Dearest Penpal,

Over the last year, I’ve been on an enormous inner growth journey that has felt so profound.

It felt revolutionary to be 42 and in a period of so much healing and breakthroughs.

And I wanted to find a way to encapsulate and document and share it all.

So I’ve been chipping away, handwriting & illustrating a little diary/zine to share the journey. I finished writing it over the weekend, perched in my car for a couple of hours overlooking the wetlands while my animal-mad 11 year old was at a turtle program.

And now it’s time to share it with you.

But first – a story. When people ask me how my business started, the answer is a surprising one.

I tell them that when I was 16 years old, I sent myself to boarding school. I lived in a dormitory with 20 other girls. And our school art teacher handed out large blank art journals to everyone, and told us to make it a room of one’s own. To document our creative process in it, collect all our inspiration and insights in there.

It was like I’d been waiting for 16 years to hear this advice, and I dove headfirst into it. It was the thing I turned to every day, every week. And it morphed into being not just about art, but all of life. All the musings and photos and sketches and stories of a teenage girl’s inner world.

Soon, other girls in the dorm asked what I was doing each day. And I would hand it over to them, let them read it for themselves. And they’d read it, and pass it onto the next girl, and around the dorm it would go. And when I wanted to create in it again, I’d go hunt and see who had it last.

And eventually it got them to create their own journals too… this beautiful ecosystem of inspiration within four walls.

I’ve never really been a private person, would rather spill it all out on paper, and offer it up to anyone who needs it. Let it make other souls feel less alone. Let it incite their own creations and story. Let it offer up new possibilities.

And then after I graduated school, I kept up this creative practice. And four years later, when I discovered the word blogging, I threw myself in headfirst again… as though I’d been waiting 22 years to find that practice. And it felt just like my art journal, only one I didn’t have to hunt down each time I wanted to create in it.

My business feels like it was born from those two instincts:

CREATE
+
SHARE

It began in that boarding school dorm. It grew as a blog. And my newsletter and social media is just a continuation of that tradition…

Let me make art + words + scribe down the stories of my soul.

Let me offer it up to you, the journey of my inner world.

May it birth your own awarenesses, insights, healing and possibilities.

This illustrated zine is me scribing down all the biggest transformations and lessons of my spirit, heart and business over the last 12 months…

and then offering it up.

“Want to read my diary?”

Read my Year of Inner Healing zine here.