and things this year and and in turn charm people and things as I discover the softer powers I’ve always possessed but never purposefully wielded before now”. Then I immediately started panicking because I did not have anny of the outer trappings of sacred femininity namely motherhood and marriage (read, no children of my own and I am nobody’s wife) and even scarier still, that this is by personal preference. But I watch how I show up in the nurturing and the softness (I literally flirted to get a copy of a results sheet printed the other day; It was an aggressively asexual encounter but flirt I did and I’m still proud of that little moment to this day) and I realised that “I do not need the traditional outer trappings of the feminine for the feminine in me to be true. I live here.

Nothing in your path can derail your path. Someone really smart (Master Oogway via Jean de La Fontaine) said: “one often meets one’s destiny on the path one takes to avoid it.”

Whoo whoo alert: I don’t know much about manifestation and vibrations and all of the buzz-wordy stuff in the expert sense. But I know this: if you believe something is already yours, let it go, trust it will come and in the meantime prepare yourself to meet it. You will never be disappointed with what comes after that (even if it is not what you expected). It has been called by many names. It is still true.

The wound is where the light gets in. Just because it hurts doesn’t mean good things aren’t happening.

“Sing to the moon/and the stars will shine/over you lead you to the other side/
Sing to the moon/and the starts will shine/over. You heavens gonna turn the tide”
Laura Mvula’s immortal hit me like a ton of bricks while I was in the world’s most gentle candlelit bath. I finally heard that the stars are in motion and the heavens exist with or without you but: if you choose to participate in the celestial dance, you get to feel like a collaborator in the magic that has been unfolding all along. A week prior, when I sitting before the ocean in the moonlight I was struck by the profound beauty that the same magnetic power controlling the mighty tides also commanded my internal tide (my uterus is on a literal lunar cycle). The realisation made me literally shiver with awe of how interconnected we all are to everything. Because The Maker’s fingerprints can be found on everything he touches.

Creativity should be treated with personal urgency as a daily pursuit however, creative output need not be. Your humans will wait for you and your output will find its intended audience. I’ve felt personally convicted by the reappearance of one of my favourite Creatives Nneka Julia. She was clearly working/living out of site for a while after her last project (the incredible Letters to a Stranger 100 day project) and while she has been dropping gems in my inbox every other month because I’ve subscribed to her mailing list (do yourself this favour), she was largely missing from our feeds. And she was missed but I find myself happy to have experienced her output at all and was also at peace with the fact that we might never hear from her (in that way) again. And then she returned. This has reminded me that there is no timeline to creative output because your community will wait for you and enjoy you when you are ready to. I will be redirecting you to her Instagram now: @nnekaj.

The well never runs dry. Use all your ideas, don’t save them because you think they’re the best you’ll ever get. Use them all and you’ll soon find that there’ll be more ideas tomorrow. Bigger, better ones. I used to be stressed years ago when I started this blog that I’d eventually run out of ideas. Every time I wrote something I was proud of it was bittersweet because I thought “that’s it, never gonna top that”. And while some ideas are better than others, I have learned to trust that there will always always always be more. Always there will be more because as you engage the Muse, she will supply freely as she begins to know you as a reliable receptacle. It is not overstating the fact when I say that my creativity is how I know for certain that there is a God. He is a Creator after all.