New projects

Even though one of my New Year's Resolution was to do less, I found myself participating in two new projects at the beginning of the year. And I'm so glad I didn't say No to any of them!

Since the beginning of the year, I've been taking a photo a day for our Blog Camp 365 group on Flickr. Yes, I've found it difficult at times, yes I'm a bit behind adding them to the Flickr pool, and yes, this stressses me out sometimes. But it's all worth it because of everything that I've already learnt so far about photography and about Flickr. Seeing the photos that the others in the group take and choose to post is very inspirational, but it's the comments that are making this project so fun for me. From the beginning, we said that we all wanted constructive criticism as that's the best way to learn, and I'm loving everyone's suggestions on how to improve my photography.
You can see above some of my photos for January. Not all of them are there, as I've been playing with my new Diana + camera too and I need to develop and post those. Stay tuned!

The second project is a journaling project, Sojournal, a collaboration with three amazing ladies: Stacey. Julie and Polly. I truly love these ladies and I'm constantly amazed by their creativity. It all started with Stacey's idea that Writing is the new praying. We have each started a journal and are going to be sending them into the world soon. Initially we'll send them to each other and later, we're planning on including more people who want to be part of the project and start their own journal. The project is still evolving, we have lots of ideas to take it forward and I'm really excited about what we can do. I've posted some of my incomplete pages above (I need to add my own words) but will be posting the complete ones over at the Sojournal blog. Do come and visit!

It just shows that, sometimes, you should just say Yes... even if you struggle for time!

12 months of being 30: On writing

* This post is part of my 12 months of being 30 project, an attempt to record what happens during my year of being 30.

Stacey said it first and Julochka instantly embraced the concept of writing as the new praying. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, because writing is definitely helping me feeling better despite the stress, the depressing weather, and the lack of energy that I told you about in my last post.
I know I haven't been writing here much (Sorry!) but I've been playing with words quite a lot, on my own, and as part of a Creative Writing class that I decided to take on a whim (a creative writing class in English! Talking about leaving my comfort zone!)
Last week, we did an exercise that I found incredibly liberating. We had to write three short autobiographical texts (100 words each), and chopped them up word by word. Then, we have to play with the 300 words and create a completely different text with them. The idea was putting words together without thinking too much about their meaning, but perhaps not surprisingly, most of the people in the class found that the words were definitely trying to transmit something to them. I had so much fun doing this and liked my text so much, that I used it as part of one of my 12 months of being 30 collages.

For the record, my teacher thought that I needed to add some concrete concepts as it was too abstract, but I still like it as it is.

I'm now determined to go back to a routine of writing morning pages before going to work, and sitting down and writing on a stream of consciousness whenever I feel lost or overwhelmed. I'm not sure if writing is the new praying, but for me it's definitely the best form of therapy.

PS. It's my first day at my new job today. Wish me luck!