This visual represents seasonal, personal, and academic data drawn from my 2025 journal entries.
 
The process behind it was shaped by two key resources. A Year in Practice: Seasonal Rituals and Prompts to Awaken Cycles of Creative Expression (Suskin, 2023) offered guidance for aligning my creative and craft‑based practices with seasonal cycles. Observe, Collect, Draw! A Visual Journal (Lupi & Posavec, 2018) provided inspiration for noticing personal patterns and rhythms, and experimenting with visual data representation—ways of visually and creatively telling data stories. 

Although the Gregorian new year falls in winter, here in the northern hemisphere, winter itself leans more toward stillness, rest, and deep reflection than toward new beginnings or major shifts. Because of that—and because I’ve learned that Montreal winters don’t reward resistance—I’ve been looking for ways to work with each season’s lessons rather than push against them. This also means paying attention to how, in the words of bell hooks, the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” systemically erodes our connection to these natural and creative cycles, and finding ways to negotiate and push back against that disconnection—when possible—in my own life.

Guided by prompts and exercises in the books mentioned above, I spent the past few weeks going back through my journals and pulling out ideas, themes, theories, and projects that felt important and likely to continue shaping my work in the months ahead.

I had four journals to work with: 

Once I had my “data,” I organized it thematically and created visual symbols to represent the ideas I wanted to highlight. As noted in the key, the themes and categories I ended up with were: journal beginnings, writing projects, creative practices, speaking engagements, notable albums, concepts and teachers, moments of clarity or synchronicities, and the seasons: winter, spring, summer, and fall. 

From there, it was a lot of experimentation, ebbs and flows, and refinements. While I would have preferred to create the whole thing by hand, using Canva made the process manageable this season and still let me shape the visual in a way that felt true to the material.

This creative process has already generated ideas for how I hope to approach my journaling with more intention and a more critical perspective in the seasons ahead. I’m thinking about how to track, more deliberately, the places where personal rhythms intersect with broader social, political, and power‑relational forces—and how tending to those cycles, and making them visible, may become small but meaningful forms of resistance...

References:
Anzaldúa, G. (2015). Light in the dark = Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting identity, spirituality, reality. (A. Keating, Ed.). Duke University Press.
hooks, b. (2015). Feminist theory: From margin to center. Routledge.
Lupi, G., & Posavec, S. (2018). Observe, collect, draw!: A visual journal. Princeton Architectural Press.
Suskin, J. (2023). A year in practice: Seasonal rituals and prompts to awaken cycles of creative expression. Sounds True.