April celebration postcard
“Falling back in love with life”. This is my 3rd celebratory moodle postcard (Mapambo Adornments - Edition 2024:4)
Hello! Hello! Welcome existing and new subscribers. It’s lovely to have you here.
This is Debs from Of Mappery. I write a mixture of fantasy micro fiction and real life stories, based on my hand drawn art maps
Falling back in love with life and 2024 postcards
For 2024, I have joined with Safar Fiertze and others who have created an image inspired by a Substack post they’ve read (have a read here). If you’re new here , to find out more and who else is participating, scroll to the end.
Follow The Moodle Bug as she celebrates!
Join my newly designed Moodle Bug as she once again flits around the postcard, visiting three places on the map: Someone In Real Life, Someone on Substack and Me. Each place is a chance to stop and celebrate a little, or a lot.
Celebrating: Someone In Real Life
Celebrating people I know in real life.
This month, the celebration is more general, just acknowledging all of us that keep going every day, in spite of what life throws at us. We get up, we show up and take one step at a time.
This is dedicated to my friends and family, but also to you, dear reader.
Celebrating: Someone on Substack
Celebrating reading other Substacks and engagement with other writers on Substack
This month, I’m celebrating 2 postcard participants. Both
and have set the bar for what it means to be as part of this postcard community. Safar has visited and engaged with each of the postcard member’s (and others) publications, including my own, and wrote a series of Introductions for each. After she’d rootled around in my stack for a while she commented on an old piece (A moodle on a page) which resulted in a delightful conversation about moodling (more on this further down).Renée wrote a series of odes using words she found in each member’s publications. Like Safar, this must’ve involved spending a lot of time in each looking for those words! As
commented “I think you just lifted the postcard series to a new level of creativity.”Celebrating: Myself
This final stopping point is to acknowledge something I’ve done in the past month that I want to celebrate: it might be a Substack piece I’m proud of, or something I’ve done in the offline world.
I’m celebrating that I finally got around to writing a piece for
“The Gift of Words” based on one of their 10 values of The Encouragement Manifesto. I knew I had something I wanted to say, but it took me a while to narrow down exactly what that was. Mine piece falls under the “Stay Optimistic” value.We are thrilled that Debs has focused on ‘optimism’ for her contribution to The Gift of Words* project. We all have our moments when the tunnel seems long and the light is dim. We love this recipe for positive action.
Who or what are you celebrating this month?
I was inspired to create …
This 100 word piece and map as a result of my conversation with Safar on A moodle on a page
It doesn’t start with the destination. It doesn’t even start with ticking something off a list. It doesn’t start with mindlessly doing things at breakneck speed. It doesn’t start with being a “in real life” thing.
It does start with being insatiably curious. With an intentional acceptance of slowing down, with allowing a circuitous route to unfold, with randomness taking the lead. It does start with doing it outdoors, or metaphorically on a page, through a map, in our minds. It starts with paying attention to the smallest details, with being a delight detective.
It starts by taking a moodle.
So that’s my postcard for this month. If you’ve enjoyed this, or something resonated, I’d love the hear from you, either as a reply to this email or through the Substack app.
Why “falling back in love with life”?
A phrase I’m living by this year (2024) is “falling back in love with life”, and I’m doing that in real life all sorts of delightful and joyful ways. So why not bring a little of that fun to this postcard and take more of the “pebble in the pond” approach by using it as an opportunity to celebrate others? Celebrating others is one of my life values and it’s also very much a part of the Substack culture I “mix” in, where a lot of encouragement and celebration happens every day.
Read more about “falling back in love with life” at
“The Gift of Words”Participating in 2024 postcards are:
You can support me by subscribing, restacking and sharing my stories and maps, or you can buy me a cuppa through my Buy Me a Coffee page ⬇️
What a gorgeous invitation Debs… and one I sorely needed for inspiration!
I’ve been in such a writing, no a whole creativity rut, just recently… I’m hoping it’s passing but….?
The confidence question is still not buried!
Thank you for all your encouraging letters, they always always make me smile 🙏🏽💛🍃
Oh this is such a wonderful postcard!!! Your invitation to CELEBRATE is so beautiful, so contagious, so enchanting. I read your piece and I felt that from the teeny tiny in me to the beautiful achievements of my community, to the collective awesomeness in nature, everything needs to be celebrated in a way that reminds us to REMEMBER JOY AND LOVE AND MAGIC...Thank you for this beautiful post.