Journaling Nature Folklore Course part 1
or ‘Journaling Through The Seasons With Nature Folklore’.
Many thank yous to some people who asked me to put a ‘course together.
I invite you to consider joining my ‘course’. Here is the introduction, in two parts …
What I am creating is a guided course of using ‘prompts’. I find that the word ‘prompts’ is a great word to describe what was the earliest form of language used by humans. Personally, I find that using ‘prompts’ is a wonderful encouragement to sense and live the realms of nature folklore within our day to day living?
The running theme of this ‘Journaling Nature Folklore’ course is to ‘apprentice’ recognising and following ‘prompts’ for imagining, dreaming, organising, and problem solving? Packaging this all together, I believe this course is about being confident about being more visionary.
Through each season, through the four seasons of each solar cycle year, I recommend and guide ‘prompts’ to invite ‘nature folklore explorers’ to discover and use to serve more vision and ideas. This can add amazing clarity for making decisions and seeing a way through challenges and problems, related to whatever season we are in. This is also a fascinating journey of ‘wonder’ to participate in.
You may well have your own set of tools, prompts, and ways of doing what I offer through this course. But, if so, I also believe you will also discover new and inspiring ways to approach your craft, whatever that may be. And, selfishly, I will enjoy experiencing what you can add to the ‘mix’ too.
I now realise that I have thrived well when I have allowed prompting triggers from the realms of ‘nature folklore’ to guide my own living. By doing so I do feel that I enjoy a better pace of living, with many happy moments, no matter how challenging circumstances become.
There have been times, during my younger years, when I allowed myself to drift away from living with that connection, and they were not happy times at all.
I can see the unfortunate potential of people getting into similar unhappy times, these days, as more people appear to not be able to live without their phones and computers turned on.
Especially walking through life with phones constantly in our faces. While driving, how many of us need to brake or swerve around people stepping into the road with their phones in their faces?
Now we have the encouraging growing popularity of using new AI services as our life’s ‘answer machine’. Could these AI services distract us to make our disconnections wider? All I can see from the abundant use of AI are slow penetrating side effects of feeling more isolation, melancholy, anxiety from surroundings, and painful depression too. Many people respond to me with, “learn to live with it!”. Not at the expense of more disconnection from nature flow, I will not.
But let's see what we can do to avoid most, or all, of that clouding our lives?
My ‘Journaling Nature Folklore Course’ is based on a practice of personal translation of ‘prompts’, recording them into your journal, and then letting your journal inspire, and provide more vision. One lovely outcome of this can be extra clarity through our decisions and actions, with more confidence’.
I’ll tell my story background to my before I reveal my amazing pricing
… or shall I do pricing first? Yes, I will go off of the regular marketing rails, and straight to pricing first!
Are you like me, with your reaction to long ‘sales letters’? Before I bother to read them I quickly scroll down to try and find out the price of the offer before I invest my time in reading the rest? I will save you from that torture now. My ‘Journaling Nature Folklore Course’ is currently €30.
I will refrain from a long sales pitch of why that is terrific value . But for some people, there’s nothing to pay for now, so I had better explain that.
To distribute my ‘Journaling Nature Folklore’ course I looked at several course management and distribution platforms and services … then realised I was already within another ‘elephant in the room’ situation.
I have been thoroughly enjoying using Substack as a platform to archive my articles while also distributing them publicly.
I have two tiers set up for people who subscribe to my work on Substack.
One is a free subscription tier where you leave your email address and we keep in contact through articles I that I post, and discussions that follow the articles. We can do all of this on Substack without any social media style algorithms stalking and haunting us.
The other subscription tier is what I call the ‘sponsor tier’. For this tier you can choose to subscribe at €5 a month, or what this is in your currency, or you can choose the heavily discounted €30 a year subscription.
It is choosing that €30 a year subscription that gets you invited onto my ‘Journaling Nature Folklore Course’, with no additional cost.
You can easily cancel at any time, but if and when you do cancel you still get the rest of the outstanding annual subscription. It will just not renew next time. Of course, I hope you stay on and learn more.
So, if you are already an annual subscriber to my Substack content, as many people already are, you are already covered, with no extra charge. I will invite you to my course, and it will be included in your subscription for a while.
So, with the budgeting information out of the way, I will get one with my story and why I have opened up my experiences to invite people onto my course.
It seems that not a week goes by without people asking ‘when are you going to write your biography or memoirs book?’ Without knowing it, I was being placed by other people into another ‘elephant in the room’ situation. So what do I mean by that?
Throughout my life, since childhood, and that’s over 65 years now, I have set up events that involve people gathering in loose circles out among trees and by water, and each event usually includes a shared picnic. Through these events participants feel comfortable to share their ideas, vision, feelings, passions, observations and humour. They share this through their stories and poems, and sometimes songs.
Two recent activities that I have facilitated in recent years, that have included all of this, and have brought a lot of joy, are ‘Bards In The Woods’, and ‘Sunday Sessions at Carrowcrory Cottage and Tree Labyrinth’.
I love it when people journal random inspirations, and then share and express what they journal.
One of my favourite Bard In The Wood ‘readings’ was when a woman pulled a shopping list out of her purse and read that. With each item on that list she had a different facial expression and voice tone. She was truly inviting us into how each item on her list was connected to her. Some items on her list brought up memories, some items were of trusted habits, some items were of duty that she did not really like handling, and of course there were a couple of special personal treats.
It took me a while to identify what was happening at these events. Recently I recognised that an ‘organic process’, for lack of a better description, actually happened at these events. It was lovely for Claire and myself to receive thank you letters and testimonials from people describing how their lives had changed into happier projects and actions due to ‘prompts’ and visionary experiences they enjoyed when we met up together.
I know this sounds cliche, but it seems many people do love to follow three point title ‘programs’ , as this practice is very memorable.
The ‘three points’ I am referring to, for this course, are
Prompts
Journaling
Action
This ‘trinity’ approach wonderfully manifests a process for
revealing visions and ideas from ‘prompts’,
that are wonderful to record in a ‘journal’ format;
and our journals become our maps for ‘action’.
Through interpreting and adapting this ‘trinity’ into our lifestyle habits, it seems that we can seamlessly move into creativity, focused negotiations, and problem solving with much less stress, and carry more personal confidence while we are doing so too.
Through this ‘Journaling Nature Folklore Course’ I share what I have discovered and what I have learned and applied that returned to me a feeling of being more wholesome as well as comfortably connecting with what I may have missed, otherwise. To use a well known slogan, following my course brings on many more ‘stop and smell the roses’ experiences.
My ‘Journaling Nature Folklore Course’ is not a course where I learned from some book reading and assignments, then earned a diploma … and then feeling qualified enough to move on and teach you.
With my ‘Journaling Nature Folklore Course’ I will not be asking you to read books and do scholarly assignments. But I do not dismiss books. I will suggest a few books as books are one of the tools we can use, but they will not be essential reading. Certainly books are not as essential as your personal re-crafting of recognising through using ‘prompts’.
‘Prompts’ are the anchor foundation of this course.
During Part two of my introduction to ‘Journaling Nature Folklore’, I will enter more into the course contents and a very potent resource we will explore for our ‘prompts’.
Meanwhile, you may like to get subscribed now … this button below will do that for you. It's the €30 annual subscription you need to click.
Then I will contact you personally, to help you start with the ‘Journaling Nature Folklore’ elements …
This is a great idea, John! 💕 I love how you are working the pricing in with the subscription.