An Invitation to Start Again
The Spring Sessions
In this creative course, we'll paint and pray together through this next beautiful and exciting season of life.
Whether you are eighty or eighteen, we all have an opportunity to enter into a spring season, a time of starting something new or starting something new again.
Oh, the joy of starting something new.
A new friendship.
A new hobby.
A new book.
A kitchen remodel.
A cut flower garden.
A marriage.
A new morning routine.
A new hobby.
A new book.
A kitchen remodel.
A cut flower garden.
A marriage.
A new morning routine.
A move.
A baby.
A new job.
A new career direction altogether.
A new home.
A new hobby.
A new challenge.
A new job.
A new career direction altogether.
A new home.
A new hobby.
A new challenge.
Spring is the season of starting again.
I love the season of spring. Spring feels like the actual beginning of the year. In January, everything is cold and in retreat. Life in the natural world looks dead still, or at least in a very deep sleep. It feels like a bit of a chore to gather the effort to squint my eyes and shake off the cold and figure out what the year will be like.
But when March peeps out after a gray and bleak February, it feels like the world - and life - is beginning again. With the beginning, comes the invitation to dream and plan and pray and step into new things.
Welcome to The Spring Sessions:
A new creative mini-course featuring watercolor, collage, and a bit of journaling
Are you entering a spring season of life?
Are there new things brimming all around?
Some things are obviously spring – marriage, babies, grand babies and so forth. But spring seasons can hide under long winters.
Is Anytime a Good Time for Spring?
You may be reading this during the actual season of spring.
Or maybe you're reading this in the blistering heat of August, and it is simply time to enter a spring season of your life.
There is a tug at the heart, a pull in the quiet interior of your being. An invitation to start. To plant seeds.
I know that well.
Spring brings with it a host of emotions and reactions. We love the idea of starting...usually.
But sometimes starting something or restarting is intimidating.
I've had many starts and stops with a book writing project the last few years. About two years ago, I finally left it on my hard drive and stopped writing books completely. I thought this chapter of my life was over and writing went into a season of winter, of retreat and hiddenness. Writing continued with blog posts and articles, but nothing long form.
But something started to tug on me, quietly persistent like the spring rain on the roof. I knew it was time to begin again, to walk through the uncomfortable feelings and nagging doubts and fears.
It was time to plant a new seed and start this project again. It was the spring season.
A spring season doesn't necessarily mean an entirely new thing. It may be that our next spring season is picking up something that we buried (like the book previously hidden on my hard drive). We buried that thing in cement, forgotten, dismissed. But spring comes, blowing a fresh wind, inviting us to pull out that endeavor or relationship and plant it in some good soil with water and sunlight.
There is a way to start, a way to enter spring and navigate through it that will propel us to the summer season. (And that is the goal of spring, btw, to get to the summer season).
What is The Spring Sessions?
The Spring Sessions is a two part mini-course designed to propel you into the next life-producing season of your life.
It's an invitation to start and a launch into your spring season.
How are we going to do this?
- have fun celebrating the start of a new season with an exuberantly playful painting (playing)
- put down our ideas, thoughts, hopes, and dreams on paper (playful planning)
So often, we think we must "go big or go home" or have all sorts of stuff into place.
But spring starts with seeds.
Seeds and sunlight and good soil. Basic stuff.
But put together, these basic elements create miracles.
Life happens. New growth and new flowers and beauty that artists have been striving to recreate for centuries.
The spring season is where beauty starts.
And like the basic elements required for planning seeds in a garden, we start with basic materials – accessible to all of us – to enter into spring.
The Spring Session mini course is your playground to dream and plant and plan. The goal is to create a springboard for the spring season of your life. Whatever seems fuzzy now, we want to find clarity. We begin and move to the next step. We'll use watercolor, pen and some paper and glue to create two projects.
It is not "mini" because it is small in scope. Rather, it is a mini course because I want you to get the essence of what you need without hours of content. It's two creative sessions and a bit of me talking.
And that is enough for you to plant your seed and step into the next spring season of your life.
Start painting, collaging, dreaming, playing.
$19
With Love,
Melissa
Spring seasons are not just about us.
We don't do these things only for ourselves, even if they start out that way. We're partnering with God to do good work in the world, to add to the beauty, to be an encouragement, to light a spark in the lives of others.
What's Included in
The Spring Sessions
There are two main sessions.
Each session is broken into parts, about 15-20 minutes each.
Session One:
We'll create a collage. This is our playful planning portion. I'll show you a few different ways to create your collage.
Session Two:
We will pull out our watercolors and enjoy an hour painting (broken into 15-20 minute sessions) this beautiful garden, full of spring flowers in full bloom and plants that are just getting going. A table in the middle is full of inspiration while a cottage home beckons us to continue the journey.
The painting is broken down into sections (sketch, painting, adding details), about fifteen to twenty minutes each with a total paint time of approximately seventy minutes.
They can be done one after another (with a little time for the painting to dry) and can be easily completed in a day or a weekend.
Bonus Sessions
These two painting and creative projects are going to act as a launch pad to move us into this season of our lives. Think of them as a beautiful start to the season of spring.
However, the spring season is not all butterflies and poppies and tulips.
Joy is not the only thing dancing in the season of spring! There's also fear and uncertainty. Slush and mud. Messes and questions.
Anyone who has planted a garden or revived a yard after winter knows this. There is mud and unexpected rainstorms, the slush of snow not all the way melted, damage done by winter that must be repaired.
Spring can be a disaster.
In a special bonus session, we'll also explore the pitfalls of spring and how to navigate around and through them.
Included in the bonus are journaling prompts and a few notes from me to encourage you when the rainstorms of spring hit. It's important to recognize the pitfalls of spring and not get discouraged when they inevitably happen.
Bonus:
Creatively Navigating Around Spring's Storms – journal prompts, a video where I share some of my spring storms and what I'd say to my younger self (and what I am saying and praying now).
Bonus #2:
Do you want to paint some more?
I did! So I included another spring watercolor, full of flower, a spring tree, and a table with two chairs, a cup of coffee and pile of books, the perfect spot to spend an afternoon.
This is a garden full of growth and ideas and prayers and beauty. Tulips, lupines, and peonies cover the garden, but you can add your favorite flowers. Spring is the time for dreaming and planting!
It's Okay to Be Nervous about Starting.
The last several years we've seen a lack of starting. A lack of energy and vitality. People of all ages are plagued with anxiety and fear. A desire to embrace adventure and take risks is in decline. Many seem more interested in safety and security than pressing forward with good endeavors. Others are intent on going back to an era that, despite good qualities, is in the past.
But we can't go backwards no matter how much we want it or how good it was.
Playing things safe doesn't work out well in the long run either. Deciding to stay in passivity or a state of constant rest, "staying safe," doesn't serve us well either.
While rest is good, as Christy Nockels recently said in a podcast,
"Rest can turn into sluggishness and apathy if we're not careful."
Winters are a necessary part of life. Seasons of rest and retreat are essential.
But there comes a time to step out of winter and into spring, glorious spring. And even though our endeavors in spring seasons do not always turn out, important growth happens in spring seasons that cannot occur if we reside in winter forever.
And so here we are, you and I. Facing the beautiful, miraculous season of spring with the invitation to step into the season.
Ready to start again.
Dance Into Spring Today
In this creative course, we'll paint and pray together through this next beautiful and exciting season of life. Whether you are eighty or eighteen, we all have an opportunity to enter into a spring season, a time of starting something new or starting something new again.
Is there a dream you thought was lost or too far gone? Maybe it won't be the same exactly as you wanted it to be all those years ago, but
What is tugging at your heart these days? What is pulling at you to slow down and set aside some time to really tackle?
Let's paint and step into the spring season together.
The Creative Season © 2025