I wish for everyone a neglected blog. A pillow pile of old posts for the times when tattered life needs tending. Sentences sewn together again. Old fabric mixed with new finds. Unpicking certain threads.
This blog dropped off at the end of the Washington Writer’s Retreat, after a good run on topics like creative practice, global cultures, and the secular Buddhist practice of dana, or balanced exchange.
That writing was preceded by a few years of travelogs, including a creative road trip across the United States, visits in Melbourne, Brussels, and Johannesburg, where Louise and I met and have been earning miles ever since.
I still carefully carry with me the handwritten journals of youth, now more fascinating for their materiality and privacy. Unlike the internet, they can be burned.
I trained in graphic design in high school, luckily landing in a small print shop run by a larger-than-life leader. The smell of ink and photographic chemicals wafts among graphic memories, a time when life’s tragic romance walked in the front door. Wedding and baby announcements. My own graduation news. Also funerals and flyers for lost dogs.
Sadly, I designed more than a few business cards for start-ups destined to fail. Incomplete ideas, personal hubris, time-wasting exercises recommended by supportive friends. Also, very tender reasons like having a scrap of stock with one’s name on it when everything else had been torn away.
Pinning down colors was crucial. Flipping through fonts revealed notes of class and status. Name specifics, title details, followed by the minor marketing messages. So big in the mind, so small in the visual space. As an object, the business card is created to be so valueless as to be given freely. And it is laden with identities and latent opportunities.
I can’t help it, I kept nearly all of them handed to me over the years. Well out-of-date and entirely eclipsed by technology. Tiny portraits of past professions. People as they appear in paperwork, along with the resumes and websites too. Works in progress.
The combined skills of writing and design have served me well professionally. More recent executive and management work appears in slides, speeches, and proposals. Data visualization has become a lifelong passion and frustration, along with stories that reveal the very complex values beneath all manner of facts and finance.
Three syllabi and slide sets due for updating soon. Site visits and photos so memorable they bear mention. Social media memes scattered across a collectible universe. Also that time I invented a phrase and it got grand prize on an old radio show.
“Ohma lo neary”
A phrase to replace of ‘sorry’ in response to loss or grief
Time travels, too, back to moments before my own musings. The who and whose that made my mental landscapes. The places only my soul has been before.
And, more. Here’s to wild, untended, and not yet ended spaces.
Anne L'Ecuyer 