My Substack anniversary
Two years of sharing nature, creativity and wellbeing
Hello, I’m Rachel. I write about nature and creativity to encourage connection and wellbeing. This post celebrates my substack anniversary and what I’m planning this year. To read more - go to my homepage.
So, here I am - two years and 65 posts on from my first words.
And I’m proud to have sustained that. I’m proud that despite all that life has thrown at me, meaning there have been a few periods of silence, I’ve still kept going.
It reminded me I love writing, I like forming my thoughts into sentences and setting them down on the page. More than that, I like sharing them and that’s where Substack has helped - by providing a platform and community for writers and readers to find each other more easily. I may not be earning yet from it but I hope it’s a starting point for building my new little career. Writing, like I am now from the sofa, is the most flexible activity that works best for my health so one of my aims is to branch out from just writing here to other paid work such as magazine articles or similar. Maybe mini zines or books combining nature and art? Guides on how to notice nature? What do you think?
As well as putting my words out, it’s the community aspect I like. Most readers get my posts via their email so the fact you have chosen to have me there is an honour. That people leave comments and share my words is even more special. Recently a few joined in with the 12 days of nature photos project and the chat thread became a lovely place where we shared our noticings. It became a journey around the world, of different weathers, different landscapes, and a little view into people’s days. For someone who is at home alone a lot, it brought a sense of community and connection - which is one part of my guiding word(s) for the year. It meant I could encourage and help people, we helped identify what people had seen, shared common moments of wonder and I loved that it sparked people into their own research rabbit holes.
Your comments remind me there is an audience and interest in what I am doing sharing my love of nature, of creativity. To help open up the outdoors and nature to all.
Looking back at my early posts, much is still the same. I’m still sharing my nature noticings, how nature inspires my art, and how I create in/with it. I occasionally still share nature books I’ve loved (would people like me to do more of this again?). I’m still giving little nudges to help people get outdoors or bring some creativity into their day. I just don’t combine it all into the same post, enabling more depth.
What changed this year is how much of me is in the essays. While I’ve always talked a little about what brought me here, about living with a chronic illness, and how nature and creativity help, this year there was a shift.
This time last year, I was a ghost of myself. All the nature in the world couldn’t help at first, though it was part of the toolkit. I wrote about it more in this post when I finally returned to writing seven months later. My life has changed and I’m still processing it all.
I hadn’t intended to shift how I wrote, but so often big changes bring about unexpected things. Taking part in
’s Summer Writing Sanctuary meant I wrote more personal, memoir style pieces and decided to share them. The lovely feedback gave me the confidence that sharing my experience and feelings was ok and that others wanted to read it - it resonated with them.
So - what now? I’m still easing myself into the year. I don’t feel ready and energised enough to leap into anything new and my brain isn’t clear enough to work out new plans. And that’s fine, it will come.
For now, I’ll potter along doing the same types of posts, mixing up nature noticings with one on art and then a nudge for you to get outside. There will be some deep dives into interesting things for the ‘In Praise of…’ series and ‘Marking the Seasons’ posts at the key points in the year.
What I am going to do more of is the voice notes from nature, I’m hoping to get a microphone so the wind is less of an issue! I’m also going to host a monthly noticing nature community chat where we share something that brought joy/wonder from nature that month. I think I’ll do it on the last weekend of each month so the first will be 25/26th January. I also want to write some posts about the theories and research behind nature and creativity. Is there anything you’d like to see more of? Maybe you have an idea for a deep dive?
Until next time,
I love your writing, the way you think, everything you do. The plan sounds great. Looking forward to seeing how it progresses.
Could you do a live workshop in nature for local members of the community?