Rocky

This winter, I was hit with a life event I could never have seen coming, and it was okay.

When I first outlined my goals for LITH, I knew each season would be circumstantially unique. The overall goal for the first 6-12 months is to explore and validate my creative interests while building fundamental skills. Because I have so many interests, I divided the year into two-month blocks. November through December is a slower season in my life. Therefore, my goal for these months was to use the free time to work on design fundamentals and drawing, start my blog, and learn my way around an espresso machine. While my original plan was to follow the monthly cycle of Plan -> Execute -> Reflect -> Detach, I ended up wandering my way through the goals instead. Which is okay. Admittedly, I'm quite the wanderer, and much of my perspective of life, beauty, and adventure is seen through a wanderer's lens. This is actually pretty helpful when dealing with life-altering occurrences.

Learning about design was the hardest. The art I tend to make is more imitation than originality, but I desperately want to develop my own personal style and become someone who can create inspiration too. My first project was to research design fundamentals and implement what I learned in the Save the Dates for my upcoming wedding. It was an oddly hard project for me. Despite the very simple style we decided on, I struggled with everything about it. The challenges included settling on a concept, picking a font, text composition, and generating artwork. My fiancé, the professional designer, will be designing our actual Save the Dates, but I was hoping to contribute more with this project. It feels like failure but I know that wasn't the point. Regardless, working in Procreate again was fantastic, and I've moved onto the next. My current project is learning how to draw cats. It's a great pastime, and I'll share updates on that as soon as the cats stop looking scary. Cats, cats, cats... cuddles, cups, coffee....

Coffee. The ritualistic cup. To avoid boring you with my history with coffee (perhaps a fun-fact for another time), lets say the current phase began when I was brainstorming for our wedding ceremony. In my head, everyone simply ends up in the same place, under an old, wise tree, and there are fairies... and an espresso machine. You'd think I might look back on this original idea and laugh. It's dreamlike after all. But no... I'm still sad that my ceremony won't have fairies (the Tinkerbell-like ones, you ACOTAR fans). Wise tree aside, I've made the espresso machine part come to be. I turned 30 years old in December and used that as an excuse to buy myself a beautiful, white Gaggia Classic Evo Pro. When it arrived, I set to it like a scientist, measuring and recording every input with precision, and following the directions as best a girl like me can (a girl like me is one who daydreams rather than listens, letting instruction bounce off her pretty head). I created the worst-tasting latte I'd ever had at that point. But learning to use the espresso machine has been immensely fun, despite the daunting weight of how much more there is to learn. I hope we all know by now to enjoy life for the journey rather than destination, and some pursuits make this easier to accept than others (design, for instance, has yet to provide such grace--hence why I fled to drawing cats). This is where, per my outline, I ought to discuss challenges (steaming milk, extraction time, latte art) and artistic inspiration found through flavors. But instead, I'm going to tell you about my hip.

A creative interest I haven't mentioned yet is Yoga--a kind of continuous, underlying, inherent activity to support the other interests I'm pursuing at any given time. I've been flirting with Ashtanga yoga for a couple years now. Essentially, I've had a huge crush on the practice but wasn't ready to commit. In late-November, my studio put out a membership deal that was too good to refuse, and I was finally (happily) roped in. The whole thing involves daily practice and waking up before 7am. I originally committed myself to going into the studio three times a week, but by the second week I'd upped it to four. I can't really explain it, but it changed my life immediately. So much in fact, that when I left town for two weeks for Christmas with family and a subsequent work trip, I was slightly terrified that I'd lose it all (a pattern very personal to me). I brought my travel mat and signed up for yoga and pilates classes at studios local to the towns where I was staying. They were wonderful classes. And then I slipped on black ice and broke my hip (did you think the injury would be yoga-related?) I had hip replacement surgery on January 1, 2025 and am now a forever-enemy of metal detectors. When I'd left on this trip, I'd been pretty overwhelmed and depressed. I think it's normal for the holidays to do that. Also, wedding planning. Also, overstimulation of social media and general world happenings. Also, ... okay I'll stop. There's nothing quite like a major injury to prove that it's possible to pause. It's okay that the Christmas cards didn't go out. It's okay that the house is messy. You know what's still possible on crutches? Espresso. And drawing cats. And no, not yoga, unfortunately, but physical therapy is fun when you're 30 and vibrant and therefore healing rapidly.

I'm in the CPA profession. I actually never got my license, and while I blame Covid and meeting my partner for occurring in the thick of my final two tests--who wants to study when the world is shut down, you just met a charming man, and your quaran-team has Napa Valley in the springtime all to itself--it's actually because I'd rather spend my time on LITH. I didn't have a name for it before a few months ago, but I've known for a long time that being a CPA wasn't what I wanted to spend my time on. A person's time is their life, you know? However, I need my numbers job to enjoy the creative side of my life. I can't have one or the other in any fulfilling way without having both. Balance is the mantra that gets me preaching. I apologize for being so tangential--I'm simply trying to say that required tax-season overtime begins tomorrow. This is relevant because I'm actually halfway through my January/February block already, and to reflect the busier time, I’ve only set two active goals. First, I’m going to start designing stickers. I've become a sticker girly, somehow, and I really want to sell them. So I'll be working on my cats and hopefully some other animals, too, as I use stickers as a tool to further my design practice. Second, I'm taking a medicinal herbalism mentorship, which has just begun. Together, these two things will still be a significant load along with work, so it will be good to rely on Plan -> Execute -> Reflect -> Detach for pacing. Or I'll wander.

In the background: I Love You So F*** ing Much - Glass Animals (Album)