I took my own course…

This summer I taught an online course on joy. I’m calling it a course for lack of a better term but it was more of a community of women looking for more joy in their lives. I called it Summer of Joy, clever right? 🤣 Each day offered a short video from me on that day’s subject, a short meditation, and a prompt to either answer in the community or in a private journal.

The thing is that every time I lead a group it is prompted by something I’ve grappled with in the past and feel like I’ve learned a thing or two to share (rare), or it’s about a topic I’m currently working through (the usual case). This was both.

Our daily practice for the Summer of Joy was to return to a childlike joy that we knew long before the world taught us to be practical, careful, and busy.

Through the 31-day program we found ourselves returning to slow summer afternoons watching fireflies, chasing the ice cream truck for a summer treat, and lots of roller skating. It was fun to remind ourselves of the ways we all kept busy back when the world was analog; writing song lyrics for no particular reason, chalking the driveway, and creating for the pure joy of creating without hefting purpose upon the shoulders of our art. The purpose was the doing, not the outcome.

And for once, I took my own class. I’ve returned to something that brought me deep joy but in a new way.

I have always been a keeper of memories. I have scrapbooks in my garage from as early as high school. In my 30’s, when my kids were little and scrapbooking became all the rage, I made it my whole personality. I had an entire room for crafting, attended conferences, started teaching at the local scrapbook store, got a few pages published, and of course turned it into a business.

Then life got super busy and my scrapbooking fell along the wayside and my memory keeping segued into journaling. I have never been precious about my journaling. It’s real, raw, filled with misspelled words, some four-letter words, and a lot of woe is me. In journaling, I no longer held myself to the standard that I required of my scrapbooking. I couldn’t. No clean lines, cute headings, or perfectly placed memorabilia. Nope, I slap that receipt, fortune cookie message, napkin, and sometimes a photo, right in there without a millisecond of thought to the aesthetic. Done. Moving on. They call this junk journaling. I call it saving my life.

My journals are my therapy. I have this one, I’m writing this in my Day One online journal. Then I usually have several for handwriting laying around in different places and bags with fun pens so I can write (or make lists, or doodle, or whatever) when the mood hits me.

My journals are also filled with great ideas, gratitude and memories that when read later put me right back in the moment I knew that my future self would need. My journal is the first place Summer of Joy came to life.

All of this to say, I’ve leaned back into not just journaling, but journaling as art. I’ve been tearing, painting, and dying my own papers, creating covers for my current journals, and dreaming up new journals I want to create.

I bought this record the other day at a used book store which will find its new home in my lyrics journal. Yep, once this came back to me in the Summer of Joy I couldn’t let it go. I need to write lyrics again. Something about that process soothed my soul.

I also love to collect quotes and poetry in my journals. It doesn’t all have to always be so hard. Sometimes someone else’s words are exactly what you need to write.

And my new favorite journal is the one I made for my grand daughter Isla that is being filled with letters to her.

The fun part is whatever my mood, whatever my need for that day, I have a journal to pick up and pour into. And nothing, in my opinion, shows of my gifts of imperfection (thank you Brene Brown 😉) more than journaling.

Summer of joy had a big part in this happening to me; this return to art for the sake of joy. The other catalyst is that I handed down my crafting gene to my daughter and now she is scrapbooking...and setting up a whole room for it and sharing her creations on Instagram as @TheIsleofPaper. That apple didn’t fall far and has inspired me as well. Both of these things have led me back to something I love but in a fresh new experience.

So, you may have received an email from me about the next program. But that wasn’t supposed to send. I’ve put that on hold until the time feels right. The one thing I have promised myself is that I will not be beholden to worrying about what people think, and certainly I will not create just so the algorithm will like me. I’m going to be 55 years old in a couple weeks, I’m well beyond that. Summer of Joy meant something and it worked its way into my life and right now I’m letting it do its work. I hope you are too.

Wishing you much joy,

🦋 Jen

PS: Feel free to check out Summer of Joy for yourself. It’s still available on Patreon and it’s free. Beware, you may find yourself with a new obsession.