What Do You Hope Will Happen? (A New Year)
in which I'm feeling up for a challenge
Happy New Year! I started this post on New Year’s Day, briefly full of ambition. Then I looked at the time and realized I was supposed to be walking out the door to get Phil for our movie date (“American Fiction,” go see it now! Right now!).
And with that, my New Year’s Day ambition was thwarted. But here we are now!
I love going to the movies on New Year’s Day. One particularly great thing about seeing a movie with Phil is when he laughs, L O U D L Y, and that happened quite a bit with this particular one, unlike last year when we saw “Babylon” and I regretted not walking out after the first 15 minutes of the shit show. So if a New Year’s Day movie choice has any impact on the tone of the year, we’re off to a solid start, and thankfully, one that didn’t involve elephant shit.
You might be wondering by this point what this picture of a giraffe has to do with anything. It was, in fact, the entire point! I’m not here to share my New Year’s resolutions with you, because that’s none of your business and frankly who cares! All you really need to know — which is to say you don’t need to know at all — is that I’m, as usual, participating in 30 Days of Yoga with Adriene this January, and I’ll be reading War & Peace ALL YEAR LONG. (Finished Chapter 3 today and it was wild!)
But I did want to share an update on some of my latest collage endeavors, prompted by The Paris Collage Collective, and specifically, that giraffe.
Essentially, they post weekly creative challenges to create a digital or analog collage based on an image prompt. I snagged a copy of the workbook in another one of my fits of ambition, and am already having fun working directly in it.
You can check them out here, and here:
And without further ado, here’s what I did with that giraffe:
Whatever happens this year, I hope it continues to be as fun and as weird and as thought-provoking as a day spent cutting up words and images, and piecing it all together again. I’ve also been testing out some mini collages (4x4 inches! That is not a lot of space!) and that’s been a fun creative challenge as well.
There are of course a billion different things you can and likely already have read related to starting a new year, so thank you for indulging me if you’ve made it this far.
I’ll leave you with this from the one and only Patti Smith:
“We all have goals, but it is good to offset lofty ones with simple and practical ones. Write a poem and take a walk. Make charitable efforts then take a subway to the sea, and always drink plenty of water.
A new year, or as my mom always said… ‘A clean slate, a fresh sheet.’ I can still see her taking the dried sheets off the line and slipping the wooden clothespins in her housecoat pocket. So happy New Year everyone the future is in our hands.”