Be a (______) blessing

A story about filling in the blanks

Dear Kula Diaries,

As I shared in my earlier post this month, I recently discovered something that I found remarkably sad:

When I opened my watercolor notebook to paint during the Christmas holidays (while I was intentionally giving myself a break and time to re-charge), I realized that it had been over a year since I had painted anything at all. At one point, I had been painting almost every single evening before bed… but on November 5th of 2023, my paintings stopped without warning — as if my paintbrush had thrown itself away shouting, No more… no more!!

The last painting I had finished in my small notebook… from November 5, 2023.

But, that’s not what happened. What happened, is that I was really overwhelmed — and I just stopped. I don’t think it was a conscious decision, it was just something that happened.

When I paint, I usually start by finding a photo on my phone of a place that I’ve been — I’m also weirdly obsessed with the same view of the dirt road above my house. There is a unique way that it meanders down the hill… and on sunny days, Mt. Rainier can be seen looming in the distance. After I select the photo, I draw a quick sketch with a pencil and then I start painting with watercolors. Once my small painting is finished, I look for a quote that resonates with me — usually something about mindfulness or being present. Then, I slowly hand-letter the quote onto the painting. My paintings are usually done relatively quickly — it’s the hand lettering that takes the longest amount of time. First, I write the letters onto the page… then, I go back and widen the edges of the letters… and finally, I go back for the last time and color in the blank spaces.

A painting that I did for my mom many years ago — this was an image of our campsite in the Enchantments… our first backpacking trip together.

It looks like this as a progression:

My hand usually gets cramped during the lettering portion of this practice, but I find that the act of taking so much time to write down a simple quote gives me the chance to mediate on the meaning of what I’m writing. As I write a quote about being present, I too, am present. I sit at my small table and nothing else seems to exist — I’m just sitting there, filling in the empty spaces.

I started writing these hand lettered quotes many years ago. After college, I decided to take some time off so that I could study for my MCATs to go to medical school. In reality, I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I was trying to delay the inevitable decision making process. I took a job working as a hot dog cart girl at a golf course while I was living in my best friend’s bedroom (she was at college) with her parents as my unbelievably gracious and kind ‘landlords’ (who let me live with them for free). Each day, I’d spend hours surfing Monster.com for jobs while I simultaneously tried to start numerous businesses: a clock business making reclaimed clocks from motorcycle parts… a skincare line… and a t-shirt business. Eventually, I got a job as a Marketing Assistant with a print shop and marketing agency. I (very) prematurely moved in with my boyfriend at the time, because I felt bad about continually living off my best friend’s parents’ kindness. When my boyfriend angrily screamed at me one day for not stirring his instant hot apple cider in the morning, I knew that it should have been the ‘beginning of the end’ about a year ago. Volunteering at the National Park was the only place where I felt like ‘me’ — and in a sudden flash of inspiration, I knew what I was going to do: I was going to become a park ranger.

A painting I did for my dad for Father’s day one year.

I announced my decision to attend a park ranger law enforcement academy to my then-angry-hot-apple-cider-stirring boyfriend, and since the lease on our rental was almost up, he decided to move in with some of his friends, and I decided to drive to Maryland to spend a month with my parents. My mom, who worked at a gift and flower shop, told me that she could get me a job helping out at the store for the month before I left for Washington State.

The store in Maryland is no longer a store, but when I worked there many years ago, it was a barn-converted-gift-store called Homeplace. Homeplace was an overwhelming assortment of decorations, and my daily tasks usually involved working at the checkout register, sorting random items that were sold in the store, or — as I did on one occasion — arranging dish towels by color. During my time working at Homeplace, I was in the midst of panicking about moving across the country to attend the Park Ranger Academy, but it was also the first time in my life that I felt like I was really doing something that I wanted to do. My mom hosted a ‘going away party’ for me and a few of the folks from Homeplace showed up — most of these folks had lived in the same town for their entire lives, and they couldn’t understand why I was moving across the country to pursue a dream. One of the owners of the store looked at me during the going away party and rolled her eyes as she shook her head disapprovingly, “Oh, it’s just Anastasia and another one of her adventures.”

Another painting for my dad — this one is a painting of a waterfall where we fished on the Firehole River in Yellowstone.

Jane was one of my co-workers at Homeplace, and Jane was the type of person that exuded a radiant energy that you couldn’t help but love. Jane was a talented artist and she was the type of person who turned everything she did into something beautiful. At the shop, we had little price tags and descriptor cards near the items for purchase, and I would watch in awe as Jane would hand letter the most delicious script I had ever seen. She was the type of person that could turn a phrase like, Antique Victorian Santa Claus with Velvet Smoking Jacket $128, into such beautiful words that you could have easily thought you were reading a poem. Jane also had a dry sense of humor, and the store employees would regularly joke about some of the ‘rustic style’ home goods that were for sale in the store. In particular, there was a wooden sign that said ‘Be A Blessing’ that made us laugh. To pass the time, we would dream up vulgar versions of these signs… and one day, Jane presented me with a stunningly beautiful hand lettered card that said Be a F*cking Blessing on it.

Some pins that Jane made in her beautiful script!

I asked Jane to show me how she did her hand lettering, and she took the time to demonstrate her technique to me. That night, I went home and practiced… and I hand lettered my very first quote. Over the years, I started painting watercolors for friends, and I’d spend time looking for the perfect quote to hand letter onto the painting. As much as I love the process of creating a watercolor, mine never felt complete unless I had hand-lettered a quote onto them. In some unique way… combined with the voice of others… I had found my own way to create art that felt special to me.

A more recent painting from the first week of 2025.

When I left Maryland for Washington State, I had originally planned to come back to the East Coast. I had told the angry-hot-cider boyfriend that it was a temporary move for me to attend the Park Ranger Academy, and that my ultimate dream was to work as a Park Ranger at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Within a day of stepping foot in Washington State, I knew that I would never move back to Pennsylvania again. Surrounded by mountains and trails and forests — I knew that while this might have been one of my adventures, it was going to be an adventure worth having. The angry-cider-boyfriend and I broke up over the phone while I was in the Park Ranger academy. At the time, most of my friends still called me by my nickname, Stacy. He had some of my personal paperwork mixed in with his belongings, so I sent him a self-addressed-stamped envelope so that he could mail them back to me. On the front of the envelope, I used my new hand-lettering technique to very carefully pen my name — including my real first name, Anastasia. When I received the papers back a few weeks later, he had crossed out the name Anastasia and penciled in the word, S-T-A-C-Y in all caps — in one last ditch effort to try and control who I was. I crumbled the paper in a ball and threw it away. It was one of the first times in my life that I, finally, felt like I really knew who I was.

Here’s a video of one of my recent paintings with a hand lettered quote. The music is original improvisation by The Musical Mountaineers.

It’s been 21 years since I worked for one month at Homeplace, and I am still hand lettering quotes. Something that seems like a painstakingly meticulous act is a quiet rebellion — a reclamation of the things that I love the most. Over the Christmas holiday, I pulled my watercolor notebook back out from its resting spot, and as I quietly grieved the loss of a year of painting and lettering quotes, I also felt deeply grateful that it was there for me to come back to. Even if we stop something that we love, we can always come back to it. We can always re-trace the delicate outline of what we want to become and then take a deep breath as we begin again to fill in the empty spaces between the lines.