Happy May! It's a beautiful sunny Sunday in my neck of the woods today, as I'm putting this post together.
This year I'm experimenting with my own version of Slow Blogging. What I'm doing is blogging just once a month, sharing the month's pages of a sketchbook that I'm writing in, and collaging in, and generally treating as if it were my blog.
If you're new to my blog and to this year's experiment, or if you just want a recap, here are the other posts: why I'm slow blogging, January, February and March.)
The way this works is, I'll share my sketchbook/slow blog pages one at a time in this post, and you can click on each image to view it in a lightbox if you need to (although it generally doesn't get bigger than what's in the post itself). Below each picture, if I feel it needs further explanation, I'll write a bit, or include links to whatever inspired me. Here we go!
At the start of the month I thought I would try a month-long lettering challenge, on Instagram. So these next few pages were my daily lettering pieces. I did the lettering and posted a photo to Instagram, and then I'd write around it, for my blog post. After about a week or two I lost steam, and interest, but it was fun while it lasted.
Since I wrote the words above in this picture, I haven't been back to the gym. I've struggled with it, I'll be honest... struggled with letting myself let it go. Last year I was devoted to the gym, and got a lot out of it, out of going twice or three times a week. And then I just ... stopped. Stopped going, stopped caring, stopped wanting to go. I tried, a few times, to go back and get back into it but the passion is gone. I think I did it too much, or else, perhaps that phase is just ... over. And that's OK. But I hear Vampire Voices in my head for sure, saying I must go, that I have to stick with it. Oh ... well.
More of the lettering...
And then... I quit Facebook. This post by Tiffany on her Instagram is what lit the spark, but I think really the kindling pile had been building. I gave myself a week to get ready for it, collect people's contact information and whatever else I felt I wanted to take with me. Then I scheduled my account for deletion.
I helped out at a workshop by the local chapter of Ladies Learning Code, which was fun.
My friend Leah Wechsler has this great free little e-course that comes to your email. From it, I found one sentence in particular really speaking to me.
Leah sent me a package in the mail! What a sweetheart. She got me this deck of cards, called The Daily Tending Divination Deck, by Mara Glatzel, and I've been putting it to good use.
I find with Facebook gone, there is more time in the day to do creative things. Not a LOT of extra time, but little pockets of it here and there.
And then of course there is Chase The Ace... the monstrous fundraiser that I've been volunteering at, for my work's sake. I took some unwinning tickets home with me after the last one and played around with them.
Now my one remaining social media platform is my Instagram, and I'm pondering creating some sort of plan for it, to promote myself and my business a bit more. Above and below are my written-out thoughts on it and a start on a calendar.
We'll see how it goes... I'm still on the fence about it.
I've been using this desktop art by Sea of Atlas this month, and loving it, and it's got me thinking about making one too, that I can share with you guys.
This post by Alexandra Franzen, titled "Why I Do Not Use Social Media Anymore," is where the quote above comes from.
I find that now that I don't have Facebook in my life, I'm more curious about my own thoughts, and there is more room in my head to give them space to grow. I feel a bit like I've returned to what life was like pre-Facebook, and pre-crazy-Internet-on-every-device-all-the-time, when things were calmer and there was more time to just BE, yourself. And think your own thoughts. I didn't realize how necessary that is for my creative happiness! Until I gave up Facebook.
Well, that was April 2016. I'm enjoying this experiment very much, and enjoying finding a way to blog and be online that suits me now, that suits who I am now. I look back to myself as a writer and a sharer during the Dream Big Cape Breton project and I'm grateful for it, but also I know deep down that I could not do the same level of intensity, the same level of sharing, anymore.
And that's OK.
See you here again at the end of May, and in the meantime, if you're an Instagram user, I'd love to say hi and chat with you there. I share photos and words of things that inspire me, bring me joy, or are just part of my daily life, on my account.