Up: [[Intentions]] Created: 2026-04-23 I’ve made vision boards in the past, but am generally not a huge fan. I don’t like cluttered collages, which vision boards so often are. And they are a bandwagon art activity, promoted by coaches and self-help bloggers every January as the way to bring what you want into the world. Just glue an image of a desired state on to your board, gaze at it, meditate on it and, over the months, watch it appear! I’m not quite as doubtful of the power of vision boards as that last sentence suggested. I have had the experience of making a vision board many years ago, coming across it a year or two later, and being amazed by the way the board was describing the realities of my life for things that earlier had just been desires. I just object to the hoopla surrounding these boards. For example, my friend Joanne, who had wanted to make these boards on our retreat after hearing them extolled on an astrology site she follows, told me that the site was recommending first burning a list of anything you no longer wanted in your life, and then mixing the ashes with the glue you use on your vision board. Spare me the theatrics! Joanne wholeheartedly agreed with ignoring some of the more woo-woo suggestions and we spent time on the first full day of our spring retreat making boards. Mine actually took most of the day, and that didn’t include the many hours over several days spent collecting images from my very extensive stash. Yesterday, I used the constraints of paper size and my desire for a clean aesthetic to make a piece that maybe shouldn’t even be called a vision board. It is how I want to see myself in five years time, but it is also who I am and who I can be *right now*, if only I would choose to embrace that. That’s the choice I want to make when we leave this retreat. I want to more consistently live what this board represents to me. So let me describe what it represents. ![[Vision Board 2026-04-22.webp|600]] The most important piece on the board, the one that I placed first and that my eye goes to every time, isn’t the divine child made of light, but the older woman, the artist beside the child. I love the openness and the ease that I see in her. This is a woman who is friendly, curious, fully alive. She is wearing casual, relaxed and colourful clothing, and she is holding a hand thrown pottery mug, a piece of art. This is the woman I wish to be. She represents my central value of [[Inner Harmony]] with its corresponding core feeling of Ease. And yes, the divine child beside her is within her — playful, vulnerable, instinctual, and curious. Everything else on the board probably looks quite cluttered to others, but it is very simple to me because it all supportive of the woman and child, and of inner harmony as the “first among equals” core value. The other two values are to Savour the Mystery with the feeling being delight, enchantment and curiosity, and to Express Myself with engagement and joy. All three of those values and corresponding feelings directly mirror [[Mary Oliver's Poem]] by which I live.