As a bit of a background, the 39 drawings included in the cards are selected out of a 100 day project that I did back in 2015. It was a great project, spearheaded by Elle Luna on instagram but with roots that go back to a design teacher at the Yale School of art and partner at Pentagram, Michael Bierut.

The premise of the project is that you commit to doing and making something for 100 days consecutively. There is something in the disciplined, repetitive process of creating and sharing that leads you to places that inspiration alone could never reach. The discipline and even devotional act of creating every day is like a way of making a deal with the universe to show up for each other, rain or shine, every day.

For me, I committed to do a drawing of a plant or flower every day and called my project “100 days of blooming love”.  At the time, I had no idea that the Gratitude Blooming cards would ever exist.

On the first day of the project, I went into my garden and found a blooming anemone flower that I decided I would try to draw. When I cut the flower and brought it into the studio, I noticed it was already starting to wilt. And in the process of getting it into a position I could draw from, one of its petals fell off (I’m not sure if any of you noticed the detached petal in the drawing). I felt so bad – like nothing was going right and all I seemed to have accomplished was to kill this poor flower on my first day.

And that’s the story of the first drawing and the first flower of our Gratitude Blooming card deck and its lesson of forgiveness. And it sort of makes sense because when you are truly grateful for something then there really isn’t a more powerful way to show it than to be willing to forgive in order to preserve it, in order for it to truly bloom and thrive one day. In many ways, the gift to be able to choose forgiveness is the only generative way forward.