Today is the start of a new year. With its arrival comes a clean slate–a blank canvas ready to be painted with the vibrant details of our journey through these next twelve months.
In reality, it might just be another day, another red X to put on our Calvin and Hobbes calendar. As I explained to my daughter this morning when she asked why everyone makes a big deal out the start of a new year, it’s symbolic.
It is a metaphorical rebirth: mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and even physically for some. It is a chance to begin again, to start fresh on a new path–to find new adventures, make new friends, build new lives–to do all of the things we wished we’d done in the previous year. It is a second chance.
For writers, it can also represent a creative rebirth, a cleansing of the writer’s soul. It is so easy for creative beings to feel dejected, sluggish, uninspired. Especially when the year is coming to a close, and all of our hopes and dreams and goals are weighed and measured against our actual accomplishments. Today is the perfect time to tie balloons around last year’s unfulfilled desires and goals, to bury any unrealized resolutions, to sweep those pesky bad habits and bothersome nuances out the door. Let us not carry any of 2011′s dead weight into the new year. Let us instead forge ahead into 2012, inspired, confident, and open to the path we’ll walk.
As I said in my post yesterday, I have forgone the antiquated act of making New Year’s resolutions this year (which will likely go unrealized). Instead, I am creating a personal manifesta, an organic declaration of my creative principles, my values, and my intentions for 2012.
My Creative Manifesta for 2012
- I am a writer. I may be more than that, but I am never less than that. I will remind myself everyday that I am a writer until there is no room for doubt.
- I will keep moving forward, never backward. I will create and never un-create. I will write and never un-write.
- I will love my stories as if they are living beings. I will care for them, respect them, and nourish them. I will nurture them and give them a safe place to grow.
- I will create from a place of truth, from the raw, real self without walls, self-imposed or otherwise.
- Like the lotus, I will open myself to beauty, to light, to love. I will create from this place–with no barriers between myself and the open world.
- My creative self is malleable and holds no shape. It cannot be put into a box or pigeon-holed into any of life’s genres.
- My craft is a gift I have been given. I recognize that I am only a vessel for the language I ask for every time I sit down to write. My words are a prayer, a meditation, a chant, and that whatever the words, whatever the meaning, whatever the genre, my writing is a gift.
- Everyday is a blank canvas, a clean sheet, a new day, and I will treat everyday as a gift.
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love it!
Me too! I’m already feeling inspired to add to mine