Word of the Year

It’s two weeks into the year and I have settled on my WOTY. I was musing about the way New Year’s Resolutions are often a list of ways we aren’t good enough, and even the way, for me, the WOTY often disappears from my consciousness after a few weeks, and so did I really need to choose one this year?

I was journaling about this in my 2024 scrappy art journal that I set up for the year, with the intention of, at the very least, doing some art in there every day. It’s two weeks in, and no, I haven’t got a spread for every day, but I have done some form of art/creativity every day. Some days I’d rather get stuck into the other things I am working on, rather than doing the art journal, so I am not getting caught up in the self-inflicted rule that I must do that thing every single day.

I wanted to write a bit about that journal process, tho. I’ve sort of evolved a process for art journaling that works for me. I used to do a lot of Morning Pages, in the way Julia Cameron suggests in The Artist’s Way. I have piles of notebooks filled with these pages, and, as anyone who has done this process might know, quite a lot of Morning Pages are just the dirge of being stuck in some way. There’s value in expressing that, of course, but then the pages aren’t really anything I would want someone else to read, or even to read them myself, so why keep them? They really aren’t in the realm of creative writing, or interesting writing, that usually ends up elsewhere. In the spirit of making some space, I am using some of these old notebooks as collage fodder, and I’ve evolved a process of doing my Morning Pages in a notebook, then immediately covering with a slaister of gesso or paint, so the dirge is immediately dealt with, rendered, turned into something new, rather than sitting in a pile gathering dust for years. Some days the spread has been resolved into a something, and other days it’s just a background, and some days I haven’t done any of the process, and that’s OK, it’s a practise, it’s not perfection.

And that’s my Word of the Year – practise.

Practise: to do or play something regularly.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to produce an end result, it just needs to be a practise. It doesn’t even have to happen every single day, because it’s a practise. The beauty of my choice is that I can apply it to virtually everything – art and creativity, sleeping well, eating well, exercise… All The Things. It’s just about practise, not perfection.

The same goes for blogging, this blog is a work-in-progress, it gets abandoned, rearranged and forgotten in cycles, and keep saying I want to start putting my thoughts up here more often. It’s a practise, as much as it seems futile and self-indulgent in this world of chaos and creeping fascism.

Did you choose a word of the year, or do you do resolutions?

Peace,

Suzanne