The Magic of Words

Hey, this is Amber and I want to ask you one question: How can one word impact your year? As an English teacher and a writer, words are, in a sense, my life. Words can be a powerful thing. They can lift a person up or they can bring them down. Words can be magical and they can be detrimental. Choosing one word to motivate you can have a lasting impact that will set the tone for your year.

Years ago, when I first started teaching, I was looking for an enlightenment exercise to do with my students in January. Later, I will talk about the goal-setting exercises that I do with my students in January, but in the process of teaching my students goal-setting, I ran across a book by Jon Gordon called “One Word that Will Change Your Life” (linked below).

Jon Gordon’s idea came as an alternative to the endless New Year’s resolutions that people make every year. Instead of making resolutions, you pick one word to drive your year. The word is meant to be a motivational power word to impact all the dimensions of your life: mental, physical, emotional, relational, spiritual, and financial.

So, I challenge my students to come up with ONE word to drive their year every January. Afterward, we do activities and writing assignments that incorporate our words. One thing that Gordon talks about is making a sort of vision board or painting with his word and hanging it in his house to remind him of his yearly motivation. One of the activities that I do with my students incorporates their words and I add them to the classroom word wall. Students have to make a small poster/vision board incorporating their words. They cut out or print pictures that inspired or had to do with their word. After implementing this in my classroom, I also choose a word and make a vision board of my own for the classroom. We will be talking about Vision Boards in an upcoming “Goals, Girl!” episode as well.

My word for 2021 was “forward” indicating that I am always moving forward in my life. After a long, few years of moving backward, I decided that I never wanted to move back again and always move forward.

My word for 2022 will be “inspire” because I want to inspire people by sharing my past experiences on this blog and our podcast.

I look forward to hearing from you. What is your one little word?

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One Word - 365 Days of Change

 One little word. Sometimes one little word is all it takes to change the course of history. Yes. No. Maybe. Stop. Go. Attack. Retreat. Or change an attitude. Live. Laugh. Love. Dream. Be. One little word can even change your life. Forgive. Believe. Learn. Begin. Heal. So much is carried in those words. Such power. Such potential for change. I’ve witnessed the power of words in many ways, and have seen the results – in myself and others.

My personal experience using a power word started with a 365 art journaling project inspired by a crafty friend. You can read more about it on my Crafty Neighbor Blog. Christen and I decided to try a word of the year project, but turn it into a 365 project to work in our art journals. 365. I’ll let you think about that for a moment. We wanted to do an art journal project EVERY DAY for 365 days. We came up with 365 prompts, then started making pages that tied our word of the year to those prompts. It was hard work, and I can bet you already know how it turned out. I made it through about May, or maybe June, and then it just fizzled. 

Was it a failure? Oh, heck no! I feel like it was a great success. My word for that year was heal and through daily art journaling, I did a lot of healing. And even though I wasn’t working on that project every day, I was still working on it – I am still working on it, and will continue to do so. I’ve tried to keep up with posting the pages from that art journal on my Flickr.com account. Feel free to browse the album, or check out the CraftyNeighbor365 group to see what others have done with this project.

Over the years, I’ve picked other words, done other projects, and found ways to incorporate the word into my life. I chose words like organize, simplify, and heal (I’ve used that one several times over). The words helped me focus on what I wanted to create in my life, where I wanted my focus to be. Mostly I just worked on my own. I found projects that were symbolic of the word or that helped me through the process of living that word. Then a friend introduced me to Ali Edwards and her “One Little Word” project, and the real magic started to happen.

Yes, I know I’m starting to sound like a total fan-girl for all things Ali Edwards, but sometimes a designer just speaks your language, and Ali surely speaks to me. The video introduction on the One Little Word page is powerful, and says far more eloquently what this project means to me each year. It is profound, complicated, and intense, and it has brought me so much acceptance and peace. 

I do the project a little differently each year. Some years I buy the class, some years I buy the kit, sometimes I’m in a 6” x 8” album, or (this year) the softcover journal. The process is part art and part journaling, but there are really no hard and fast rules about how to do it. You could approach it from a completely photo-journalistic perspective, a serious written journal, or all art and collage. My work tends to be a combination of all three. Is it good art? Good writing? Good photography? Does it have to be? NO! This is a project for me and really no one else. This is for my growth, my benefit, and no one else’s.

If you'd like to see a flip-through video of my 2020 One Little Word project, visit my YouTube account here. So whether you take on a 365 project, join Ali’s “One Little Word” workshop, chant your word in a unity circle, or use it in some other imaginative and resourceful way, consider what your word might be. What word could take you from where you are now to the person you want to become – the person you are meant to be? What word could propel you, sustain you, and empower you? What is your “one little word”, and what will you do with it next? Leave us a comment…we’d like to know!

Quick Links from Today's Podcast

Hey friends! Thanks for joining us! Here are some quick links for resources we mentioned on today's podcast. You can hear the full podcast episode: here

Christine Kane: "Resolutions? Yawn! Here's a Better Way to Start Your Year"

Christine Kane: Word of the Year Discovery Tool (Free)

Ali Edwards: One Little Word

Crafty Neighbor: 365 Challenge

Jon Gordon: https://www.jongordon.com/

Jon Gordon: "One Word that Will Change Your Life"

How One Little Word Can Make a Huge Impact

November is one of my favorite months of the year. Although Thanksgiving and my birthday are major reasons why I love this month, there are other things to consider. And no, before you ask, it’s definitely not because of Black Friday. I’m not that kind of gal. During this time of year we really get the chance to live in the past, present and future, figuratively speaking. The year is starting to come to an end, and let's face it, as soon as Thanksgiving is over, the tree comes up and December blows past us like a whirlwind of celebrations. October 31st - January 1st is one big celebration for me. I really try to live in the moment, be mindful, capture every story and embrace the cooling temperatures. It’s the time to snuggle up and enjoy the longer evenings and make the home cozy.

In addition to enjoying the moment, I tend to reflect on the year that has gone by, see the progress that has been made, pat myself on the back for a job well done, and assess areas in my life that could benefit from an up-leveling. During that time of reflection, it is nearly impossible to keep myself from thinking ahead to the upcoming year. I will start to imagine what it will be like, or better yet, what I want it to be like. I start making plans for the upcoming year and visualizing the changes, it's just natural for me. I get all geared up for the transformations, so that starting on January 1st, I’m ready to rock the new year right out of the gate.

There have been many approaches to setting goals and resolutions, but I do something a little different - actually a lot of things differently. You might be asking where I am going with this and why I am talking about it now, in the fall, but just bear with me. Generally people set a goal or resolutions for the new year and it is long forgotten by February. We typically get burnt out or side tracked. I would always lose my focus around February when the Valentine’s Day candy comes out. So the real challenge is finding creative ways to incorporate your goal into your everyday life so that you don’t lose focus.

One of my favorite methods is choosing my word of the year. I started doing that around 2010 when a crafty coworker of mine introduced me to Christine Kane’s Power Word, or Word-of-the-Year. Christine’s technique allows me to select a word that I feel would benefit me throughout the year, and focus on my goals, without making me feel like I am not achieving my goals. I can find ways to incorporate my word into every aspect of my day to day life.

Over the years I have picked words and used my creative abilities to flesh out what my word means to me. The first year I selected “Productive” as my word because I was seeking ways to break old habits and transform my approach to life. My mom and I thought it would be a great way to work in our mixed media art journals by creating a page every day. You can read more about that in Cindy’s article later this week.

As time has passed, my method for incorporating my word into my craft has changed and I have discovered that I really enjoy following Ali Edwards’s One Little Word. She has an awesome class that lasts all year long where she posts exclusive content each month for those who sign up. There are some great products that she designs each year that go along with the project. Each month I eagerly look forward to what the prompt is, and generally work on it throughout the month. She really focuses on journaling with a bit of design inspiration. It’s one of those things that you can transform into your own style and be as elaborate or simple as you like. The take-away is incorporating the word into your life, documenting your experiences, and reflecting on it. It truly is a great add on to your goal setting.

For me, this is the keystone to my goal setting for the year. I start with the following steps:

• Visualize what I want my year to look and feel like.
• Narrow down the feeling into a single word that can be used all year long.
• Set the intentions, create goals, or resolutions.
• Make your word visible.

The first step in selecting your word is to sit down and really think about what matters to you and what you want to get out of the upcoming year. For example, if you have been overwhelmed or stressed out this year, picking the word peace is a great focus word. It is a flexible word with many meanings and great imagery that you can work into your everyday life, whether it is with your family and friends, work, personal space, or even on a grander scale like world peace etc.

I suggest sitting down and just writing out words that resonate with you, or if you feel like you need a pushing off point, there are some great places on the web where you can generate a word. One of my biggest pieces of advice beyond that is to make sure that your word is flexible, verbs and adjectives work best. Nouns can be tricky if they are not multi-faceted. For example, snow would not be a very good choice in my opinion because it is not something that you have much control over, and it doesn't occur all year long for the majority of us. Have fun with your word, try it out for a day and let it roll around in your mind. If you can’t decide between two or more words, that’s ok, just sleep on it and over time you will start to lean into one of them more so than the others. If you get a head start before the new year, then you will have plenty of time to decide.

If you are having a hard time getting started I highly recommend checking out Christine Kane’s downloadable free worksheet. Ali Edwards’s website has a list of words that I like sifting through. You can find it here or you can just do a simple Google search for word of the year list or One Little Word (also known on the web as OLW).

I would love to hear from you on what words you have chosen in the past and any creative ways that you have incorporated your word into your daily life. I especially enjoy getting insight from the non-arts and crafts community who take part in the Word of the Year or similar trends. We will be sure to announce the words that we have selected for ourselves before the new year so make note to check back in. If you are curious as to how I incorporated my word of the year into my mixed media arts, or my Ali Edwards’s inspired project check out the images below.

2020 - HARMONY

2020 - HARMONY

2020 - HARMONY

2021 - LESS

2021 - LESS

2021 - LESS

December Bucket List

Hi everyone, thanks for stopping by today. My name is Christen Hessler. I hope that everyone is enjoying your fall and living in every moment. I am sure that many of you are just now winding down from Halloween and haven't even begun to think about Thanksgiving, but before you know it, Christmas will be here and gone! So really, truly make sure to live every moment while you can. Today, I want to share with you a fun way to enjoy all the things around the holidays and specifically December’s festivities. Since we have been talking about December Daily, I thought this would be a great time to discuss this because you can incorporate some of these everyday activities into your December Daily. 

December has many fun things to offer for my family: not only Christmas and Hanukkah, but my mother and husband’s birthdays as well. Let’s not forget some of Hollywood’s best movies come out between Thanksgiving and Christmas too. Our daughter, Reyna, is out of school, so we get to spend more quality time with her, and to wrap it all up neatly at the end, there is New Year’s Eve to celebrate as well. 

When it comes to December, or any time during winter really, I like to think up all the fun things that my family and I really don’t do any other time of the year, and we start planning who we might want to include in those fun activities. I really do enjoy planning out my holidays. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a rigid schedule of events, but there are just so many traditions and holiday activities that I enjoy. I know if I do not plan at least some of it out, I will end up missing a lot of things that I wanted to do. It is easy to get caught up spending each weekend watching Hallmark movies. The worst is when you want to do something fun with the family, or you have relatives in town, and you stress yourself out trying to find something exciting to do at the last minute. 

The best remedy is to have a bucket list! That's right, I said it. It is completely ok to have a bucket list, and let me just preface this with a reminder that you don’t have to do it all. Now, if your family is down for a challenge, that's an activity of its own, trying to knock out as many “Christmas clichés” as humanly possible. I did that one year and it was a blast - but you don’t have to make it too complicated. 

Over the years, I have compiled a massive list of fun things to do that have helped me live in the moment during the month of December. I wanted to share this list with you because I have implemented it in my December Daily scrapbook in order to capture all the little moments and quirky traditions that my family has cultivated over the years. I have captured and documented those moments so that we can look back at them and reminisce. Below are some of the bucket list items I wanted to share with you today to get your mind buzzing and to hopefully give you a starting off point towards creating your very own list. 

• Enjoy a favorite beverage from Starbucks or local coffee shop

• Coordinate matching buffalo plaid outfits with co-workers, friends or family.

• DIY ugly Sweaters

• Make handmade Christmas ornaments

• Host or attend a cookie/candy/ornament swap

• Make handmade holiday greeting cards

• Build a fort in the living room

• Bake cranberry bread

• Wear festive jewelry (the gaudier the better)

• Grown-up hot cider and snowplows

• Take the dogs/kids for a snow hike

• Create your own holiday music playlist

• Buy a gift for the “angel tree” or a community gift program

• Send over some homage baked goods to your neighbors

• Christmas pajama fashion show

• Make paper snowflakes

• Make paper garlands

• Decorate gingerbread houses or gingerbread men

• Tip the mail carrier and other service providers

• Holiday themed mani-pedi

• Read Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”

• Share the “Gift of the Magi”  with the children

• Holiday themed family or pet photo shoot

• End of year letter to friends and family

• Watch a scary or nontraditional holiday movie

• Go to the movies and see a December blockbuster

• Go ice skating or play hockey

• Family game night

• Go see a performance of “The Nutcracker”

I hope that this list gets you inspired for the holiday season! There is a FREE downloadable version of this list that you can print off and add to your holiday planner, family binder, or even stick to your fridge! There are so many creative things that can be done with the list. You can add them to your December Daily as an actual bucket list or simply use the list you create while planning out fun activities for your family during the holiday season. I personally love the idea of using the list as a starting point for capturing the memories during the festivities. I would love to hear what some of your must-do activities are during the month of December. Is there anything that you are hoping to try differently this year? Please make sure to add to the comments.

 

Excuse Me...

Hey this is Cindy Murray and I wanted to pop on here for a minute to tell you about a little segment that we will do from time to time that we call “Excuse Me While I Read My Tarot.” This series is a fun excursion into the art of tarot reading and the many ways we use it to look deeper inside ourselves and enhance our daily lives. But before we get started, let’s take a look at some common misconceptions about tarot cards and how they are used.

Reading tarot cards is a popular practice and different people use Tarot readings in different ways. Some historians speculate that tarot cards may have started in ancient Egypt, but in the strictest sense, tarot originated as playing cards in 15th century Italy, and were used to play games not unlike the traditional playing cards many people use today. In fact, the original cards are still used today in many parts of Europe to play various card games without occult associations, and other than a 15th century sermon by a Dominican preacher who condemned them for their use in gambling, they were not really censured at all until more modern times.

Fortune-telling with cards, called cartomancy, began some time in the 14th century and eventually found its way to the Tarot and other decks of cards, including the common playing cards used in America today. Sometime around the 18th century, Tarot decks began to be produced specifically for these card-reading purposes. One of these, the Rider-Waite tarot deck, is quite famous and is often the one that comes to mind for people here in the U.S. This deck was first published in 1909 and contains a bounty of religious symbolism, including Judeo-Christian icons, as did many of the preceding decks. Imagery includes the Pope (later renamed the Heirophant), the Papess (renamed the High Priestess), Adam and Eve, the Devil, angels, and crosses. The cards are really just a very elaborate “symbol code that depicts universal and natural laws and principles that are shared by all the world’s great religio-spiritual traditions.”

So enough of all that history! Let’s talk about what’s going on with tarot cards today! While many practitioners interpret the cards as a form of divination, or fortune-telling, just as many (or more) use the cards as a sort of cue or prompt for daily insight and enlightenment. Much in the same way a therapist might use a Rorschach ink blot, the interpretation of the symbolism on the cards can be a useful tool to examine the beliefs, behaviors, and thought patterns of the individual. As stated by the tarot for dummies website (cited below), “The purpose of a tarot reading is to help you see your past and present thoughts, words, and behaviors more objectively.”

For me, personally, I like to look at the cards as a good way to start my day with a little mindfulness and reflection. I certainly don’t see them as anything at odds with my Christian beliefs, and I know a good number of Christian faithful who use tarot cards. However you want to interpret the cards, we hope you will enjoy what we have to share and will accept our readings with the spirit in which they are given.

Information in this article came in part from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot

https://www.dummies.com/religion/paganism/correcting-major-misconceptions-about-tarot/

https://tiffanyleebrown.com/tarot-religion

If you would like to learn tarot, this is a great website:

https://www.biddytarot.com/tarot-card-meanings/

A Little Christmas in November? Oh My!

Hi! It’s Cindy Murray again, and I’m here with our first official blog post to discuss one of my favorite topics – December Daily®. Why, you may ask, are we talking about December in our very first blog post when it's only November? Well, it’s sort of a long story, but if you’ve got a few minutes, I’d love to share it!

I have long been a “Christmas Purist”. I love the holidays, but I feel like Halloween should be celebrated in October, Thanksgiving in November, and Christmas in December. I don’t listen to Christmas music until after Thanksgiving, and I get really annoyed at Hobby Lobby and other retailers who start pushing Christmas decorations in June, but then only offer Thanksgiving décor for a few short weeks in November. What’s the deal with that? Either offer it all year long, or only at the appropriate time…but I digress….

 

I know this makes me sound like a total scrooge, but really I’m not. I love Christmas. I love everything about it, and I like to go all-out from the Friday after Thanksgiving until January 1^st. We have family activities all month long, and my kids sort of move-in with me again for a couple of weeks while we celebrate. We decorate the tree together, bake cookies, make crafts, and just about every other cliché Christmas activity you can name. On top of that, my birthday falls in December, and who doesn’t want to celebrate their “birthday month” in grand style? As far as I’m concerned, December truly is the most wonderful time of the year.

 

I’m also a scrapbooker, shutter-bug, and burgeoning genealogist, so it’s always been important to me to document our family history, recording as many details about our family exploits as I can possibly capture. So when a friend told me about December Daily® (also sometimes called “December Documented”), I was fascinated. The idea is simple…December is about so much more than just Christmas day, and by only focusing on December 25, we miss out on all the other things that happen in December. I can totally relate to that, because, as just about anyone with a December birthday can attest, our special day tends to get overlooked in all that merry making. Rather than make a scrapbook or photo album that only includes Christmas, December Daily® prompts us to capture the spirit of the holidays by telling one story every day for the entire month.

 

I started my first December Daily® album in 2019, and I loved it so much I did it again in 2020. You can see flip-through videos on my Crafty Neighbor YouTube channel. My daughter, and co-host, Christen has joined me both years, and we’ve even coaxed my 10-year-old granddaughter into participating. We enjoyed the process so much that we quickly adopted it as one of our favorite holiday traditions. We even have a tradition of going to Starbuck’s on December 1^st to kick off our documenting with a tasty beverage before heading home to get crafty. But the fun of December Daily® really starts long before December 1^st.

The creator of December Daily®, Ali Edwards, has been facilitating this fun project since 2007, and through her company, Ali Edwards Designs, she offers high quality memory-keeping supplies geared towards this project, including stamps, papers, and a wide assortment of ephemera and embellishments. She also offers online courses to help inspire participants with new tips and techniques. Her products and classes are wildly popular, and many of her fans make a whole production of getting ready, prompting Ali to begin a December Daily® Prep Day tradition where participants join in live streams with Ali and her design team. 

 

The 2021 Prep Day is scheduled for Saturday, November 6, and I, for one, am super excited to spend a day in November doing something that I once would have refused to do until December. Does that knock me out of my membership in the Christmas Purist club? I’ll let you decide…I’ll be too busy crafting Christmas layouts for my December album while I snack on all the leftover Halloween candy.

For more information about Ali Edwards Design, Inc. or December Daily®, visit AliEdwards.com

To see a flip-through video of my 2020 December Daily album, click here:

2020 December Daily Flip-Through

 

One More Day!

 

 

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