[little me + a journal from my son + card from K]
So, Braveheart, today is the first day of a new trip around the sun for me … and Week 4/52 was the ideal launching pad for celebrating my wild and precious life! 🎉🎉🎉
Week 4/52 was all about redefining my creative work, self-directed study, trusting my pace — next level acceptance of what is, and what is not.
i finally decided to stop apologizing for my emotionality and stopped carrying the burden of other people’s comfort …
a’driane n. nieves
While listening and taking notes from this podcast, I was also prompted to compile a list of people I know I can trust and rely on.
- People in my life who are safe, who love and accept me as I am; people I have regular contact with and share a mutually beneficial bond.
Trusted relationships are part of living free and unmovable, [stable, at-peace, tenacious].
I am ever-grateful and fortunate to have a 33+ year partnership, and so many long-term friendships.
- These relationships are proof that “the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives” (Dr. Rangan Chatterjee). ♥
My sojourn with cancer served as a start line of learning to separate acquaintances with friendships. But also knowing who I could trust as I ever-slowly started living differently.
- I have needed the 21+ years since then to fully transition into what I knew I needed and wanted for my life, and to come to terms with “what I cannot change.”
“This is just who I am — a person who needs practice spaces and accountability containers, especially when a task or project feels scary, overwhelming, or particularly tedious. Instead of fighting against that, I embrace it. I join other people’s spaces, I create my own spaces, I recruit friends for regular phone call check-ins about writing and for zoom dates in which we can talk through blocks in our businesses.” Nic Antoinette
The first of those two decades after cancer was spent living with chronic pain, estrangements and loss.
The second decade became a solo journey with healing and practicing self-compassion as I untangled myself from faulty and baseless hopes.
- The past year and a half has been about the final stage of letting go of (so-o many differing) realities I hoped against hope could be different.
- Most recently, people who have incrementally disappeared, the myth of closure and being able to ignore people who “insist that we are the problem because we are not tolerating their behaviors” (Nedra Glover Tawwab).
- “[Ignoring] people doesn’t prevent us from feeling some of the impact of their behavior.” –Nedra Glover Tawwab
When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.
Maya Angelou
Braveheart, we cycle like the moon. Our lives consist of a series of phases and cycles during which we develop and change physically, mentally and spiritually.
🎉Birthday celebrations mark the years we mature and evolve; fostering, replenishing and reinventing our-selves, our relationships, our work along with how we define “home” and “family.”
It matters not at all whether we are holding our breath for a triumph or bracing for a tragedy. For as long as we are waiting, we are not living.
Maria Popova
“We find that about 43 percent of what people do every day is repeated in the same context, usually while they are thinking about something else.” –Wendy Wood
Turning the kaleidoscope of my life means I give my attention to what matters most to me, and that I remain open and vulnerable to what is new and different.
- Related: sacred space & possibility | doing what i want | creating a linear narrative | freedom born of detachment | rewrite the script | appointed seasons just beyond yourself
I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.
Flannery O’Connor
[The] treacherous “if only” mind that haunts all of us, in one way or another, to some degree or other, as we go through life expecting the next moment to contain what this one does not and, in granting us some mythic missing piece that forever keeps us from the warm glad feeling of enoughness, to render our lives worthy of having been lived.” –Maria Popova
The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation.
Rebecca Solnit
The longings of my younger self fueled me to the life I live today. A life with freedom and ease I celebrate in spite of its uncertainties. But also, because of its uncertainties.
- I have been fortunate to live each of the wishes I had for myself … even though there were also outcomes that I couldn’t foresee when I made those wishes.
- 2020-2022 were not easy years for me. I lost hope and struggled to find meaning amidst realities in the world, but also within myself as I coped with repeated losses and debilitating depression (and a major home renovation).
- Frankly, 2023 wasn’t “easier” but there were some shocking 💔 realities that served me well.
- Related: life can get better
- These years were a necessary time of facing facts I needed to ignore for various reasons.
- This became a healing process made possible by self-compassion, a series of choices and conversations, and ongoing support. (I have a loyal and loving partner, and the best friends in the world, Braveheart!) ♥
Let this be a space where you continue to act with courage to create, because you know the small things matter so much more than we often realize.
Morgan Harper Nichols
My Week 4/53 page collage includes hand art + weekly art marker from the Ko-fi January theme download; planetary papers, a lunar phase sticker; jotted entries and doodles; found words that created a message of guidance and affirmation; art from packaging (yogurt); black paint with white gel ink; red Washi tape (red is the color prompt for January from the 2024 Kit).
Having a system, a scaffolding of sorts, provides us with starting points + helps us to show up for ourselves on the page as we align our values with our actions.
- The 2024 Annual Kit provides instructional content to guide you in establishing a right brain planning practice.
The 2024 Annual Kit includes:
(1) Guide — content and principles regarding a right brain planning practice to foster your attention regarding your “constellations” [patterns, habits and rhythms] and compassion.
(2) Prompts and Template Pages — basic principles for a right brain planning practice including monthly guide words, prompts, art and themed content to provide a framework for a calendar year.
Braveheart, today I shall laugh and celebrate living; I will have cake; I will be among the trees, and I will go easy and be filled with light, and shine (ala Mary Oliver).
Thank you kindly for your presence here, Braveheart.
I appreciate your interest and support.
~love & good wishes~
2024 Right Brain Planner® Kit | field notes | Right Brain Planner® FAQ
2024 Right Brain Planner® Kit [Theme] Kaleidoscope Perspectives ✨ [Focus] — Noticing Beauty (within the kaleidoscope of your living: the ongoing, ever-changing “formations” of color and meaning)
❤️ Braveheart, as the Creator/Artist of Right Brain Planner® I am ever-grateful to have the opportunity to share my creative work online + support other creators since 2008! 🎉 This is possible, in part, by {you} and your presence here. But also because of the support of my Ko-fi patrons and the other other member/subscriber communities I host (via their presence, input and subscriptions).
P.S. I have been devoting more time to writing here about my creative practice. 😊 I hope you will join me here, Braveheart. 🎉