Habits

Habit: A settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up.  Synonyms: Custom, practice, routine, wont, pattern, way, tradition.

I am out of the habit of posting on my blog (obviously).  While I have been doing my monthly check-in WIPocalypse posts, I've not been very good about updating anything else.  I've been taking a really recharging, creative and inspiring online "camp" class, and one of the things that's stressed in it is not to feel like we're behind.  The whole point is to enjoy it and find inspiring moments tucked into our days, so despite the fact that the control-freak aspect of my personality is finding it hard not to feel behind and then having the need to feel like I have to catch everything up, I'm just going to start here, in the middle of things, and try to just re-develop my blogging habit.

One of the things we've done while at "camp", is build a journal of inspirations - images, quotes, lists, notes to self, about things we are interested in.  I fell down the (very deep, very dark) hole of bullet journaling and I've been immersing myself in all things BuJo - Instagram, YouTube videos, blog posts, etc.  I've also been playing around with some different types of page set-ups and I think I finally have something that's working for me that will function as both a daily/weekly/monthly planner AND an inspiration/note-taking/collections repository.  One of the things I'm including in my journal pages is a habit tracker (you see now how this all ties in).

The hope is to remind myself on a daily basis that blogging is a to-do task multiple days of the week, and then actually... you know... DO.IT.  I've got tons of things I'm working on right now in the crafty world, as well as reading, so it's not like I don't have topics to write about and things to say.  Mostly it's getting back into the habit of actually posting!

I've also been reading and working through The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron. If you haven't read this book, it's just had it's 25th anniversary of publication and was a really groundbreaking book exploring ideas about creativity and artists (not just fine artists - writers, crafters, etc), and how those things work together in successful artist's lives.  I'm in week 3 of the book (each chapter is a week's worth of exercises) and writing a few pages each morning of random thoughts and tidbits; these are suggested by Cameron as Morning Pages, to do each day. I am finding just dumping the crazy monkey brain thoughts out onto paper does actually free up some bandwidth in there, so that's another habit I'm trying to really solidify as a daily task to do going forward. 

Interested in more info about bullet journaling, here are some sites I found helpful (no affiliation, just ones I've referenced in the last month, although there are literally thousands of videos and blogs out there, as well as Instagram feeds full of beautiful journals):

BulletJournal.com - the original website and start of it all.

BohoBerry (on YouTube):  Kara also has a blog and an Etsy store, but lots of great info in her
YouTube videos.

TealNotes.com:  Some great set-up ideas at her site.