Welcome to the landing page for the 2025 imPerfect Studio Art Calendar.

As I thought about what we'll need for this year, I realized I wanted to chart a course for myself to swim through the year with as much grace, direction, and purpose as possible. Each month, I'll post three open-ended invitations:

• An inspirational piece of text to Read
• An activist action to Do
• And a prompt for Self-Care

I'll share mine along the way, and I'll also leave the previous months up so you can always scroll back through if you'd like. I think we'll need these three things together more than ever, and I would love to hear how any of these go for you! 

xo Natalie

 

FEBRUARY 2025 

Read (an inspiring piece of text)

My daily routine lately includes finding as many things as possible that are NOT social media to spend my time on. I've been reading a lot more, trying to fill my daily painting background with audiobooks, and also sending as many hopeful nuggets back and forth to my dearests. This piece Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times really spoke to me. It reminded me of all of our preparation for this time, how we are truly the hearts and minds and fists needed to face the new challenging and chaotic reality. I found a lot of comfort in Clarissa Pinkola Estes' words, and I hope you will too.

Here's an excerpt I loved -- let me know if you read the whole thing and print it for your wall like I did <3  

 

Do (an activist action) 

In January I shared how to find your representatives' phone numbers and save them as Favorites -- scroll down if you still need to do that! We're now three weeks into the new Presidency and seeing all kinds of daily chaos and horrors -- and also that OUR VOICES MATTER. One of the new regime's tactics is to create the feeling of chaos and confusion, churn up the public, distract and then get something else done. We're seeing evidence again and again that when voices are heard LOUDLY, the efforts back down or lessen. Calling your representatives daily is the single greatest impact you can be making right now -- and then you can go right back to focusing on your local people and self-preserving. 

I really appreciated this full carousel from @emilyinyourphone. She gives background context from her own experience of how important daily, personalized phone calls are. When you call, you're talking to a junior staff member who is taking very literal and definitive yes/no type action items and then reporting those daily in a summary to the representative. Your action here couldn't be more important!  Introverts, time to rise up, and get on those phones -- this whole routine could take you less than 10 minutes per day. I'm on it for February, using that EYP method linked above. Please join me! 

 

Care (self-care)

If you're SOMA local, please join me on February 28 at this workshop: Welcoming Pleasure: Harnessing an Abundance Mindset. Hosted by two of the wisest, bravest, boldest women I know (hi, Angie & Logan!!), I'm so excited for this beautiful evening of candid conversation and community. We all slip into the traps of scarcity mindsets, and time with Angie and Logan never fails to remind me that abundance thinking is everything. "Abundance" is the exact framework we need for this heavy moment in time -- instead of thinking "woe is us" we can approach with creativity, calm, and courage to turn it into: "WHOA Is us!" (for a little pun :P) and together create the next right things to do to care for ourselves, those we love, and the world at large. 

I promise you'll leave the Abundance Mindset workshop with your brain buzzing with new ideas, possibilities, connections, and also some inspiration for how this leads to your own self-connection and pleasure, too. Let me know if you'd like to join and I can help you get a discount code! 

 

That's it for February, friends. 

xo Natalie 

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JANUARY 2025

Read (an inspiring piece of text)

This month, I'm reading Rachel Cargle's new memoir, A Renaissance of our Own. I've loved Rachel's activism work for years and am looking forward to learning more from her own personal story. She opens the memoir with a 2-page "Manifesto" that's inspiring to me in thinking about approaching this new start to an uncertain year -- I hope you'll read it and find your own resonance here, too.  Purchase your own copy from her self-founded bookstore here! 

 

  

 

 

 

Do (an activist action) 

We will need to use our voices more than ever in 2025. Start off the year by finding out exactly whose voices represent you! On January 21 or later, click over to Common Cause's page here to enter your home address and find out your current & new local, state, and federal representatives. I save their phone numbers in my phone contacts under Favorites so it's easy to make calls to their offices throughout the year!

So, I invite you to find your representatives, too, and save them as Favorite contacts alongside your partner, kids' schools, doctors, etc. You can also share those contacts easily to local friends, too, to spread the contact information even more quickly. We will need to reach out to them just as much next year!  

Care (self-care)

One of the most meaningful ways I practice my own self-care is by tending to the voice(s) inside my own head. I spend so much time with them, it's important to me that I'm taking active care and control of how they're speaking to me!  At the start of each year, I like to choose an image or phrase that feels particularly grounding to me for the year to come. 

Last year -- "Steady & Gentle" were the words ringing in my ears, and I was sketching & painting a lot of seeds, roots, and underground growth. (They ended up looking a little sperm-y, haha, so I didn't do much with them but that process and thinking still mattered!) That mantra really helped me walk through 2024 with more grace and surety than I might have otherwise, and so I know in January I'll repeat this process and choose something that's feeling right for how to shape my 2025. I was extra proud to receive a voice memo from a friend last month who I hadn't seen for a few years, and after we caught up, she left me a message praising the ways she's seen me grow and move differently this year -- it felt like the universe reminding me I am changing and improving and learning all the time, and was so, so nice to hear that recognition from someone who's known me for a long time but not seen me recently.

So -- for January self-care, I invite you to think of your own grounding phrase or image and somehow put it somewhere you can refer back to. Once you make your mantra, share it with someone safe and ask them to help you with it this year, too. I'll share mine once I decide it in January!