Creoinfluensis

Each January, at the dawn of the new year, I choose a word to be my theme for the next twelve moons. I try and reflect often upon this word and bring it to being in my daily life. As my time has been piled high these past months, filled with new sights and experiences and people in the first semester of my masters, the year came sliding to an end and I’d yet to think of any theme.

Yet this break, while rather busy, thankfully provided me with a few moments to reflect. Something that’s been on my mind for months (though really, for my whole life) is the something that lies beneath. I’ve spent years caught up in the trials of academia, spending hours formatting essays and taking painstaking notes, and I’ve just started another year of this. Even in high school, it was beginning, I was getting roped into to the modern life humanity has constructed. My interests in happiness, in creating change and bringing people together would fall with the rising tide of schoolwork and other daily necessary tasks.

It is easy to get caught in this tidal wave. I feel it particularly in academia, my thoughts on which I will perhaps untangle in a post soon. A sort of dissatisfaction has been creeping in on me for awhile now – have I done anything truly meaningful? I’ve crossed little hurdles, small personal goals that I set for myself. I’ve poured myself into these things that amount to little more than words on my CV. I’d forgotten my plans, schemes, hopes, tentative dreams—plots that were born within me only a few years after I rose from the earth. I suppose I thought I’d get to them eventually, I am young after all. But I know, I must know, that the present is the only time in which to make change. I cannot wait for some foggy, unknown future date when I’ll suddenly have all the time and energy to start creating, to release these thoughts into the world.

I must start now. That is why my word for the year is creoinfluensis. There was no word to describe exactly what I wanted my theme to be, so I created one, drawing on latin roots. Creoinfluensis is the process of transforming one’s creative energy and thoughts into visible or tangible entities with the intention of impacting the lives of others. It is my hope, in this year, to resurface my childhood wonder, my righteous indignation against the constructions of our modern age, my love of writing and hopeful faith in my abilities. I turn to you, Goddess, and humbly request your blessing for this year, hopefully the first of many where I can, in the smallest of ways, help people to find happiness and reconnect with the fundamental cravings of humanity that lie outside of time.