The Setting of Intentions

in this year, 2024

The New Year has always felt special, and now, it’s even more special to me. It is the day I became a mother. It’s my little boy’s birthday. Like me, he is a night baby, he was born 8 minutes before my own birth time.

Every mother has their birth story, and still, mine is hard to process. It was a hard, dark time. But here I am, a year ahead and that year behind me. It’s time to start fresh.

Resolution — that word never felt right to me. I love to harness this time because of the collective motivation and momentum to change and shift the way we do things, to start fresh. It’s like you can hop on a jet stream and let it carry you. As an Aries, this is the energy we live for.

My intentions this year feel good and simple and my goal is not to add more (ok I do have a few new additions to my life!), but to decrease and maximize what I already have. Quality over quantity. This is a mix of personal and work related intentions and goals. I don’t really separate the two, because so much of my work life is deeply intertwined with my personal life. Like two vines twisting up and growing together.

It’s a less is more year.

So here’s what I am setting my sights on this year:

1. Begin and finish one pleasure book a month

2. Committing to staying accountable with my no-buy year for 2024.

3. A 25 minute walk 6 times a week (I already do this, and I want to maintain it).

4. Committing to An Herbalist’s Notebook and providing quality writing, so that I may grow my readership

5. Prioritizing joy and doing what makes me feel good. If I ignore that dread feeling in my gut that something is not right for me, forcing it to work only makes things worse. It’s ok to quit.

6. Getting back to my soap making art, sharing one soap each season of the year that is very slowly and intentionally made with local ingredients

7. Continued prioritization of tending to my health in holistic ways

8. Starting my prerequisites for Nursing school, fall term

9. Starting my first in the ground home garden — herbs and vegetables

10. Incorporating more movement in my life, as inspired by Katy Bowman of Nutritious Movement (Grow Wild is a great book if you’ve got kiddos!)

And that’s it. The newest things for me are gardening and starting school. Everything else is either already on my radar, accessible or challenging my status quo in ways that require less of me (isn’t it wild how that can be hard for us?).

I’m really looking forward to exploring some of these things. School sounds intimidating, my no-buy is increasingly feeling intimidating! And my ADHD brain is always afraid of burnout when I push it too hard.

Let’s add: 11. Practice pacing myself.

Tell me one of your goals or intentions for this year! When we share, we put it out into the energetic webs of the world — and from my experience, things really move and happen when we do that.

Of course, there will be a check-in at the end of the year to see how these things went. I’m so curious about what my future self will do!