Beloved writer Mary Oliver once wrote,
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Love Letters.
Following my heart’s lead, I write and design love letters into artists who create or created art, and wider spaces for our Souls to open up, in spite of their own suffering, or limited external circumstances, or incredible odds against them.
My eight-page designed Love Letter No. 1 to Oprah:
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A Barnacle gosling must dive over 400 feet from its nest on top of a cliff top to reach its parents below.
Usually not all the chicks make the drop. Here goes - my first Love Letter in Motion, my letter to Oprah.
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In the summer of 2021, I wanted to see if I have the courage to write an open letter to her and post it live. Because she is so big and I am so small. At the time it was the most terrifying thing I have ever done.
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and moving past it and creating new challenges for myself, both in writing and design. It’s also important to me to create something that doesn’t fit into any box, and the inner process of learning how to embrace not fitting in.
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over popularity; courage over fear; vulnerability over being dead inside, and vulnerability being the soft true spot in my heart.
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I’ve procrastinated long enough. It’s been years since I first had this idea, and this month is the month to peel it out of my journal and assemble it. Tenderly, then, forward I go...
First thank you for the Super Soul Sunday show …. It has been so life-giving for years — finally people talking about things I’m interested in - that’s how I felt when I first started watching.
I’m writing this letter as a designer and as a pastor’s kid and as a brand that is interested in Soul. The soulfulness of your show has made my God wider for me.
Now I see love everywhere, and this is also in part because I have found myself through my brand journey, not before. Now, I am making myself fit into fewer boxes, opening my heart every day in new ways, including this letter.
Speaking of Soul, let me explain one more piece of Context for WHY I am writing this letter. I have always loved funerals because they are one of the few places where people will actually say how meaningful someone is to them, now that the person is no longer living. I loved the beautiful homilies that all the pastors in my life ... that they have written; I love the kind of realness, beauty, openness, and soulfulness that people bring to a funeral. I have always wanted people to behave this way during life and while living, and so that is one of the things I bring into my All-lines-are-beautiful brand message.
Be open, soulful, real, courageous, vulnerable, and honor people … And do it every day.
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You are so beautifully open with us with the single moments in life when something becomes clear to you and it’s for this that I am most grateful for you, because those moments give me so much strength. And that is what my art for you is about.
My artwork has a particular context and story that comes with it, so let me tell you a little about the messy lines pattern, and many dots of my life which I turned into my All Lines Are Beautiful logo and brand art ...
What I got was this brand journey.
What I wanted was another full time design job, or anything that resembled the first part of my miraculous design career. I thought I knew myself, including following my intuition and my personal guide to “follow the fear” of professional challenge. But at 44 my plan didn’t work and after that other plans didn’t work either. What I knew was how to function from within my strengths, what I apparently needed to learn was how to function from within my weaknesses.
The supportive and invisible thread all these years has been listening to the Super Soul Sunday show, your A ha moments, story after story created food and water for me and a series of little shifts inside me ...
So here I am now doing what I can do, understanding that there are No Rules, using my fear as a guide that I am going in the right direction: using what I have, my voice and my designs.
I want to intentionally drop in this mysterious art and that potentially the reaction is “what is it? What are those dots?” … Because that is part of the point, if we must have answers. Instead of dissenting the art or this movie, allow a heart experience to happen, with feeling … Trust the journey …. And trust the newness …
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I’ve procrastinated AND there are certain things that just take TIME: It took TIME to get to this place, and even with the knowledge that we don’t have forever.
It took me TIME to learn how to lean into the newness of doing new things I have never done before: coming out from behind the art and the coziness of a computer screen, stepping into my life more.
It took me time to understand just how much of my life was a response to an external request … For me to learn how to bring out ideas that are inside me, with zero direction coming from someone else. And then to take the courage to show up with the ideas.
It took me time to embrace that my career is no longer just about design, it has a spiritual component, and that this would not necessarily be fun, or easy.
I was so used to believing that God was all powerful and a little bit outside me, it took me some time to understand that when our lives unravel that is when God or the divine shows up within us; and then the time it took for me to learn my new life skills.
It took me time to understand the nuanced living between ego and heart, and the constant ebb and flow between both inside me.
It took me time to really understand that the spiritual journey is never ending, that there is no landing point, and how I would be connecting this to my Brand and my Brand art: I understand now that my brand art extends in the same unpredictable ways that life does.
It took so much time to understand the abstract art that was occasionally coming out of me. It took time to embrace this style as the center concept for All-lines-are-beautiful. It took time for me to accept this as a gift, that my weird abstract art is not something that would have come out if I had landed that full time job.
It was the smallest of moments when I was able to just say to myself, I love this art, that seems to be within me, and I’m going to DO something with it.
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Years ago my Midlife Midwife taught me to give myself the thing I am seeking. Using this as a tool, I found my beloved, G.
The idea is that the external THING - including people - that we are seeking is not going to fill us up, or complete us, the same way that learning how to be truly content with just who you are at any given moment, will. Including all the bad moments. This is the core concept of what it means to do inner work, and living from the Heart space, vs the Ego.
Now, I seek meaningful connection and a place for my art.
So that’s what I have to DO.
It took time for me to understand that I will commit to the sometimes painful process of this art. I know this process as a designer already, but with this wider and deeper art - am I really willing to commit to the depth of this emotional process over and over again?
I never know what I am going to create until I have a starting point of a concept - or better yet - a person who inspires me - and then me showing up to do the work.
Most of all it took time for me to live like my art. Over the years, I knew on an intellectual level that art is life, and that life is art, but for me to actually live this way and turn my life INTO art, has taken and takes whole other layers of courage. For me to show up to the blank computer screen of my life, speak from my heart, make things, assemble them and go from there.
Art is a healer, both for the person creating it and the person receiving it - we each have an Experience. I understand that in order to heal myself, I have to go into the hurt, into the rejection, which is so counter intuitive, and so my art is what I have to enter.
Art creates Openings, and it’s only through Openings - not things that close - that there is movement and healing.
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I am (my ego is) well aware that the distance between your large celebrity-goddess-life and my small-mere-mortal-life could not be further apart. You get lost to me sometimes with all your fame, so I want to stay with the ways I feel connected to you.
Continuing with The Dot, I try to stay with this, but my ego easily leads me astray with the sudden need to vacuum my house. This is the fear and discomfort tugging at me.
At some point in my journey I realized that I was creating the job rejections. I found myself saying to G, “I need to get six more rejections, and then I’ll be at 100. That will sound better later than just 96.” This was crazy. Who would intentionally create so much suffering?? It was a powerful moment when I realized I was actively creating something.
This was another dot on my logo, with my logo dots representing Awareness points.
But there are also lines in my brand art, messy ones … Because I didn’t design this art for you originally.
I originally designed this for David Goggins. I can’t tell this story without explaining that I designed this art for someone else first, and the pitch didn’t work.
If we don’t show the process of things not working and then trying something new, how will we teach that life skill? If I value courage and vulnerability I have to be honest and transparent about this, about being IN the process, not afterwards, “when I succeed”.
This is what IS living in the moment right now, and embracing my life right now.
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David Goggins did not hire me, even though he is about challenging himself with new things, which is the connection point for me and G, to DG. But I still loved the art and I still wanted to use it. My ego would have loved that plan, but my heart walked away with the art …. Yes, I lost time feeling defeated.
I learned from this that not everyone believes they are “Art People”. I believe everyone is, because I’ve experienced it in art museums.
There is something interesting that happens when you go to an Art Museum, ESPECIALLY a Modern Art museum - an art piece will grab you, for some mysterious reason, you can’t always explain it. You JUST love it.
You just love it and either your ego will latch on to it and deconstruct it.
Or, your Intuition will experience it and just like it because it does. You likely also feel it. One of the things I want to encourage with my brand, is not to love something because hundreds of other people love it - which is what happens with the main exhibit - but rather to love it because you love it.
And that is why my Brand Art works = you love it because it connects to a core piece of you. This is how I’m going to talk about my art - the core symbol of how I experience you, Oprah, and expand that out visually.
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My heart became alive when I watched the Original 3-Part MAKERS documentary on feminism.
You described a core moment of discovery - your male-coanchor was making more than you were. You brought this to the attention of your boss, he was quite unreceptive to equaling your salaries, you have a little inner moment where you think, “ … I’ll show you.”
You have given us words, visuals, feelings, and inspiration … Society teaches us to believe that there are safe landing points in success, and having a lot of money, connections, or even having a lot of answers. I want to highlight the process of what it means to be empowered by intuitive moments - not necessarily even answers - the way you have shown us.
This moment in the interview gave me goosebumps and from that point on, I started seeking out more Oprah-moments, of when you sitehare about the injustice and at the same time know your own strength.
The dot also represents the starkness of what you were up against: Your childhood was less than ideal, you lived through violence and abuse, your grandmother envisioned a small path for you, all in the wider setting of deep, systemic racism. Through it all you tuned into incredible, single, intuitive moments of truth, and drew them out.
And so the dot becomes the symbol that gives the strength to expand outwards. You are the Teacher of what it means to take one moment, one dot, believe in it and expand it outwards. There is motion and flight in this art because that is what you have brought to this world, on a soul level. One person, one moment creating openings in so many people’s lives.
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The dot also represents the countless times you have highlighted the feeling of the A-ha moment for yourself on your show. When you feel it, I feel it, we feel it. Even if the lesson isn’t the same - you are teaching us how to feel and to find our own A-ha moments. You are teaching how to feel tiny inner shifts as guides.
Our spiritual journeys are never finished, there is always another layer of awareness to discover. My art expands outwards in unusual ways to show this. When I work with an idea, I don’t exactly have a plan. But I have decided on this new journey of mine to USE as part of my artwork, the art that comes out after the original concept, but still connected to the original concept.
What will happen NEXT?
Who is to know?
I trust my art.
I am going to make more art.
I am going to follow my inspiration and my tiny intuitive motions about people who have suffered and lost, and through their experience, found that inner dot, and hung onto it, and shaped it into something new. That is all-lines-are-beautiful.
I am sending out these handwritten, penciled, scribbled words, attaching it to my art,
and sending all my love,
Anne
