What Makes My Heart Sing

Some joyful end of the year miscellany & a gift

Hello, Beautiful People!

This is my penultimate post for the year. It’s a grab bag of miscellany.

I will send one more out at the end of next week. It’s already written and scheduled. After sending this post, I will begin my shutdown procedures for the rest of the year.

I will still be taking on any last-minute pay-what-you-want haiku comics until the end of the day, Monday, December 23rd. After that, I will be fully immersed in nothing.

A Gift

I’ve made the ebook version of my short haiku comics collection, A Dsicple of the Sea, permanently free. You can use this link to get your free copy through a service called BookFunnel. You can download it for any e-reader or as a PDF.

A Thought-Provoking Prompt

Nature writer and photographer

Sydney Michalski

shared a wonderful post today in her newsletter that asked the question, “What does winter mean to you?”

I was so inspired by the question that I wrote an entire essay. It led me in some interesting directions. You can read the essay, You Need a Season of Rest and Celebration, here.

Getting Back to Joy

This year has been a challenge for me from a professional, personal, and physical health standpoint.

As I looked back at what went right and where I got a little lost, I discovered that I had stopped doing some things that made my work the most joyful.

To that end, starting next year, once a week, I will be breaking down one or two haiku from a haiku poet and illustrating the poems I’m analyzing. These posts will be paywalled and will come out on Sunday mornings. I will continue to do the WonderWalk series as well, and these will be free for everyone, but they will be published more erratically.

Another habit I will be returning to is my junk journaling. I love to cut and paste stuff into my notebook. Here is a two-page spread from this past week:

I do these pages simply because they make my heart sing. It just feels good. These are little art projects I do just for me. As a way to make sure I keep doing them, I’m going to share more of my notebook pages in this newsletter in the coming year as well.

On the Horizon

Another thing that makes me happy, and something I did not do this year, is creating and releasing new books.

In January, I will be releasing something I have never done before. It’s a prompt journal called My Secret Book of Hope.

The best way to understand what this prompt journal is all about is to read the introduction:

This book will ask you to do things that will make you uncomfortable. You might find this strange. You might believe, as so many do, that a book about hope should be light, fluffy, and effortless.

Building and holding onto hope takes work. Inside these pages, you will find moments that make you feel like you could fly. You will also find exercises that make you want to cry. Hope gives you the fuel to keep fighting for the changes you want to see in the world. Hope is built on laughter, wonder, and creativity. But, before you can create and sustain hope, you must first work through shame and develop the courage to be cringe.

On some of these pages you will be invited to draw, to make collages by cutting and pasting, to write poetry, and to remember your wildest dreams.

We live in a world and culture that has been optimized for dream-killing and hope-quashing. However, no revolution, no great change—either personal or societal—has ever been accomplished without the presence of hope.

If you want to change your life or just change the world, you will have to learn how to generate and sustain hope.

The good news is that this is your secret book. You don’t have to share it with anyone else. It will become your hope storehouse. As you complete the pages, you will find long-forgotten hopes swelling inside you again. But life is still a marathon of suffering and a series of indignities.

When you feel the forces of the world draining your hope, you will be able to look back at the pages you have completed to remember you do have hope—and then you can complete a new page that will come to the aid of future you when the time is right.

There is no wrong way to use this book. You can respond to any prompt by writing, drawing, or cutting and pasting images. My favorite way is to flip pages until something catches my attention. I love to let fate, the universe, gods, or luck guide me. My second favorite way to use this book is as an alternative to doomscrolling on my phone. When I find myself disassociating on social media, I put my phone down, reach for this book, and do a page or two.

But this is your secret book of hope, not mine. Let your intuition guide you. Use it in whatever ways serve you best. Make a mess or keep it tidy. Use pen, pencil, crayon, or lipstick. Draw when asked to write, collage when asked to draw, or write when asked to draw.

The only real rule is that no mistakes are possible. An errant line or misspelled word is not a mistake. They are a part of your secret book of hope. You cannot make a mistake when using this book because this book is a physical manifestation of some secret part of you—and you are not a mistake. Your imperfections and your strengths are both a part of what makes you a singular wonder in this vast universe.

The rest of this book is written in the first person. The goal is to spark internal conversations so that you can take control of your dreams.

Now, it’s time for you to start building some hope.

I will be sharing more about this prompt journal next month. I’d love to hear from you in the comments about your impression of this project.

Life as an Essayist

Yet another thing I have found myself returning to after a long absence is writing essays. Since October, I have been publishing new essays at least once a week behind the paywall on Medium. Some of these have also been published here in this newsletter. But most of them have not.

Here are links to my three most popular Medium essays in 2024. These links will get you behind the paywall so you can read for free.

How to Pay Attention

How a Recovering Self-Help Junkie Finds Contentment

Grand Theft Poetry

Honorable Mention:

The First Pancake Principle

Life as a Newsletter-er?

Even though I’ve been doing the Weirdo Poetry Newsletter for more than five years, I’m still learning on the fly. Below are three of my post popular previously-paywalled posts from 2024 that are now free for everyone.

A Gash in the Sky

I am a Birdman!

Time Travel is for Lovers

Thank you so much for reading!

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason