As readers of my creativity Substack, Nurturing the Song Within, may be aware I’ve pivoted. I was meditating on my work at Heron Dance, thinking I’d start offering my art on Amazon, and asking whatever powers may exist out there for advice, and bang! I got the message if you want to really contribute to the lives of others, and do something unique, focus on journaling. Create a series of journals that explore the use of journaling to create a life of beauty and work of beauty.

That was maybe a week ago. I let the idea percolate around in my head a little, and started looking for ideas about the most interesting way of approaching journaling that might stand the test of time. I have a vague memory of a book I read twenty years ago. I remember the color (a pink cover), and that it had something to do with gratitude, and it might have had a title something like “One Day At A Time.” So I typed that title into Amazon. I didn’t find the book I looking for — someday I’ll come across it in the thousands of quotes I’ve collected over the years — but instead I encountered a series of journals that divided a page into five sections, one for each year, and that had a page per day.

I’ve been journaling for fifty years or more. A couple of times a year I get out old journals from five, ten, twenty years ago and read what I was thinking, struggling with, dreaming in years past. I’ve found it worthwhile. In particular recurring struggles, recurring setbacks, are indicative of some tendency, some repeating pattern that has its origins in my thought patterns, that I either don’t want to deal with or that I’ve been unsuccessful dealing with. You probably have them too, although yours will likely be different than mine.

The journals I encountered — one page per day, each page divided into five sections, one section for the current year and four more for future years — seem a more organized approach to revealing patterns of importance in a human life. So I’ve begun work on the creation of eight of these journals. Four, one for each quarter, two pages per day, one with art, one with room for five years of brief notes. One series on creating a life, one series on creative work.

In order to focus on the creation of these journals, I’ve set aside work on the book I was working on, Meditations on Nature: The Beauty of Wild Places, which seemed to be generating little interest on Kickstarter. I’ve rewritten the Kickstarter to instead fund these journals. You can read more here.

If you are having trouble reading the text in the example above, and would like to, here it is in easier to read format. It is from one of my journal notes written twenty years.

Who am I? Who do I hope to become? Before the outward journey, an inward journey. Dreams backed by clarity have a very real chance of becoming reality. Establish a clear vision. What is your image of a successful life? Nurturing the beauty within is crucial to the process, but first, what is your vision of your beauty? Who are you at your best? What do you want to do with this strange, wonderful gift called life?

Relatively few people are clear about who they are. Rarer still are people who live that vision of themselves. Those few have a real power, a deep, inspiring energy.

It will take me a couple of months to design these books — I want to ship them December 1 — and work on some of the new abstract art planned for them. If, in the meantime, you’d like to work with these pages, you can download one here or by clicking on the image below. It is 8.5 x 11 inches in size so easy to print out.

More on the thinking behind the journals here and here.