Renewing Our Relationship with our Writing

Choosing Ourselves Again

We all have different relationships with the seasons, daylight, the moon, the year. After researching my culture’s Neolithic past, I became enamored with lunar time and the concept of the moon’s cycles—strange, I realize, since I’ve passed the threshold of menopause.

For part of 2023 and all of 2024 so far, I’ve followed a lunar calendar for organizing my creative life. It’s been challenging as no one else—no people I know, no institutions or companies I engage with—follow this way of interacting with time.

Regardless, it’s been a lovely, structured way for me to pay attention to my cycles of creating, sharing and ruminating. Here’s a sample of one cycle--the circle represents a full moon; the markings are the goals I met on a particular day.

My goals will vary cycle to cycle: pleasure reading, research, naming a particular project I’m working on, networking, marketing, exercising, photographing, making art, writing/journalling. I make new goals each moon cycle, though some remain the same. I downloading this “Daily Habit Tracker” in 2016 from Daisy Cottage Designs and have used it ever since.

Whatever our relationship with time, the sun has begun to retreat (I know, it’s really the earth tilting on its axis) and we are dancing with the dark half of the year now. For most of us, this means becoming reflective of our goals: what have we accomplished? Reassessment: what would we like to change? Determination: what new goals would we like to accomplish?

Are you a productive, resplendent writer with a wonderful future in front of you this coming year? Of course. What is real is what you make real—just like laying words down on a page creates a sentence, makes your ideas come into being, so you can create the life and relationship with your work that you want.

If you, like me, are one of these people who renews and reassess your goals at this time of the year, let’s keep a few things in mind:

1. Slow and steady: small actions can accomplish larger goals. Break larger goals into smaller, do-able actions. For example, a larger goal of getting published could be broken down into send out 5 submissions each month or workshop 1 poem every other week to be ready to send out or research 10 journals to submit to. Those three smaller goals are within your control to try to accomplish that one larger goal.

2. Give yourself credit for what you did accomplish, even if you didn’t meet a certain goal you had hoped to. Celebrate your successes!

3. If you notice that you struggle to meet goals you set, identifying where things begin to fall apart for you can help. Are you too ambitious/unrealistic? Do you feel overwhelmed and/or become paralyzed? Struggle to come up with clear goals? There is nothing wrong with starting small and simple; for example, “write for 10 minutes a day” or “read for 15 minutes a day”. If daily is too overwhelming, try “write for a total of 30 minutes a week.” Set a timer.

4. Maybe you could begin to hold yourself accountable to the promises you make yourself and/or your project(s). If there is no one you can check in with, I can be that person who can check in with you and hold you accountable—either through the comments (really, I don’t mind—there were times when I could have used a helping hand this way when there wasn’t any and if I can be that for you, I’d be glad to be) or with a weekly or monthly email to check in; it won’t be a “did you do this?” but rather a “I’m thinking of you and your relationship to your work—how is it going?”

Let’s make this darker half of the year one resplendent with motivation, support, and the work of achieving our dreams!