Emily, mixed media (watercolor, marker, digital art tools, 2022)

Photo credits, in order of appearance: Ashwini Gupte, Beth Price, Nicole Veloso Buchheister, Sofía Mejía Llamas

We have all been through challenging times these past couple of years. The pandemic aside, there have been multiple humanitarian crises with the most recent being the atrocious mass shootings in the US. My heart has been heavy and I am prioritizing time to reconnect with treasured friends and my own creative energy - to replenish and heal. A rekindling of a friendship and the magical collaboration that has come from it marks a joyous return back to All My Love, M.

Emily and I first met 8 years ago when I joined the team at the One World Play Project. While Emily and I worked on different teams, we became fast friends and spent much time together talking and walking around West Berkeley during breaks from work. Emily is a world traveler with an old soul that is honest and loyal. Her dry wit paired with her endless kindness makes Emily such a special individual and friend. She recently directed and produced a short documentary film about female guide Durga Rawal in Nepal. On top of her film work, she is a gifted writer - a wordsmith.

Like me, Emily had been in a creative slump. In early February of this year, Emily and I committed to chatting about our creative journeys weekly with very few ground rules and no expectations. Out of this our first creative collaboration was born. Marrying Emily’s words and my art, we created this piece around resilience and self-empathy.

The pandemic years brought a period of loss. Emily lost her beloved father and I lost my dear mother-in-law. Emily shared "after my dad passed away, writing hasn’t felt the same to me. I’ve struggled to write about his passing and the moments of my life—however big or small—since then. The words just don’t seem to come or flow as easily these days. But through this first collaboration in particular, where Mayura prompted me to write about resilience, self-empathy and / or self-love, I revisited a moment (something I had made note of) from September 2020 with Dad—and then wrote a short note to the me who wrote that note, that former version of myself."

Inspired by Emily’s words, I created this art piece. It represents the ebb and flow of the journey toward self-empathy through different shades of blues bleeding into one another. The layering of textures and patterns throughout the piece signals the complexity and sometimes dynamic process of building resilience and arriving at a moment of self-love. It is a mixed medium piece created with watercolor, marker, and digital art tools.

What you see here is where arrived and we are excited, proud, and grateful to be exploring and sharing this joint artistic expression - or what we affectionately call “magic moments.”

Thank you Emily for opening your heart and sharing it with me and the world.

all my love, M

Chat with Emily

Life has taught me: to have (my own) dreams, goals and plans and also to be willing (and able) to, at a moment's notice, go with the flow—all while staying true to myself, my heart, my values. I'm quite sure this is a lesson I will be re-learning and practicing for the rest of my life.

I’ve recently read/listened to/watched: I'm currently watching "How I Met Your Mother" (going through all the seasons for the first time) on Hulu. I recently listened to two podcast episodes on regret that I found really powerful: "Daniel Pink (The Power of Regret)" via Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard and "REGRET: What if we'd done things differently?" via We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle. They shifted the way I see and think about regret.