The Zen Leaf

My family arrived in Wisconsin on August 30th. In the month since, the world has exploded into color. Reds. Oranges. Yellows. Chunks of vivid color nestled in green. I love when trees change piecemeal: a single branch of color followed by bushy clumps followed by a full turning. This is the prettiest time of year!

I’ve enjoyed being in the Midwest for this again – watching the corn harvested, feeling the roller coaster of temps, tasting all the abundant produce available here. This week, there’s been football. There have been TV season premieres. There have been sweaters one day and shorts the next. There have been pumpkin patches and corn mazes. There have been spooky audiobooks and lots of crochet. There have been guests and travel and a husband who is finally home this weekend. And color. Fabulous, beautiful fall color.

By now, just about everyone has heard of bullet journaling. People either love it or hate it, and everyone who uses it seems to have a different way of doing so. I began my first bullet journal in late August last year, and reviewed the technique in October. As I see people going through their planners and bullet journals on Instagram, I’m struck by something I said back in that review: “It’s not a pretty way to journal.” I further clarified that I’m not really a pretty-planner, scrapbooking, stickers and colored-pens kind of person, and so this functional type of planner worked very well for me. A year later, this still holds true, though I now know it to be a partial truth.

Sure, my bullet journal has evolved over the last year. I now have a daily tracker for certain goals, but I still just mark stuff out with Xs instead of colored indicators. I use post-it flag now to keep often-used pages (like my monthly calendar) easy-to-find. I have a blog-tracker, though it’s basically identical to my monthly calendar, with blog posts instead of events written down. I sometimes use colored pencils if I’m designing a crochet pattern in detail. Mostly, though, my bullet journal still serves as a functional place to store my calendar, to-do lists, goals, trackers, tarot spreads, grocery/meal lists, crochet project plans, wishlists, and other sundry bits. It looks nearly identical to the pictures at the above link, as you can see if you wanted to compare the pictures there to the one at the right.

There’s nothing pretty about my bullet journals and they are certainly no pieces of art. I admire all of you who can create art out of planners and such, but I just don’t have the drive or intuition for it. I like my little function planner, and crossing out my tasks, and having my calendar all at a glance. That’s it for me. More recently, though, I’ve loved discovering that this technique is so adaptable, so that someone with stickers, tape, colored pens, and beautiful handwriting can use the exact same methods to make a piece of art that I use to quickly-and-unartistically organize my brain. This was not something I foresaw when I reviewed the technique last year, and I’ve loved watching what others do with their own bullet journals! This is why I say “partial truth” above. I personally still love my no-frills way of bullet journaling, but I understand now that this is not the only way to use the technique. And as dorky as this makes me, I get a little thrill every time I see someone adapting the technique in their own, unique manner. Ha!