Please note: When this posts, I will be away helping with a Women’s Wilderness Vigil with The School of Lost Borders. Please be patient with my response to this newsletter, and I look forward to getting in touch when I’m back around.
If you’re interested in The Art of Rest’s upcoming workshops:
Missoula Community Grief Ritual - Saturday November 22, 2025 from 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM at The Aspen Grove Wellness Center - In the style of Joanna Macy
Mythopoetic Mapping: Locating Ourself Through Myth, Story, & Folklore - Sunday December 14, 2025 from 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM - We’ll be exploring the Norwegian tale of Tatterhood <3
Half-Day Winter Solstice Retreat — Sunday December 21, 2025 from 12:00 PM - 5 PM - We’ll be exploring cycles of the year and celebrating skillful means of heading into the depths of winter. —More details coming soon
16-Week Winter Experiential Book Club: Women Who Run With the Wolves at Sacred Ally — Runs every Sunday starting January 4, 2026 - April 19, 2026 - This is my favorite, and most popular offering of the year. Hope to see you there!
Ahhh, Hello Friends.
Here we are on another Wednesday morning. Hopefully you’re moving through your week with some grit, some grace, and perhaps even something silly and surprising. A good surprise, we hope, of course.
Today, we’ll be touching into an art practice to help us reflect on 2025. To savor the moments that stood out to us. To notice where we’ve been on our journey, so we can thoughtfully point towards what’s next. And hopefully, to take those steps with a sense of trust, even if we can’t see where our foot is landing quite yet.
All Good Things Take Time
What makes a trope like this so annoying, is the clear-cutting truth of it.
As we’re getting closer and closer to the end of the year, I’ve been reminding myself that lasting change happens at a glacial pace. Like, geologic time-frames. Like, trees-turning-into-unrefined-oil, type-speed. That all of the ways I wish I could snap my fingers and make my life “better” sometimes, it’s always just a silver-bullet wish.
That everything worth moving towards, takes time.
Takes effort.
Sometimes…just takes.
I don’t say this disparagingly. It’s just the truth of behavior change. Of the speed of the natural world. And of progress. It’s all quite slow.
Sometimes, we as humans forget that this slowness is a gift. And by humans, I most definitely mean me. I’m not calling anyone out here without calling myself out, also—as as much as I have worked to enjoy slowness’s gift—slowness is hard for me, too.
The great news about slowness, however, is that we can harness this speed and remember we’re not in a rush to get anywhere new. That we can take our time to reflect on what went well this year so that next year we can trend towards something better.
One of my dearest, sweetest friends Corinne, has been one of my idols of right-timing. Her trust in the speed of nature grounds me when I’m flying out into space for the 14th time again this month. During the day, you can often find Corinne in a garden somewhere, loving the plants into their fullest life in, all in their own perfect timing. She’s not staring at a cucumber intensely, trying to force it to get bigger or yelling at a squash for still being small and green. She has an ease with the magic of dirt into something delicious. As night falls, Corinne is also known to let the crushed velvet-y cape of darkness swirl around her home while she leaves the overhead lighting off, using the simplicity of an oil lamp instead to shift around her space until her bed calls her in for the evening1.
Although she might fight me on this one, Corinne often feels, to me, like patience incarnate. I trust her sense of timing, and her intuitive nature around it helps me identify, remember, and anchor into my own.
And as if she could somehow know what I’ve been working on for content creation for the remainder of 2025, her timing could not have been better. This past week, Corinne sent me a poem that lit up such a sweetness inside of me, that it inspired me to create an art-practice from it.
A Reflective Art Practice —A Place Poem
Step 1 - Carve Out Some Time
It can be as short as ten minutes, or you can make an entire self-care evening around it, but find some time in your day where you can think about every impactful place you’ve been this year.
Step 2 - Gather Your Artifacts
Maybe you scroll through all of the photos on your phone. Maybe you flip through the pages of your journal. Maybe you go on a walk that you love and sit among the trees while you simply remember every impactful place you’ve been. There’s no wrong way to comb through this. Trust what feels intuitive.
Step 3 - List Them Out In No Particular Order
Write them as they come. Don’t give any explanations. Don’t label them as good or bad, just trust what wants to be written down as a landmark from the year.
Step 4 - The Final, Shiny Bow
Rearrange the names of the places or leave them as they naturally came out. Lastly, but not least-ly, pop a title on that bad boi. Let it be unconventional.
Place it Somewhere Seen
The covert step five would be to place this poem somewhere where it can be seen. Whether you share it with a friend, or put it on your bathroom mirror, make sure that this beautiful piece of art gets to be witnessed. Sharing the things we create is part of what makes art so impactful to our brains, bodies, and sense of self. With an art practice like this—mixing something reflective, with the act of creating something new—is likely to help us find an added layer of meaning, gratitude, savoring, connection, and wisdom.
It is likely to help us see a peek of insight that might not come out in a traditional therapy session, some journaling about our year, or talking to a friend about “how our year went.”
The unlikely, surprising things that sneak into our art on accident often give us a sense of awe, which in turn, create new pathways in our brain. I don’t know about you—but when I’m looking at the year ahead, I could always use a new brain pathway or two.
Next week, we’ll be sharing some more traditional journaling/art-prompt questions to be slightly more literal about reflecting on our year, just because it’s always good to have a bit of wisdom from every way of knowing.
But in the meantime, let this inspire you. Let this surprise you. Keep this close.
I hope you have a beautiful rest of your Wednesday and I’d love to see where your Place Poem took you, if you feel like sharing.
With love,
And stranger places than I anticipated,
Dagny Rose
PS. — Please enjoy Corinne’s original place poem that lit my heart and brain on fire this week.
places (in no particular order). — Corinne La Bella
Goblin Colony
Cochiti Lake Campground
Earth’s Moon
Walmart
The Arroyo
Manhattan
Belt of Venus
Your Threshold
Manzanita Market
McDonald’s Bathroom
The West Shield
Kim’s House
Zoom
The First Kiosk
Turtle Island
6595 Sahchu Ln
Eve’s Garden
The Altar
My Silk-Lined Heart
Cities of Gold Casino
Good Vibe Farms
The Field
Rio Grande Gorge
Aphrodite’s Secret Swim Spot
Sandia Mountains
Juniper Heartwood
Stripes Burrito Co.
The Milky Way
Albuquerque Sunport
The Karman Line
Home
This sub-section of The Art of Rest, is all about—you guessed it—The Art!
Here we explore the creative practices that bring vitality into our lives. Whether we are creating for the pure joy of it, finding ways to have our art help make our lives better, or intentionally honing in on our creative practices, “The Art” is going to regularly touch into our creative pulse5.
Which as a sleep-health professional—I could not recommend more for good night-time sleep hygiene!