Hello, this is Sarah. And I have decided that we're going to release the idea of seasons for the podcast, I'm going to release the expectation that I upload on any kind of regular schedule, I keep going through this cycle, because every December I have this idea that the next year is going to be the Year of the Podcast. And I will find the bandwidth and have the time and space and energy to interview people maybe once a month. And the last few years, that has not happened. So I need to just show up as I can, and find a way that makes podcasting work for me instead of trying to make me work for the podcast. So if you're on Substack, this is something that you're already used to. I've been recording ramble podcasts for Patreon and Substack for years at this point, or Patreon anyway, for years. And now I do an on Substack. But I've decided to put the podcast up on my public podcast feed as well. So if you've been just subscribed over there, first of all, thank you, because I have not uploaded to my public podcast consistently in quite some time. And I am not going to make any promises about about how I'm going to do it moving forward. But I am going to reframe my perspective on podcasting. And I'm going to show up more often with these ramble podcasts. That's just me sitting in the studio with a microphone. And when I have the capacity when the scheduling aligns, and I have the studio and I have someone that can watch my child, so I can have an adult conversation, we might get an interview. If all of the stars align. I'm trying to schedule one now for March, we shall see. There are so many challenges, especially when you're working with someone who is in a different timezone. But I want to show up here more often. And so today, I want to talk with you a little bit about my word of the year last year, which was root and how I'm kind of moving from rooting into my word of the year for this year. And also my intention to submit my work... 100 submissions. So that's kind of the theme of what I wanted to talk about. I'm also going to chat a little bit at the end about my new creative membership program, which is the creative ecosystem, that companionship. But I'm going to save that that little chat for the end. So let's start by talking about the word root. So this came for me because basically just thinking this whole last few years has been really upheaval for everyone. And our upheaval kind of started a year before that. So shortly, ah David was not quite a year old when we started locking down for the pandemic. So we kind of had a little bit of an extra period of self imposed quarantine while we were in the postpartum phase. So basically, during that time, when I was a new mom, I had so much creative energy and all of these ideas, but no time or no physical energy to act on it. And so I was saving up all of these ideas. I was writing notes, I was kind of doodling on my iPad, I was doing watercolors, and I was I started to kind of draft my book just in notes on my phone. And then moving into the next year, which was 2020 I thought that was going to be my year to write a book. And I started you know, I went into the year working really hard on that for the first couple of months and then we had to lock down and quarantine. And I found it all really overstimulating as an autistic mother, to not have a space or time that I could reset and we were limited with the support that we can receive because of that. So kind of when we came through that and we put our son into Montessori School in 2021 I was bursting with energy. And I had so much that I wanted to share and I wanted to connect with and so I I just threw a lot of energy out out out and I felt all of this urgency to make all the things and I wanted to finish all of these projects really quickly. And so when he was in school, I wasn't really using that time to reset or take care of my nervous system or my body, I was just using that time to get out here and work, work, work. And somewhere through that year is when I started really digging into the framework for the creative ecosystem. And I realized that something needed to shift in my own creative ecosystem, because I was doing too much of the making, connecting, and not enough of the refueling, regenerating, restoring, digging into inspiration and the joy of life kind of thing. And so my goal moving in to the next year 2022, sorry, I wasn't trying to tell my life story, but just kind of put this in context that I'd kind of I'm not I wasn't, I don't think it was particularly I don't know, maybe it was burn out. But I was like, really pushing myself to the edge of my limits. And in 2022, I had the intention of rooting down. And so I really wanted to take some of the time which David went to school, and like, read a book, do something for fun do some collage, Do this, do that. And then there was more chaos with related to the pandemic, we had to pull him out of school in January, he went back in February. But basically, within that year, last year of 2022, I rooted more than I have, and in a very long time, I've been reading books for fun for joy, that weren't for research, or for posting on Instagram, like, part of that goal for rooting was to do things that might not even be seen by other people, things that I needed to do for myself, and for my own mental health, my own creative ecosystem. And to make it more in balance, so not like to only grow roots. But to to find more of a balance there. And to put more to kind of value the rooting in a way that I hadn't been before, I was kind of so excited and focused on doing these things to reach out and to share, that I was really devaluing anything, that I couldn't kind of post to Instagram and say, like, here's the thing that I did. So kind of reframing myself like not as this creative commodity, but as looking at my creative ecosystem and how to make that, that I really wanted to embody, embody the lessons within my book as I was launching my book. So obviously, it wasn't all rooting the book launch. And publishing my own book was definitely not a rooting process. But I knew that I needed that rooting, to keep it in balance. And I think I succeeded. I had, you know, obviously, it takes a toll of energy, when you are introverted and autistic, and you're putting yourself out there and making these videos and connections. And so I had a period of time that I needed to reset. But I feel like I didn't push myself as hard. And I was able to recover after that in the way that I needed to. And finding my own rhythm was really a new discovery for me. So the book project, project itself was more of a reaching, I kind of think about this now is a balance between rooting and reaching. And I have a printable for that. I will see if I can add that, oh, dear. I'm running out of battery, I hope. Oh, we're on low power mode. I don't know if that's going to change the quality at all. Maybe I need to just keep chatting. So basically, I'm trying to find a balance between routing and reaching. And I have a printable for that, that I'm going to put up over on Substack. So last year, I spent a lot more energy just working on my art. Not particularly with... I don't know if it's turning off my... No, it seems like we're still recording. Okay, so rooting and reaching and all that stuff. So this year, I want... now that I have this body of work that I made that I focused in on and I just like hunkered down and I made these art pieces, I want to send them out into the world. And I wrote this book, but I didn't go around. Like I did mention it online. I didn't do no marketing, but I didn't really really push the marketing. Not that I'm gonna make a big change on my own Instagram, but like, I haven't taken it around to the local shops to ask if they'd like to stock it or put myself out there in that way for more visibility in the local community. So I'm challenging myself to make 100 submissions, not necessarily within this year, but I'm going to celebrate the effort that it takes into submitting something, and not necessarily be counting on hearing back as an acceptance, so I'm kind of trying to disentangle the expectation that you can have when you apply for something that you're kind of like hoping that you get in. Of course, some part of you always hopes that, but I really want to celebrate more that I'm putting myself out there that I'm reaching out, and that I am making these submissions for creative opportunities. So I created a printable, and it is available over on Substack. So I've just mentioned two different printables that I have over there on Substack for you guys. And they're both branded to match my Creative Ecosystem Companionship, which is my new membership program, which I'll get to in just a bit. But let me talk a little bit more about this submissions process. So I'm wanting to apply to art shows and book festivals, and articles for academic journals and all these kinds of things. And so I made a grid of 100 squares, there just the right size to put that classic gold star sticker in or you could use any other sticker you could mark it through or whatever. I also have a version where if it's not 100 submissions, maybe you're doing 100 days of drawing or 100 day challenge of any kind, you could use the same printable. Um, so yeah, I'm pretty excited, I just put down my first three stickers. Because this month, I applied to three things. Or maybe one of those was in January? Anyway, I have two more that I'm working toward, hopefully submitting in March. And we shall see. But I think it will be fun to see like a visual representation of how I'm putting my art out there in the world. And I am taking up space and looking for opportunities to connect and share my work. So that's pretty exciting. And like I said, I've made it branded to match my Creative Ecosystem Companionship. So if you've been following me on Instagram, you have heard a lot about this. Over the past week, I've been really challenging myself to show up there as well and to talk about it pretty much every day for a week while we launched. It's my new creative membership program. It's kind of a peer to peer coaching situation. And it's all based on the framework of my creative ecosystem. So every week, there's a prompt to consider your creative ecosystem. And we have a chat thread, it's all on substack. So no Facebook, no social media, a nice quiet place, and a code of conduct where we aren't posting the news. We're not debating politics, like somewhere we can go, that safe for our nervous systems to connect, where we can feel really at ease, which I think for myself is just something that I greatly need. And so that's part of why I've created it. If I was really good at marketing, I would have made this podcast during my launch. Here we are a week later. But I've decided not to close the doors for this so you can join in at any time. And in addition to the Substack chat threads, we are also doing once a month a Whatsapp kind of like a Campfire Chat, where you can either leave a voice note or a text. And we can connect in real time over the span of one day. And we have a really lovely group of creative souls in there from 13 different States, Canada, England, and Mexico. So we're in all different time zones. And yeah, I'm really excited. I've started to see the introductions coming through. And I'm excited about connecting in this way. The other thing about the Companionship is that I've structured it with three month seasons. So it doesn't matter what hemisphere you're in that it's not based on like spring, summer, winter, but kind of this three month cycle of setting intentions. And then at the end of the three months looking back and seeing what worked in what we might want to shift. So I'm very much in there in the mud, doing the work with you. It's not me telling you what to do. It's me being there side by side holding space for us all to do it together. And I'm really excited about it. So I don't know how often I'm going to show up here with these ramble podcasts. If I make it really easy for myself and I don't record restart the recording several times if I don't edit it, and I just let myself go be my Autistic Self and have my pauses and mis-speakings and um, hems and haws and ums and ahhs. Maybe I can show up more often. So that is my intention. I honestly don't remember what intro outro I have recorded previously, I'll probably try to tack that on here. But just in case that doesn't tell you, you can support the podcast over on Substack. And that helps me to pay for transcription services, which is really important to me. And when I have a guest, you'll get the video. But again, to make this podcasting accessible for myself. I'm not recording a video when I do a ramble chat, because it just requires a different level of energy for me. And I'm trying to manage those energy levels. So that's it... hop over there if you want the printables. I've got to stop because my phone is running out of battery. I was going to talk a little bit more about this rooting and reaching idea that maybe we'll dig into that in the comments. Also, if you'd like to chat about this episode Substack discussion threads are really great if you haven't been over there Substack is basically like a blog and a newsletter and a podcast and YouTube channel all had a baby together. So it's a little bit of everything. It's a one stop shop to subscribe. And there's a really easy platform for having discussions. It has nice notification systems, you can actually have long form conversations with people, which I find is increasingly difficult on other platforms. So I'm really loving it over there. So if you would like to tell me if you resonated with anything in this episode, or if you're downloading the printables, if you're trying to put your work out there or if you're in a routing phase... I'd love to hear what resonated with you and I'm going to stop before my phone dies and I totally lose this recording. But, thanks for listening.