Learning to Let Go

Being open to sharing my creativity with the world

As you may know, my new book will be available on 4/15/2023. I am genuinely excited to be able to share it with you. What you don’t know is that inside the book, at the end of every chapter, is artwork that I did personally.

If it wasn’t a big enough stretch to share another book with the world, I decided sharing my artwork would also be a good idea. I did not decide to do this on a whim. I wrestled with the pros and cons before committing.

My artwork is the calligraphy of the 21 precepts of the Dokkōdō by Miyamoto Musashi, the main inspiration for my book. There is a potential for people to criticize my work and say that it would have looked better to have it done professionally, but that wasn’t the point. I don’t want it to be perfect.

Here is the backstory. As I have been digging deeper into the Japanese language and culture, I am intrigued by how much meaning is in just a few kanji characters. For instance, 誠 is the kanji for Integrity.

When you dig a little deeper into the meaning of the character, you discover that it represents “turning our words into action.” How often have you stopped to think about the words we use? I wonder how different our conversations would be if we truly took the time to better understand the…