Since June, I’ve been a part of a special group called “9 Squares.” It began with nine of us, ranging from different types of career and cultural backgrounds. We meet monthly, and as the name suggests, we each share 9 images that represent and summarize our month. It started as a summer experiment to build community outside of the main social media platforms. But pretty soon, we collectively sensed the value of this group and continued to meet monthly. It’s personally been a wonderful way to reflect on each month while sharing the more intimate aspects of our lives and emotions in a real, unedited, raw way through unedited and uncaptioned images.

Storytelling through images alone is powerful. It reminds me of the early days of Instagram, where you could immediately sense so much about a person without knowing them IRL merely by observing how they saw and interpreted the world through shapes, colors and symbols.

December has been my “Month of New.” It was an intentional theme to inject my life with more novelty and jumpstart an energetic and creative reset before January.

So far, I’ve booked get aways and spent time in new cities, explored tide pools with old friends (while celebrating new chapters of our lives), found new books in used bookstores (which happen to be my favorite), and tried out new coffee shops and trails. I ate dinner while watching the sunset from a old wooden log with my feet in the sand and found new angles to capture the waves next to fellow photographers. I deliberately chose fiction books from the lending library on the neighborhood corner, and fell back in love with spending hours in the evening making my way through fantasy books. I’m learning there can be novelty and feelings of ‘newness’ within the tried and true parts of my life that I cherish- deep connections, nature, quaint coffee shops, trails, and books.

There is something oddly comforting about knowing there is so much more to discover in life, as long as we continue to stay open and receptive.