Six months of Journal with me

Hello and how are you?

I’m sorry for disappearing! I didn’t mean to but the last few months have been a huge period of readjustment and change and writing here is one of the habits I’ve gotten out of.

Just now, much of my time is spent running Journal with me – the membership for messy and imperfect journaling that I established in my online school back in September.

Six months in, we are hitting our stride. We started the new year together, reviewing our journaling practices; then in February we collected images and made collages to map our creative desires.

Through March, we focused on toolkits to support our projects, building mutual support through our maker’s circle and through designing encouraging reminders to keep in, or near, our journals.

On Thursday last week, during our informal Zoom hangout, (in which we mark the ending of one month and the beginning of the next) we shared the diverse ways in which we are using our journals, and I demonstrated how I reset my month after things have just not gone to plan (by making the collage of kindness at the top of this post).

It’s real, it’s messy, it’s non-perfectionist. At the moment you can join anytime but I might change this and start opening for sign-ups seasonally, as one of the best parts is the community aspect and that seems to work best when people aren’t coming and going from one month to the next.

Through April we are exploring how to cultivate wonder and delight in our journals; in May we are pruning, tidying and weeding our journals (and planting some “decorative borders”); and in June we are doing a mid-year check-in and celebrating the solstice together (mirroring the solstice celebration we had together in mid-winter).

Seasonal and gardening themes have crept in partly because so many folks in the Journal with me community grow things, and partly because when you are in any way recording time and the rhythm of the year, it helps to lean into the natural markers of the seasons changing.

There’s something else, too; I don’t know about you, but in these crazy times of warmongering and political violence, hope feels easier to kindle when you remember that the sun still rises, the earth still turns, the smell of roots and earth is still the best, and people are still brought together by dancing, laughter and food.

Hope feels easier to kindle, too, when you remember the power of your hands to take up pens, paper, pritt stick and washi tape, and when you remember to use these things to protect the things you love, and protest the things you don’t. Whether it’s scribbling a simple to-do list, making a plan for a creative project, or cutting and gluing together an anti-fascist collage, there’s something about getting our hands dirty that puts us back in touch with our creative agency and our joy… and I think we need to be in touch with those things more than ever, right now.

This might be a better marketing post if I didn’t put my gleeful anti-reform collage video in here (which you can only see when you read this post on my blog) but, honestly, if you’re thinking of signing up to Journal with me, I want you to know that this is where I stand.

I can’t advocate for deep care and lovingness in our journals if I’m not also fighting for it with my whole heart more broadly in my life. For me, the through-line from my private pages out into the wider world is why I journal. Why cultivate encouragement, kindness, creativity, projects, why empower myself with to-do lists, monthly calendars, lists of books to read, if it’s not working towards the world I want for all of us? Why mend myself from burnout, one rubber stamp at a time, if not to regain the energy to show up for the things I cherish and care about?

On Saturday, even though I am terrified of crowds and loud noises, I decided I had enough capacity and enough support to be able to attend the Together Alliance march against the far right. It was so good to go – and to feel able to go. Thank you, Amanda Jobson, for capturing this photo of me and my friend Deeanne, and thanks to Deanne for being the safe person I needed to go with. I worked out the wording for my sign in discussion with my refugee friend Roaa (with whom I’ve been meeting through the Refugee Buddy Project for one year next week) and it was my journaling supplies that I used to paint, draw and decorate it.

So that’s where I am, six months into running Journal with me: clearer, creatively invigorated, and full of a spirit of mischievous activism and determination to make the world kinder and more fun, one messy journal action at a time.

If you like the sound of that energy, join us here and, if you have questions, share them in the comments.

With love, yours in journaling together through these wild times, Felix xxx