Today I am in the midst of hand lettering 130 envelopes in fancy calligraphy with a real fountain pen and teal ink. Somebody’s gotta do it, and I LOVE that I get to. There is something about just sitting in contemplation with pen in hand and address list before me that gets me in that joy flow. True, I might experience a tired hand or something, yet it is well worth it.
I decided to improve my brand. Me, Dena McKitrick: not one of my businesses, but me, the individual.
Recently, I have been thinking about who I am on the inside vs. how I appear on the outside, with the focus on congruency. Am I congruent with myself in appearance and deed? What experience of me do others have? And even more important, does that experience reflect who I truly am? I’ve worked a lot of years to be more in integrity with myself and others. Is that apparent to the world. That is part of my brand.
It’s not all just about a visual image. I mean, yeah, we all recognise the famous logos of the world, and that is part of their brand, but it is not anywhere near all of it. It includes things like how they treat their customers, how quick they respond to a call for help, and what they do with their profits.
So, how does that translate to me, the individual? Simple really. I am looking at things like how I treat those around me, how quickly I jump in and volunteer to help at a meeting, and whether or not I “put my money where my mouth is.” It’s not that I haven’t looked at those things before. I have – lots.
Lately, though, I seem to have come upon a deeper level of self-reflection, which is aimed at being as aligned as humanly possible with who I have been guided to be and do, and to shine that person into the world with clarity. That’s the brand I wish to present: the best me possible.
Many, many years ago I was first starting on another path toward living my life in integrity with my spiritual self when I came into an inspired epiphany: that I could choose how I experience my life. Simply put, no matter what it is that I am walking through, I could choose what my outlook would be, what my perceptions of it would be, what I experience. It occurred to me that I could metaphorically “get a new pair of glasses” to have a new view of the same landscape.
I decided then that I choose joy! I could be scrubbing the porcelain repository with anger or miserable victim thoughts, or I could be scrubbing the same vessel while singing and giving thanks for my health that I could accomplish the feat. It is ok either way. I still get a clean bathroom. So, I decided to sing at it. I decided that I would dance through the grocery store, and that I would love what I do and do what I love.
We’ve all heard the saying, “calling the glass half full, or half empty.” I knew that then, but somehow getting that I could choose joy really turned my experience of my life around. So, when I am doing things that just don’t feel good at all, I still work on putting on my joy glasses. And when I get to do things that make my heart soar like creating a really superb graphic or writing a song, the joy part is easy.
I love to sing. I love to dance. I love to write a well-turned phrase. And I love to express through pen or brush or camera or carving tool or with my well-worn mouse on the computer. To me it is all the same in that it is a place of joy I enter when I open up to be of service through inspired and guided creative expression – no matter what the media. It is a blissful state of consciousness I enter when engaged in active creativity and I am ever grateful for the gift and opportunity that blesses me with the experience of it.
Even further, the more that I have allowed myself to this blissful state of grace, the more I have discovered that I can feel that all the time. It is as if the world is my canvas, and every moment my brush. Each moment consciously engaged in doing “thine will, not mine” in service.
I started doing graphic design before computers. I’d pull out my rapidograph and carefully, tediously draw a fine line border for a certificate. I would then letter it with my calligraphy pen. I loved doing commercial art that way. I loved pin-striping a car, or hand-lettering a sign, too. It was tactile and challenging and satisfying.
I was working at a newspaper when the first OCRM (optical character recognition machine) was brought online. You had to use a certain kind of typewriter for the machine to recognize what was typed. I was thrilled when I could reproduce the type with my pen, and fool the machine into thinking I was one of those typewriters.
The computer room was this cold, sealed off room where the huge computers were housed. I would scan the type, the OCRM would translate the type and the strips of programmed copy would come out to be waxed and pasted up. The graphics were taken from cutbooks and pasted up too.
Fast forward to 2009. I love taking an image I have penned, scan it into Photoshop, work it, save it, pull it into Illustrator, vector it, clean it up, save it, pick it back up in Photoshop, add layers of color and perhaps photo texture etc., maybe pop it over into Painter, add some texture, and eventually end up with a clean custom graphic. Other days, I just sit out in the yard with my watercolors and joyfully paint. There’s something about the “old world” style of hand work that just feeds my soul.
Each and everyday is a new one, with new experiences, new challenges, and a new list of things that I absolutely have to get done yesterday.
I love doing art. It is the center of me. What I mean by that is that when I am fully engaged in creative expression, I am connected and lined up and centered in Spirit, in God, in life, in being the most me that I can be.
When I am not “doing art”, when I have stepped on the hose that delivers God-juice, when I am ignoring my needs and inspiration, then I get feeling all out of sync. If this goes on for any length of time (and sometimes it does), I lose myself and drift back into old dysfunction and depression – a slippery slope for me.
The road out of this is gratitude. I am so very grateful for the wonderful gift of life, and for each brand new day. I am grateful and I give conscious thanks for all of the relationships and situations, opportunities and challenges in this life.
