hawaii – Lucy Bellwood

Moananuiākea

Hey! The gorgeous double-hulled voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa and her sister ship Hikianalia are setting off on another circumnavigation!! LOOK AT THIS VOYAGE MAP!!!

A map showing Hōkūleʻa's voyage itinerary.

I’m heartbroken this year’s trip to Juneau falls a month before the launch date, but also so excited to see these upcoming plans. I hope I can catch the vessels when they’re further down the US coast. (If you’ve never heard of Hōkūleʻa before, it’s worth skimming through her history on the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s website.)

Here are some drawings I did back in 2017 when I got to visit Hawai‘i for the first time and fell in love with the history of wayfinding. (Ask me sometime about why Disney’s Moana is basically a true story.)

Brain Food

Visual Dispatch #6

A photograph of two bits of paper. The first has "How do you want to feel?" written across the top with a list of adjectives below. They include connected, fulfilled, stable, lauded, validated, helpful, effective, accomplished, calm, grounded, proud, challenged. Below that are phrases like "Survival without worry" and "Creating empathy in others". The page on the right lists five categories "Financial, Emotional, Internal, External, and Visible".

I was emptying out my backpack this morning and a bunch of bits of paper fell out of a hidden sleeve. There were postcards from my trip to Hawai‘i in 2017, thumbnails from the comic about Federated Learning I made for Google in 2019, and a couple scraps of paper containing (I’m fairly sure) notes for this talk on success—also from 2019.

I wish I could remember where the lines in quotation marks came from. Maybe they were responses from the participants at that workshop? Maybe they came up before I even gave the talk? Either way, it reminded me how much I’d poured into those two presentations (the other was about money, surprising no one), and how glad I am to have recorded them.

I’m stuffed up with a head cold this week and feeling very sorry for myself, so this video window into a me who was, well, with it feels really validating. So much has changed and twisted and refined in the past two years. I feel smaller in some ways—like the circles of influence I previously occupied have shrunk considerably—but also deeper. In the five spheres of success above, I feel as if I’ve traded Visible, External, Financial, and possibly even Internal success for something deeply Emotional. And I’m still trying to let the dust settle on that decision and learn how to make peace with it.

The lesson remains: these questions are never truly answered. Not really. Not if I’m doing it right.

Comics

Hourly Comic Day 2017

Hey friends! I’ve got a new comic for you today:

This is my seventh year doing Hourly Comic Day, and it’s really such a delightful thing. For those that aren’t familiar: it’s a global art project where folks draw a panel for every hour they’re awake on February 1st. It’s a wonderful way to discover new artists, take a look at what everyone’s up to, and chronicle a day out of each year. This year I just happened to be wrapping up a couple weeks in Hawai’i, so there’s a bunch of tropical escapades in here.

You can read the whole comic over here on Medium. I love having these annual visual check-ins that remind me of where I’ve been every February since I was a junior in college—especially if this tropical trend continues. Wonder where I’ll be in 2018…

Did any of you participate? I try not to read people’s till I’ve posted my own, since it wigs me out and I get self-conscious, but now I am FREEEEEE. Link me to your entries in the comments or on Twitter.

You can also read all my previous years’ entries here: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, and 2011!