How My Cornucopia Year is Going
I mentioned in my last post that one way I’m framing 2023—my cornucopia year—for myself is with quarterly guides on how to celebrate different facets of abundance. Q3 for me, this year, is about celebrating abundance of time and space.
It’s heading into muggy summer heat season where I live, and I’m heading toward my annual August retreat from the internet where I do little else but read for three weeks. Summers are typically when I have less energy for activity, when I want to nap more, when I want to constantly have a fan blowing on me and an iced beverage to drink. Summer is my slowing down season, when my energy naturally lies fallow before gearing back up in the fall.
With that as my current mindset, I want to take a moment here at the midpoint of the year to reflect on and celebrate some of my achievements in the first half of the year gone by.
I built community
Leaning into communality and collaboration is one way I’ve been intentionally courting this year, and I love the way that’s come into play since January.
I started CARE, which was a dream I built out of conversations with many other creatives who were enjoying working for themselves but missing the community of working with others. This is a space I’ve crafted to offer that community, and I’ve loved getting to know and learn from this group of people I admire. Several of them were total strangers to me before joining this community. Several of them were people whose work I’d fangirled over from afar for years. This first cohort is wrapping up in August, and I’ll be retooling and reshaping it a bit before the next cohort opens for enrollment. Look for that announcement coming this fall.
I joined the Lifestyle Business League. Amelia and Taylor have made an online space for people who are running their own businesses with heart and morality and thoughtfulness. It’s been a warm and welcoming space to share tips and meet other folks with complementary skill sets. I love the variety of belonging to communities both as a facilitator and a member, and it’s offered great conversation, business tips, and skill sharing. If you’re also interested in joining, you can do it at this affiliate link for $25 off your membership.
I led a FieldTrip for Creative Mornings. After literal years of enjoying the array of free, online tastes of various skill sets (email marketing? LinkedIn profile optimization? Human Design? poetry writing? mindful walking? manifesto writing? All things I’ve learned from CM FieldTrips) I led my own. Looking back on it now, that doesn’t feel so big, but I remember my anxiety in the process of planning for it. Funny how things that loom so enormously in front of us can seem so easily accomplished in the rearview mirror.
I set up a Bookshop.org affiliate shop. One of my favorite side effects of being omnivorously curious and a voracious reader is that I often find myself recommending resources to people. My Bookshop page is a centralized spot where people can buy many of the books, card decks, and other tools I recommend. If you’re not aware of Bookshop.org, it’s an independently run alternative to Amazon, where you can designate your favorite indie bookstore to receive a percentage of all your purchases. If you don’t designate a specific indie, that percentage gets put into a central pool of money that’s distributed to the participating bookstores. If you buy any of these things from my shop, I also get a small percentage of the sale, which helps me stay in business and able to share all those recs with you.
I diversified my portfolio
A recent thread of Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study Substack asked people to talk about pivots: the moments in their lives where they’ve made big change. I chimed in, referring to this period of my life as my Ball Bearing Era (I like to think I pivot a little more smoothly than this panda, but sometimes not so much): all pivots, all the time. Since 2020, I’ve stepped away from full-time work for a single organization and moved into developing my own independent work. The journey of exploring what I want that work to look like led me to a late 2021 realization that what I wanted was a portfolio career, where I have the opportunity to do many kinds of work that have room for the many parts of my skill set. The start of 2023 has included developing that portfolio.
My top line is that I’m here to help make change in the arts and culture sphere. I’m doing that in two main ways: offering my own change-making opportunities for folks & working with institutionally-affiliated colleagues to help change their orgs. I expanded both sides of that equation in the first half of 2023.
I offered my first full-day retreat, Work/Life, a day of helping people think about what they want work to look like in their lives and how they want to approach their next steps. I’m planning to offer variations on this retreat in various locations throughout the year(s), so if you’d like to come, make sure to sign up for my mailing list. And if you know of a space near you that would be cool for a retreat day, I’d love to hear about it.
I facilitated a retreat for the Smith College Museum of Art education team, where we found guidance from artwork in the New Britain Museum of American Art galleries, and the educators clarified the strengths and values they bring to their work. I love facilitating, and I’d love to do more of it with lots of different clients.
One participant said:
Working with Rachel felt like time with a museum education kindred spirit! She utilized her amazing skills… to craft a meaningful, experiential and fun retreat for our department… Rachel managed our workshop beautifully in response to what was bubbling up for people during the day. We accomplished quite a bit in the time that we had. She connects well with people by establishing a solid rapport and trust and encourages and validates participation by all. The day felt fruitful and collaborative with her able guidance.
Inside museums, I added some new staff training clients to my roster. The talented folks at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and the First Americans Museum brought me out to Oklahoma to work with their docents. And I’m continuing to work with the MFABoston, as they revamp their drop-in public tours from the ground up with a focus on belonging, inquiry, and minimizing bias.
There’s also been a little bilingual teaching in this first half of the year! I’m a devoted traveler, and I would love to be able to spend chunks of time in other countries around the world. Building international relationships that—apart from offering friendship—may encompass work gigs and collaborations is very much on my list of dreams. So I was happy to be invited to talk about my work with graduate curatorial students at the Institut National du Patrimoine via Zoom. This is one of those times where I accepted a lower fee than I normally would for the alternate benefit of building new relationships. And giving it in French? Well, my French is rusty so I scripted myself a bit more than I normally would, but it was great! A good challenge to keep those wheels of my brain turning.
I celebrated growth in my business finances and logistics
In a recent mid-year gathering of the aforementioned Lifestyle Business League, we were talking about what we’re celebrating in our businesses here at the middle of 2023. Rather than one particular thing, I wanted to celebrate the feeling that I have a “real” business going now, and it’s been several key things in the past six months that have helped me feel this way.
My abundance cue for Q1 was to celebrate financial abundance, and I’m happy to know that in the first six months of this year I’ve made more than double the amount of money I made in all of 2022. Honest caveat: that’s still not enough to be a fully stable income replacement for my last full-time job, and that’s a hard pill to keep swallowing. But I am on my way.
I’ve set up a separate bank account for my business (if anyone else is looking for one, I’m really happy with Novo, and if you set up an account using my referral link, we both get $40). While I’m not yet paying myself a proper salary out of it, it’s let me keep better track of my expenditures and feel good about the fact that my income is more than covering the current costs of running my business.
Notion became my friend this year. It’s the first project management tool I’ve found satisfying as a way to centrally organize all my ideas for many different projects. I like organization and color-coded bulleted lists, and I also like having access to more free-form catchall spaces to keep the variety of… notions (see what I did there???) that pop into my head. Notion is working really well as a combination of both those sides of my work style.
I balanced my work with other joys
One of my major motivators right now is to have a life that balances meaningful work with the outside-of-work adventurous experiences that bring me just as much—if not more—meaning. The first half of 2023 has brought me plenty of those adventures, too.
I started taking regular barre classes. After a lifetime of dancing but without a local, in-person class that I’m currently taking, I’ve been missing the physical satisfaction of putting on the appropriate exercise clothing, going to the studio, and working myself into a sweaty, elevated-heart-rate puddle. I’ve also been wrestling with how to keep on dancing as I get older and my body doesn’t want to keep on doing the same things I’ve always asked of it. Barre has helped me. I’ve actually been able to do full splits for the first time in my life. My muscles feel strong. And I’m definitely a happy, sweaty, jelly-legged puddle as I come out of the studio each week.
I got to take advantage of a Wellesley alum perk that I never thought I’d be in position to do: I audited a college class this spring semester. For four months, I read the major works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and went back to my alma mater twice a week to sit in on discussions with very smart current Wellesley students. I’ve found that telling people about this tends to elicit one of two reactions: Why would you ever want to do that?! or Oh my god, I’m so jealous! To the first kind of people, I say that this is what it means to be omnivorously curious and to seek out opportunities for learning that is its own reward. To the second kind of people, I say, yeah, it was just as much of a treat as you’re thinking!
Speaking of Wellesley, this was also my 20th reunion year, which meant that after spending the spring semester auditing, I headed back to campus to live in the dorms again for a weekend and be immersed in reconnecting with college friends. I talked about this in my last blog post, but it was certainly one of the ways my Q2 cue to celebrate abundance in relationships was born out.
I traveled, which is always a great source of joy to me. I saw old friends and old places, met new friends in new places, and not only did the Rome and Vienna trip I wrote about in my last post, but also made it back to New York City a few times to visit the people and places I miss about being there. I’m very happy to not be living in the hustle bustle stress of NYC anymore, and it was also lovely to go for museum openings where I ran into so many wonderful art world colleagues, for dance classes in person, for theater-going, for brunches, for strolling and shopping and generally being surrounded by a vibrant variety of people and cultures.
A photo of me and Annette Hexelschneider, two alums of Mapping Your Path, who met for the first time in Vienna.
Photo of me by Liz Ligon from the opening of the New Museum’s Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined, that ended up in a New Museum email and on their website and was then sent to me by several friends.
And that’s where the middle of the year finds me.
I pulled a tarot card focusing on the question How have I turned toward and fostered abundance this year? and came up with the Five of Cups.
The Cups are the emotion suit, and Fives are about upsetting the stability of the preceding Fours. Part of what I love about my Sefirot deck is that the minor arcana aren’t images of people. Often, the Five of Cups (a card that often depicts a person looking at three spilled cups instead of the two full ones behind them) is about focusing on disappointment and missing opportunity in the face of a big transition. Instead, I’m looking at it as an acknowledgment of moving on to what’s coming next. I’m forgiving myself for the time that it’s taking to move on ahead. I’m embracing the difficult emotions that have been brewing and spilling out in my Ball Bearing Era, and in this first half of 2023, I’m transitioning to something new. An unknown, not-always-stable something new, but a something new that wouldn’t exist without learning about how I’ve handled instability and challenge.
Interestingly, when I pulled a second card focusing on the question How can I turn toward and foster abundance in the rest of the year? I got the Seven of Cups.
2023: a year for me to focus on emotions as I think about abundance. The Seven of Cups is about making choices and not letting your imagination run away with you. Opportunities are before you, but don’t allow yourself to be distracted into trying to pursue all of them. In Tarot for Change, Jessica Dore makes this suggestion:
If you pull this card, why not take whatever you’re consulting the cards about and come up with an alternative ending where the best possible thing happens, instead of the worst. Instead of imagining an outcome you don’t like, substitute it for one that involves grace, compassion, and power.
I’m taking this card in that spirit, as my reminder for the coming second half of the year. As more work and life opportunities come my way, I will decide and move toward them without letting myself catastrophize or second-guess my decisions (both things I’m quite prone to).
Here’s to an abundant and decisive rest of 2023 for us all!
Creative Prompt Coda: If you’re stuck on something (a decision, a task, an idea), change the environment where you’re working on it. See how that helps you make progress.
