9/20/23

Time	Moon	Mood
"Vibing to the same song on repeat" O'clock	Waxing Crescent in Sagittarius	PMS "Ehhhh's"

 Yesterday I had the opportunity to teach a workshop on mindfulness meditation at work! Meditation is a huge passion in my life, a subject I care deeply about. I'm a big believer in the positive impact it can have upon you both in the short and long-term, if you're consistent with it.

  After showing a brief presentation I created for the workshop, I then led the group in a guided meditation practice. It turned out to be a roaring success!! Someone told me afterwards that it was the most relaxed they felt on campus, and others commented on how they felt their heart rate and blood pressure drop. You don't know how happy that made me! Teaching is an act of gift giving: you pass on your knowledge to others for them to utilize, and then maybe they too in-turn will share it someday. Either way, the world's body of knowledge expands, no matter how small! Especially when the world is so inundated with screens and distractions tugging for our attention, and it can feel so hard to slow down. Maybe I should make a meditation page for this website?!? That might be fun, to talk about my experiences with it and share resources others might find useful...

 My coordinator wants me to do it again; hopefully it's sooner than later!

 Easy answer: it's the Cloud/Aerith one, but... but!

 I'm torn.

 SO.

 I have plans on creating a website for my fandom presence, right? Close fandom friends of mine are aware of this site and enjoy looking at it, but this is different than my plans of the other one. My goal for a fandom website would be to use it as a permanent home base for my fanworks due to the questionable fragility of social media today. Along with that, I thought it would be fun to create shrines for my big OTPs and gush away, but like. I don't know! I kind of want to make those shrines here and keep the other all business!

 My little fairytale witchy cottage doubles as a Museum of Sarah, and my insanities ARE a part of my life, right? So why shouldn't they have a place here? But then there's the other part of me that feels so torn about keeping that kind of thing centralized in one place, aligning it with my fandom presence. BUT! I wanna gush here too!! Like I have space in my gosh darn library for this kind of stuff!! Gahhh, it's hard to decide what to do!

 The best solution I can think is to do like. Smaller-scale shrines on this website, and then maybe construct "temples" that are more extensive on the fandom one. The fandom site that doesn't even exist as of writing this lol. So maybe I'm (once again) counting my eggs before they even hatch.

 Any advice or second opinions are welcomed though, I'm curious as to hear what others think. And maybe in the meantime, I can start my self-indulgent Titanic shrine first (can you spot a pattern in my tastes?).

Love,
Sarah

9/12/23

Time	Moon	Mood
Late Afternoon Sleepies	Waning Crescent in Leo	Socially drained, nobody talk to me

 September's been busy busy BUSY! But a good kind of busy. The kind of busy where you feel like the things you're doing matter, and you can be proud and pleased of that.

 What I need to do though, is get back in the habit of using my planner daily––my cure-all to scatterbrainedness! Which doesn't feel too different from this diary entry so far. Scattered, I mean.

 So far, September has been celebratory: I've had the chance to attend a few birthday parties, and a close friend's baby shower is later this week. Stuff like this gets me feeling festive, too. For a while I was clinging onto the last dredges for summer, but now I'm ready for Halloween feasts and pumpkin carvings and cinnamon sticks and crunchy leaves. I think I'm going to plan a spooky shindig for next month!

 An object in motion stays in motion, including me. Motivated and energized, I am ready to live and continue living, in ways both big and small. Whether it's through picking the perfect pumpkin at the patch, or crunch out the GRE and get one step closer to my dream of [redacted]... I don't know. But whatever it is, I'm feeling it.

 There's the flip side, though.

 I touched on this a little in my last entry, but I have a tendency to get so consumed by whatever's right in front of me that everything else can fall to the wayside. It doesn't mean that I forget about my future and dreams (it's something I spend everyday thinking about haha), but I forget to... execute them. Which sounds so silly when writing it out! There's something to be said about living in the moment, but the thousands of little moments that make up your present create your future.

 What's the best way to navigate this? A planner, for one thing. My emotional support planner that makes me feel capable. The poor planner I need to stop neglecting helps by creating a focused game plan each day, for tracking the habits I want to cultivate.

 To be completely honest, there's a lot I want to say right now about the "grindset", and personal perception of time and creating an enriching quality of life by manipulating how we perceive time, but that's for another entry. Another topic to discuss for when my brain isn't pouring out of my ears. All that aside, I'm a bit stuck on how to balance these various aspects I touch on. Perhaps by accepting that we cycle through different seasons where time means to move fast and you have to take the steps towards the goals, and others where we sit back and simply be.

 Like I said, this entry is all over the place. That's okay though, it's fine. The diary entries I handwrite in my journal are similar. And isn't that how we discover things anyway, by going on these internal journeys with ourselves, even if they circle and twist all around the place?

 Should I even post this?

 Okayyy WHATEVER, that's enough, no more writing for now! Catch you next time!

Love,
Sarah

9/1/23

Time	Moon	Tarot
Post-Morning Meditation	Waning Gibbous in Aries	Ace of Swords (R)

 First day of September, first day of writing for my website's blog, wahoo! And wow, did I have FUN making this! My plan is to create monthly layouts to celebrate the changing seasons. September, to me, stands on the precipice of autumn, as the world turns slowly gold. Like a great sunflower field.

 September also has me in a mild panic, ngl. We've entered the last quarter of the year, and have I been SLACKING. I'm trying to give myself grace by reminding myself, "hey, you spent a chunk of it dealing with a grief and PMDD episode, and only now you've begun to bloom again!" but it can be easier said than done.

 These insecurities are present enough to show up in my card drawing today: the Ace of Swords reversed. Aces, to me, represent a gift or new opportunity regardless if it's upright or not. Reversals, though, indicate the gift is dormant, and it may take a little extra effort to tap into it.

 The Ace of Swords is all about personal power. The power of your words, the power of your actions. The power of taking control. And admittedly, even with the optimistic energy of the start of the month, I feel intimidated to do so, thanks how fast the year has flown by. But that shouldn't matter; the sword is always there, waiting to be yielded.

So, my game plan!:

• Bite-sized actions, anything to shake off my stagnancy. A small step is still a small step towards my larger goal.


• Guard my sensitivities, but don't stab them with that sword. Respect that any new habits and frame of mind needs nurturing.

 Also like. As much as a party I've had working on Inkcaps, I have other goals and hobbies and what have you's that need attention too! It's way too easy for me to get totally fixated on a project, only for the rest of the world to pass me by.

 Another focus for the month, then: improve my object permanence so that it's comparable to a small child's instead of a toddler's.

Love,
Sarah