Celebrating color, calm and complicated truths
(4 min read)
This is an anniversary season for me so here are a dozen ways I’m pausing to be grateful.
Perhaps as you go down this list you’ll think of some of your own to add.
1. Wondrous color
I’m celebrating the wonder of color and how sketching and data visualizing in color are unlocking ways to communicate some joyful discoveries.
“Color is a basic human need … like fire and water, a raw material, indispensable to life.” — Fernand Leger
Sketch June 2018
2. Beams of love and light
I’m celebrating the beams of love and light the universe sends our way.
3. Better, brighter, kinder
I’m celebrating the profound perspective shift of becoming a parent more than a decade ago, and how it motivates me to contribute to a better, brighter, kinder world for my children, for myself, and for all of us.
4. Frequency
I’m celebrating unique frequencies, and the magic of resonance and nuance.
Sketch July 2018
5. Joyful defiance
I’m celebrating the hungry, hungry, hungry ones who are channeling their hunger into acts of love, kindness, and joyful defiance. However that manifests.
Sketch July 2018
6. The hum, the hum, the hum
I’m celebrating the hum of love and light that restores us when we’re overcome with the tragi-comic realities of being human.
Life here feels like you were just left off here one day, with no instruction manual, and no idea of what you were supposed to do; how to fit in; how to find a day’s relief from the anxiety, how to keep your beloved alive; how to stay one step ahead of abyss … [and yet we can] be a resurrection story, in the wild non-denominational sense.
— Anne Lamott, via Facebook August 2014
7. Women’s voices
I’m celebrating more and more women finding their voices. I’m celebrating the fact that this includes me.
8. Literary food forests
I’m celebrating an ongoing literary pilgrimage that feels akin to treading well-worn paths into food forests that feed my soul and actively shape the matter that makes up who I am and how I think.
Sketch September 2017
Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.
— Maria Popova
9. Release
I’m celebrating the steady gaining of a kind of intuitive wisdom that does not demand binary answers to difficult questions.
10. Reconciling
I’m celebrating an increasing ability to hold in one hand what author Cheryl Strayed calls “complicated truths.”
Literature’s grand mission is to tell the complicated truths about what it means to be human…
— Cheryl Strayed
11. Shared humanity
I’m celebrating an increasing abundance of true stories well told that illuminate our shared humanity.
12. Freaky fish
I’m celebrating creative allies and oddities who model every day that we, too, can show up and dare to create and contribute no matter who we are.
Because a seahorse is a fish, too. Photo: Anaik Alcasas
Celebrating you
And if your eyes are seeing this, amidst all the noise of your channels and feeds online, I’m celebrating you — your humanity and whatever steps you’re taking online and IRL to show up and contribute to a better, brighter, kinder world.
(And if you care to share one, two, or a dozen things you’re celebrating, please feel free to share this on your socials feed and add your own!)
Big love.
Hey from Anaik (Ah-nah-eek) — thanks for reading!
A bunch of my friends and colleagues have been prodding me to publish some of my research on empathy and emotional intelligence and how it manifests in communication. So even though my work is still evolving, I’m writing more in public as a dare to myself. If anything resonates, feel free to follow me on Instagram or connect on LinkedIn.
As they say in Aussie-land, “Cheers!”