It has been an honor to watch these cards reach so many of you with messages of hope and healing. I’ve sort of felt the need to detach myself from the artwork to allow the work to take a life of its own through your experiences with them. In many ways, your insights have brought more depth and healing power to the images because they come from your own heart, your gratitude, and your stories. It’s a lesson that there is something universal that we all can experience in these flowers beyond our individual interpretations – and it’s uplifting to know we share something in the way we experience them.
As a bit of a background, the 39 drawings included in the cards are selected out of a 100 day project that I did back in 2015. It was a great project, spearheaded by Elle Luna on instagram but with roots that go back to a great design teacher, Michael Beirut, a partner at Pentagram and a design teacher at the Yale School of Art. And I’ve seen many versions of it – not just by visual artists but by musicians like the violinist Hilary Hahn and even my piano teacher who composed musical haikus for 100 days in a row.
The premise of the project is that you commit to doing and making something for 100 days consecutively. There is something in the disciplined, repetitive process of creating and sharing that leads you to places that inspiration alone could never reach. The discipline and even devotional act of creating every day is like a way of making a deal with the universe to show up for each other, rain or shine, every day.
For me, I committed to do a drawing of a plant or flower every day and called my project “100 day of blooming love”. At the time, I had no idea that the Gratitude Blooming cards would ever exist. On the first day of the project, I went into my garden and found a blooming anemone flower that I decided I would try to draw. When I cut the flower and brought it into the studio, I noticed it was already starting to wilt. And in the process of getting it into a position I could draw from, one of its petals fell off (I’m not sure if any of you noticed the detached petal in the drawing). I felt so bad – like nothing was going right and all I seemed to have accomplished was to kill this poor flower on my first day.
So as I started to draw, I kept repeating in my head “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” And as I continued on really holding the theme of blooming love in my heart, the flower seemed to say to me in a very calm and powerful way…”I forgive you... but now you need to learn to forgive yourself, forgive your loved ones, forgive everyone & everything. Let go with nothing but love.” And so I wrote the word forgive next to it.
And that’s the story of the first drawing and the first flower of our Gratitude Blooming card deck and its lesson of forgiveness. And it sort of makes sense because when you are truly grateful for something (for instance, like this great land and country we live in), then there really isn’t a more powerful way to show it than to be willing to forgive in order to preserve it, in order for it to truly bloom and thrive one day. In many ways, the gift to be able to choose forgiveness is the only generative way forward.
- December 12, 2020
