This is a visual representation of seasonal, semi-personal, and academic data collected from my 2025 journal entries. The process behind it was inspired by the books A Year in Practice: Seasonal Rituals and Prompts to Awaken Cycles of Creative Expression (Suskin, 2023) and Observe, Collect, Draw! A Visual Journal (Lupi & Posavec, 2018). 

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 the hard way 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, to quote bell hooks (2015), 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.

One resource that has been accompanying me in this process—especially in my crafty and creative practices—is A Year in Practice (Suskin, 2023). Guided by some of its prompts and exercises, 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, and moments of clarity or synchronicities. For inspiration on how to approach visual data representation, I drew from Observe, Collect, Draw! which helped me think through the story I wanted to tell, how to translate it visually, and how to build a clear legend.

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.