“Art is never finished, only abandoned” said Leonardo DaVinci.

“When the student is ready the teacher appears” said Lao Tzu

This year I hope to change this internal story that “I'm not a green thumb” and give gardening another try. And for inspiration, I chose to create an illustrated vision board of gardening tools.

The deep dive had me see more important questions that I needed to address first. What was I expecting and was I doing what was necessary to achieve those expectations? I immediately saw that somewhere along this journey I got lost.

When I first adopted the practice of keeping a common place notebook, I used it as “the experts” recommended (I seem to have a thing for following experts advice before I decide to follow my own heart). But then I naturally fell into a flow of no fuzz, no restrictions, use as needed way of keeping this notebook.

I write what comes to mind, even if it doesn’t make sense, until it starts making sense and I start seeing what was beneath the junky thoughts. For sure, pearls of wisdom come through once the junk is removed. And pearls of wisdom can be anything like the one a couple of weeks ago: “discard any items that no longer fit who you are today.”

And then, just like that, as I was journaling on the 2nd day of the new year, I started doodling on the lined pages instead of writing, revisiting one of my character ideas, catching in my mind what the character was telling me it wanted to do.

Work wise I come from the Fashion Retail Industry and I’m used to companies pushing seasonal product incredibly early. But even so, I never felt the seasons turn so quickly. I wonder if this feeling is related to how much social media I’ve been consuming lately.

This is an artist account and I’m questioning sharing what I’m about to share. Yet, I’ve found that to be creative, I’ve had so much inner clean up to do!

The biggest challenge on this path, for me, has been mindset. I’ve always been disciplined. I do what I say I’m going to do. But also, I have this behavior that because it creeps up unexpectedly, it can hold me back.

I’ve been on a long journey to get to a day like today. A day when I wake up and my first thought is: what will I create today? the question brings me to my center and focuses my creative energy. It wasn’t always like this.

I started by asking myself, what would be the thing that keeps me moving forward? what would be the thing that would motivate me enough every day to keep creating? The thing that if I did, would open the flow of more ideas and more illustrations.

Since last year can be qualified as my burn out year, this year, I said: enough is enough! I know burnout too well and it is a good indicator (for me) that it’s time to re-invent my life.