On making a planner your own

I have always been wild about planners, PASSIONATE about them, I could not tell you how many I have purchased in my lifetime with the very best of intentions… and I never used a single one of them.

Oh I may have given it a go, I always, of course, filled out all the info. in the front. I might have even made cursory notes in January, but no matter what kind of planner I was using — and I paid way too much money for some of them — I just couldn’t get into them. Then came the Passion Planner. I actually had one once because people raved about them but I didn’t have any more success with it than I had had with any other kind that I ever bought. But I started watching how people used their Passion Planners on Instagram and I was hooked. When they had a 1/2 price sale the end of February I bought one. I wish I had purchased the undated planner but that made me nervous. And at first it didn’t look like I was going to have any more luck with this one than I ever had before.

If you follow the people on Instagram who use them, well, they are virtual works of art. I am in awe each time their weekly spreads come up in my feed, but I would finally just shrug, shove my Passion Planner under a pile of other things, and figure it was just one more year that the planner would go by the wayside. And then, a couple of days ago, I started drawing again. Last night I pulled out the Passion Planner and drew one Lady, the one in the middle on the top row. I thought that would be it. I knew this poor Lady in the middle of the page didn’t begin to be all glamorously artsy like so many others I had seen but I liked her. I nervously closed my planner and went on about my evening. But I have started something now, somehow the ball got rolling when I wasn’t looking, and I don’t think it’s going to stop any time soon.

Today I drew the Lady on the top right, an hour later I did the one on the bottom with the butterfly and the pug. And finally the one on the top left. I looked at what I had done and thought, well, damn, look at that! It does not look like anyone else’s Passion Planner, nor should it. It looks like mine, and in that moment I fell in love with my planner. It is now here beside me with my big journal and I plan to draw and paint in both of them everyday. Not because I have to, not because I think it is all leading somewhere, but because in these few short days that I have been drawing and painting again I have remembered something — I am a happier person when I am making art. I don’t know why I stopped before — well, that’s a lie, I do know why I stopped, I stopped because, as I said a couple of days ago, it was all well and good to mess around but what was I ever going to DO with it all? And if I couldn’t DO SOMETHING WITH IT, i.e. make money, what was the use? — but I’ll tell you what right here and now, I’m not going to stop again, at least not for the reason I did before. Drawing and painting, I have come to realize, are like taking my vitamins. I can get along without taking them, but I sure as hell feel a lot better when I am taking them. Why would I stop?

You know, I do have ideas of ways my art and writing might work together, in a book say, or how all of it might come together in a course, or a revised version of my “Spontaneous Art & Life Project,” but that is so far down the line it’s not even something I am thinking about now. One thing I know for sure, whatever I create, whatever my work ends up being, it will come naturally out of the flow of just doing what I’m doing. I write everyday, I am drawing and painting everyday, and whatever is going to evolve just will if it’s supposed to. And then there is the planner. I have taken a leap and done something in it that made it feel like my own for the very first time ever. I think I’ve always been afraid I would “mess it up.” Well darlin’ I’m making messes everywhere these days, why should I stop there?

It’s after 7 now. I’ve fed the pugs and come back here to my work table. I haven’t drawn in my big journal yet today but I think I’ll do that now. And I am watching fun arty videos on YouTube, and listening to wonderful things while I draw. This is a perfect night to do just that.

I hope you are having a lovely evening wherever you are. I would love to hear from you about what creative things you are doing that bring you joy, and I would really like to encourage you, if you’ve always wanted to make art but thought you couldn’t, or thought if you couldn’t make money with it it wasn’t worth while, to give it a go. Start, right now, with whatever you have at hand. Any kind of pen or pencil is a start. The day I drew that first Lady in 2013 I had no clue what I was doing, or how I should begin. I made a big circle in the middle of the paper and stared at it for awhile. I finally, nervously, drew two eyes, and I almost quit there because they were so lopsided. Then I thought, “Oh, what the hell,” and made a funny nose and an even funnier looking mouth, and I looked at that Lady and she made me laugh. I was never going to be able to draw the way I saw other people draw, the way I so wanted to, but I could draw like me. In that instant The 100 Ladies Project was born, and 5 years later, almost to the day, I am beginning again. I am giving myself permission to let it be what it will be, in my sketchbook, in my planner, and wherever else they might decide they want to be. This is my “one wild and precious life” as Mary Oliver wrote about and if I can’t spend it doing something that brings me so much joy, well, that would be a sad thing indeed.

Start now, whatever it is that you long to do, find a way to do it. There’s no time like the present and really the present is all we’ve got. And if you start doing your dream thing today you will be opening up a whole world of possibilities, anything might come once you begin. It’s what I’m counting on, and there’s no turning back now.

Onwards and Upwards!