This morning I started with more alphabet painting practice and some still-wet notes to myself. We find it so easy to compare ourselves to others — in business, in art, in mothering, in life. Today, I needed to remind myself that nothing valuable comes to the world through an attempt to live someone else’s story. No, all of my true impact in this world will come through living the story God has created in ME. After all, I am the only way that story will ever be told.
I started blogging in May 2008 in a little corner of cyberspace called EyeJunkie.com. Some of you faithful friends have encouraged me there as I’ve shared a lot of writing through the years. This “Oh Happy Day” post is a transplant of a series I did at EyeJunkie that I want to bring over to Small Pond Graphics. The Friday series started as I was thinking about our cultural love of the phrase, TGIF, or “thank God’s it’s Friday.” I wanted to consciously incorporate gratitude into my work and life so that TGIF wasn’t just a silly acronym, but a true reflection of a thankful heart expressed each week. Gratitude, as it turns out, is actually a pretty poignant and successful business model!
Today, I’m relaunching Oh Happy Day here with gratitude for an old writing “friend” and the clarity for how we can go new places. Here’s the story…
I began the EyeJunkie blog as a creative outlet while I was working at an advertising agency, chasing two crazy preschoolers, and pregnant with my Baby Girl — the perfect time to add something new to my plate, right? It actually WAS perfect timing, and the process turned out to be a great opportunity to express myself. Almost all of my creative time was being spent doing work for clients. The children had taken up any “free time” I had for creative or “making” projects. And, we all know that raising toddlers carries its own brand of creative thinking! At the time, I began to realize that I needed a way to do something creative that wasn’t related to selling sandwiches or shoes or branding new businesses. I needed something for me. That outlet became the blog, EyeJunkie.
I experimented with all kinds of things at EyeJunkie. I learned WordPress, which I now use exclusively for client website development projects. I participated in all kinds of memes, posting themes and “national day of…” writing events. I explored a ton of what I call “hare-brained” ideas. But mostly, I wrote. And wrote. I wrote about ridiculous things. And not-so-ridiculous things that made me think. I wrote about my family and my faith and the culture around me. I never gained a substantial audience beyond that circle of friends and family who hung on my words, but the writing became important to me — a way of thinking. And a way of disciplining myself to focus on things that mattered.
Living deliberately was sort of the theme of EyeJunkie. I deemed it “adventures in paying attention” — the pursuit of taking a deeper look at life without and within. I used the writing to try and bring meaning to everyday experiences, and to slow down and record those precious moments with my children. To give them their due. In the writing, I settled into sort of a loose mixture of prose and poetry with a bent toward stream-of-consciousness that sort of helped me find my “voice” in a lot of my communications now.
The last seven or so years of writing on the EyeJunkie blog have carried me through the daily experiences of raising the little souls in my charge, the changes in our family, changes in my work, the launch of my freelancing business, the suicide and grief surrounding my husband’s death, a lot of journeys toward what I believe about social issues and culture today, and of course the persistent pursuit of faith throughout. EyeJunkie is an old friend.
As my posting and writing for EyeJunkie.com has become more sporadic over the last year or two, I’ve been struggling with my feelings about that space and how or if it should continue. I love it, but haven’t had the will to write there consistently. But, I suppose, as in all things EyeJunkie, the posts have been so tied to my own thinking that to say goodbye to them was almost like saying goodbye to myself. In my thinking and planning for 2015, I finally decided it was time to let it go. Although, not really. I suppose I felt it was time to let it stand — stand as it is, as an archive of my thinking and the beautiful, and sometimes challenging, experiences chronicled there.
I’ve spent the last month or so regrouping on the Small Pond Graphics website and my blog here. I usually do that at the first of each year in an effort to make sure my time is spent well in what I share publicly and that the core of what I’m doing is represented well. I’ve found this year, that I really wanted to bring the best of EyeJunkie — that piece of my soul that’s been out on display — into where I’m moving for Small Pond.
The goals and ideas behind the EyeJunkie writing are the true undercurrent of how this freelance business has moved and grown and changed over the last 4 1/2 years, and much of that thinking has fueled the boundaries I’ve set up for myself in business and the choices I’m making about where it goes from here. I have an increasing conviction that my “work” — how I conduct it, the projects I choose, and ultimately the communication that emanates from it — should reflect what I value in my “life” because work IS life! We live in a culture of sharing, of communicating — almost more communication than we can handle. For me, sharing and communicating is an inevitable outpouring of creating. When I crawl in bed at night and I’m left to my own thoughts, I want to know that the hours I’ve devoted to working reflect an honest pursuit of a quiet, authentic, and conscious life. I want to talk and share and “be” about real things.
To that end, I’ve been working to revamp the “categories” a bit for the Small Pond Graphics blog to expand my thinking beyond design and images. As part of that, I’m excited to share a featured section called “stories,” which now contains a chunk of what I think are the most relevant and “evergreen” writing from Eyejunkie — my old friend. My goal is to begin posting more “stories” and thoughtful writing on some of the root ideas I’ve mentioned — peppered in with the watercolor and lettering and design-centered things I usually share, of course. I’m so thankful for all the experiments and life chronicled in the EyeJunkie stories, and those “legacy” posts will serve as my own accountability and encouragement to make sure whatever I share moving forward is governed by authenticity, sincerity, quality and creativity.
I’m so blessed by the opportunity to do what I love on my own terms and to be able to share that journey with so many of you.
Oh happy day!
If you’re interested in reading some of the legacy posts, my ever-overthinking brain has organized them like this…
beautiful ordinary | essays | mother’s heart | on faith | on social justice
Voice.
Sigh. I’ve been struggling to find it lately. I set out at the beginning of this year on a writing pursuit, seeking to find, speak, know and share my own voice in new ways. I wanted to share my voice with new resolve in this particular medium, yes, but more importantly in the broader strokes of my life. Since then, my writing has been virtually nonexistent.
This past week I’ve been celebrating my oldest son, Little Drummer Boy, turning seven years old. As many mothers can relate, the birthdays are almost always bittersweet lumps of joy where my vision is quite clouded. I see him with all the new skills and interests and jokes and signs of independence. But somehow in the very same frame of the lens, I also see that little face resting on my shoulder, the tiny hand clutching mine and all the firsts I’ve witnessed that have now turned into his beautiful habits. As I was reminded by a friend, a “happy birthday” to LDB is a “happy birthday” to me as well, for a mother always has an intimate recollection of birthdays.
With much less fanfare, I’ve also been celebrating a personal milestone — the fourth birthday of this blog, EyeJunkie, on May 6. I started it in many ways because of LDB. I was at a time in my life where I felt I needed a personal creative outlet. My readers probably know that I’m creative for a living, like most of us are. I’m just called upon to do it in a much more overt way than most. I’m a designer. LDB thinks I draw for my work, and in many ways that’s true. But I started EyeJunkie in 2008 because I wanted a creative outlet that was apart from work for hire. I needed it. I needed something that would allow me to act out those creative tendencies in a more personal way. I needed to show him. I needed to show LDB, and Bug, and now Baby Girl what I was about on the inside. That’s the crux of it.
This space has been indelibly tethered to my voice ever since. So, to leave it unattended feels like a failure in many ways, like dropping the ball, like being out of the loop with myself. Do I even want to continue it? does it matter to me? Is it a valuable contribution to my life? A worthwhile investment? Can I continue it in a meaningful way? In some ways it feels like losing ground, like losing my voice. But, I know my voice is there. Somewhere. And that need for a creative outlet apart from work is still there. Somehow.
When I launched the whole “voice” thing for 2012, I wrote this:
To be able to hear the sound of our own voices with clarity sure simplifies things. It makes choices and decisions much more obvious. It makes the worthwhile investments of our time and energy much easier to find.
Those statements still ring true in my heart. I still see the necessity of hearing my own voice. Of discerning my own core requirements for a life of blessing. Of determining my own parameters of what constitutes a life of significance. Of rigorously chasing that life with daily decisions. Of giving the gift of that life to my children.
As I’ve been processing these two milestones, I’ve recognized that I HAVE heard my voice in many areas. I HAVE made decisions and movements that reflect my own voice. I have begun to more deeply refine my work life with Small Pond Graphics so that it serves me rather than vice versa. I have begun to reclaim control of areas of my life and relationships where I felt I had surrendered my own voice. I have begun to step outside of fatigue or busy-ness or laziness to create more significant experiences for my children, to recognize and incorporate habits of joy into their lives in small things. These are all urgings I heard from my own voice. And I’m beginning to speak them each day in tangible ways.
Here’s the thing. The writing isn’t the thing. The living is the thing. The doing. The growing. The learning. The listening.
It’s all those things that make the writing something — something that enriches all that I glean from the living and doing and learning. Through this soul searching, I’ve recognized that I write to keep my heart and my voice close to the surface. I do it to clarify my voice. And I do it to recognize the sound of my voice as I’m living. And that makes it valuable. To me.
“Courage does not roar. It does not need to.”
I read this truth a few weeks ago in an article by Nilofer Merchant. The post recounted an “aha” moment for Ms. Merchant when she heard herself saying something out loud for the first time — something that spoke her true heart. Something she hadn’t articulated before, but instantly knew was spoken in her own unmistakeable voice.
The moment she described has been festering in me since then.
The article was titled “Courage Does Not Roar.” That’s what caught my attention. For the last two years I’ve been haphazardly thinking about courage. I’ve made a practice during part of my blogging foray to choose a “theme word” each year. The word is something I want to define or learn or allow to characterize my life and thinking over the course of a 12-month period, and I try to explore it in words and thoughts through EyeJunkie posts. The word for 2010 & 2011 was “courage.”
This article appeared on my radar just as I was trying to decide on a theme word for 2012 — or even if I wanted a theme word. My thoughts have seemed so scattered lately, that I’m wasn’t sure I was really able to determine a year-long focus. I mean, that would require focus.
In the sphere of remarkable people and living, Ms. Merchant wrote of “courage” as being less about bravery and more about clarity. Boy, that really struck a chord. One I couldn’t get out of my head.
To be able to hear the sound of our own voices with clarity sure simplifies things. It makes choices and decisions much more obvious. It makes the worthwhile investments of our time and energy much easier to find.
These days, I hear a lot about finding “my own truth.” And while I don’t necessarily belief “truth” is that much of a moving target, I am also firmly convinced that we each carry a truth about ourselves inside of us. We each carry our own voice able to speak to what really matters to us, what brings us joy, what reflects our deepest desires, what acknowledges our purpose, what confirms the value we want to collect in our lives. That voice of truth deep in my soul helps me discern what I know, without question, is right in my own individual life.
The problem is that it’s so easy to allow that truth to be drowned out.
“Courage does not roar. It does not need to. The truer that voice, the louder it will sound, and the farther it will reach. That’s why I believe great innovators pay attention to the thoughts that come from their heart. They honor their truth. Because that knowledge will lead you forward. It will give you courage. It will make you brave. And perhaps, it will lead you to be more remarkable than you are.”
As these thoughts began to resonate more clearly over the Christmas holiday, I found myself actually excited about this theme word concept again. MY word was clear.
VOICE
It’s what I want to pursue in 2012. My own unmistakeable one — resolving to find it, speak it, know it, share it in new ways. And in old ways so familiar to me that I’ve perhaps become deaf to them.
Finding my voice where it’s been lost.
Listening to my voice where it’s been drowned out or squelched.
Knowing my voice where confusion has overshadowed clarity.
Speaking my own voice into decisions and choices and habits.
Hearing my voice come through in the defining moments,
Lending my voice to those who can’t speak.
Sharing my voice on issues and ideas that matter to me.
VOICE is a noun. And a verb.
It’s being. And doing.
2012 is the time to voice my life.
There is no other time like now.
And, I’m ready.
Happy December! By the hardest, I’ve been holding myself back from thinking about December for a while — from thinking about the Christmas holidays. It IS hard. And not necessarily because the excitement is overwhelming, but because the busy-ness and preparations and schedule can be overwhelming. And because all the hullabaloo the holiday brings tends to encroach on my rest and my peace of mind sometimes.
Just before Thanksgiving, I was in the local Wal-Mart picking up items for Bug’s 5-year-old birthday party. I wanted to get a few extra gift items for him and also some “big brother” and “big sister” gifts for the other two. I think that’s when the impending holiday season hit me — right about the time I turned onto the toy aisle. To say it was overwhelming is an understatement, for sure. My mind immediately went into overload with the number of options for Christmas presents. I flittered from one item to the next thinking how one would love this or one would love that. My brain filled up with a low-grade panic because I didn’t yet have a “plan” for getting Christmas presents or doing teacher gifts or baking goodies or putting up decorations. I had to shake my head at myself right there on aisle 17. I had to tell myself to snap out of it and focus on the birthday at hand.
That’s when I decided that I wanted Christmas to be different this year. Sometimes I over-plan or over-work or over-schedule myself right into a serious case of Bah Humbug or at the least a case of wanting a long winter’s nap during this season. Sadly, there have been times when it made me happy to see the festivities come to an end.
With changes and challenges and the plethora that comes with mommyhood and designerhood, I found myself perhaps dreading the holiday season. But, here’s the thing. I’m a celebration-junkie. I like to celebrate. I like to create and enjoy traditions that celebrate and elevate the simple splendor of everyday life — and especially the simple splendors of a Christmas Christ child on a bed of hay. I don’t want that spirit to be dampened in my heart, in my home, in my life. I don’t want Christmas to get so lost in a sea of preparations that I miss the opportunity to see it, much less celebrate it.
The true celebration of Christmas has the uncanny ability to bring a unique light to the winter of life. From a miraculous child and astonished herdsmen to questioning sages and a guiding star, the story of Christmas can bring clarity from it’s sheer simplicity and humility. This month so often sheds light, a pure and clear light. One that opens up our eyes of wonder. The wonder that makes us step outside our tired thinking to believe in possibilities. The wonder that makes us curious. The wonder that gives us courage to follow the light set before us. The wonder that makes us seek our own light found in the unlikeliest of places.
So, I’m starting this December with my guard up. So that I can keep my heart open to the season’s light. I’m guarding my time so that I can choose to focus on the best things and activities and people. I want my children to know this celebration, not just their busy and frazzled mommy. I want them to see this light and wonder for themselves. And I want to see the light myself. And wonder.
Hello & welcome! I’m Haley Montgomery, and I’m the designer and owner of Small Pond Graphics. I sometimes fancy myself a frog kisser— a documentarian coaxing poignant moments from unexpected places. This blog has evolved from those moments.
The small Pond FIELD GUIDE is part diary, part sketchbook, and part wish list – an archive of ordinary wonders. For years, this space has housed my stories – creative ideas, vintage inspiration, our forays into curious places, and the simple artifacts of quiet of conscious living. Through watercolor, photography, and illustrated tales, these pages uncover the blessing of ordinary days and the wonder found in authentic places and pursuits.
I invite you to open the boxes.
Peek into the drawers.
Rustle through the pages.
I’m honored to have you here.
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Phone: 662.312.4001
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