Happy New Year!
I hope you all found yourselves wrapped in love and warmth as we entered 2023. I wanted to write some kind of end of the year wrap up. But as the weeks of December tumbled to a close, I found myself hiding from the task of trying to summarize my year. My concept of time is terrible as well. I wrote 2012 on a check recently. I think I got emails yesterday when I received them weeks ago. When I think back over the past year, I feel like it was forever and also so brief. A lump in my throat grows and my eyes swell up when I think of 2022, for happy reasons both happy and sad. At any rate, I’m happy to have made it through, for all that I learned along the way and am looking forward.
Recently, I heard about the practice of picking words to define what you want for the upcoming instead of making resolutions. It got me thinking about Petal Pusher and the whole concept behind it; artistic accountability and staying connected to your creative pursuits and the core truths of them. Setting goals and resolutions creatively has both helped and hurt me in the past. It provided me with structure and required me to say clearly what I wanted to achieve, which sometimes can be the scariest part. The act of writing down the artistic goal allows you to set an expectation of yourself, while simultaneously declaring the belief that you can achieve it. This exact dichotomy is what often leaves me feeling stuck. I want to follow through, but what happens if I don’t meet my goal?
That’s where this idea of choosing words that you want to embody in the coming year feels full of curiosity and possibility. It broadens the scope of compassion in which you can work toward your artistic and personal goals. It can be as specific or vast as you want. It can be as messy or as neat as you want. You get to move fluidly through your life and work while maintaining a connection to a central point. This year I would like to share a few words that I’d like to have be central to my life and my art:
COMPASSION for myself and others
FUN in my day job, my home life, with friends, with art and music
TRUST in the progress, the process and the time it takes to heal, create, and grow.
JOY -a word my dear friend Anika Pyle speaks and writes on so well. I want to prioritize ideas, time, people, and work that brings me and others joy.
As my first attempt to share work that I’m doing for LP3, I’m going to share a demo that my partner and I worked on together. This song contains lyrics I wrote as a teenager, but never quite found a melody that worked with them. Fast forward many years later and many lives lived, I heard my partner quietly strumming this progression on his guitar. It was a rainy day and something felt right. The melody came to me with such ease and I thought, “maybe this is the right tune for those lyrics.” Sometimes, it really is worth the patience and trust that a good idea will eventually become complete. Had I made a resolution that year when I was 18 to finish that song, it never would have been right. Some things are on their own time. But the compassion for myself and the trust in the process of creating this song, has surprised me in the best way and it will be fun to see where this song goes next.
I hope that you enjoy it and that you can also be open to some trust, fun, compassion and joy really blossoming in your year to come.
Community Question: What are the words you want to center in your life this year? How do they relate to your creative goals?
Beautiful
"Kindness."
To myself, because it's what I need to work on most- being kind to myself when things don't quite work, or my brain doesn't quite focus, or plans go sideways. This year is going to have a lot of big changes, coming soon- needing to find a new job (since I'm more-likely-than-not to finish grad school in a few months), which likely means moving to a new city. Lots of decisions that I can't foresee the outcome of, so I need to be kind to myself and respect the choices I do make.
Creatively, it's not beating myself up when things "don't go" or "don't work" and giving myself room to explore a little, even if it means that I really, really want to splurge on a macro lens for my camera. Am I going to be good at it from the get-go? No, probably not. But if I can just allow myself a little grace to learn and grow, maybe I can create something cool.