Every month for about 10 years now, I have been pimping up my very boring wall calendars with beautiful pictures from magazines and then some meaningful words or sentences thrown in for inspiration.
Last year I had the grand idea (not very uncommon for me…) that I would have a specific theme every month and then let that month on the calendar reflect said theme. I wrote about this madness1 in the Your Word of the Year post.
This year I decided to take it more chill and simply go with the flow. Let my words of the year “Simplicity & Beauty” guide me. Pretty much what I did last year as the mere exhaustion of having not only to find the right pictures and words, then also have them guide me in my daily actions made me question my sanity. Nice in theory, too complicated in practice.
Following my intuition and the love of beautiful collages have then been my North Star in this creative process. But me being ehem me, I have not been able to resist the temptation of sprinkling every month with some kind of a message that would be of value for me that specific month.
Since five years I have been slowly putting on more weight every year and also accumulating all kind of annoying ailments like tinnitus, sleep apnea to name a few. Anyone saying that age is just a number, I´ll throw a wet towel on them!
Being a woman who has hardly ever had any issues with her body image or how she feels in her body, it´s a totally new territory for me to suddenly have these 20 kg (44 pounds) of extra weight to carry. Which is why I on purpose chose beautiful food and exercise related pictures and upbeat sentences for the month of April.
If someone wonders how on earth a picture with a woman jogging on a beach would help anyone to be inspired to exercise more, I can tell you that vision boards actually do work. At least sometimes. I have a whole post on this topic on my to-do list and since vision boards are one of my creative outlets I will save my more extensive outpourings on the subject for that post.
My dream for April was to once again take up my morning yoga practice, go for long walks and in general enjoy my life. It started quite well and then went downhill the further into April we went.
I have been sick again! For the third time in six months. I have done my morning yoga only twice and not had any long walks except for the walks to and from work. Yesterday I made a bacon pasta which can hardly count as healthy food. For the latter part of April I have been feeling very down. Maybe it´s the snow and the long winter, maybe it´s something else that I will moan about and spill into my morning pages.
But no matter how hard I have been looking at my April collage, I have not been able to be inspired enough to do anything about my health. However it will be May in two days and time for a new collage. This time I will not have any hidden agendas, just mumble my two words of the year “Simplicity & Beauty” and see where it leads me.
This is also called optimism. Unwavering optimism.
Picture collages make so much sense for inspiration! I’m sorry that April has been a tough month and I hope that May brings some sunshine and good health with it 🧡
I love your collage practice. Its nice to be able to reset each month no matter what happened before! 🙏🏻