Yeah, it’s provocative! That’s the point.
Bri
Read the lines of this fictional story that poured from my pen, then check out the print on canvas. It’s there. It’s available.
There was a time in Cleo’s life, and it wasn’t so long ago, when she thought she had it all figured out.
She had the plan. The five-year, ten-year, twenty-year vision. She had bullet points for how her life should unfold. Vision boards. The kind of love she was supposed to find. The job title she would wear like armor. The place she would live that would finally make her feel at home.
She had it all laid out like a blueprint. Cleo dared life to follow.
Life doesn’t read blueprints. Life doesn’t care about neat lines and clever plans. And when it started to deviate — subtly at first, like a quiet detour — she resisted.
Fiercely.
One afternoon, she was sitting on the floor of her tiny apartment. The sun was pouring in through the window. That strange golden hour light that feels like truth. She had just received the email that changed everything: the opportunity she had needed to come through, the one she had bet everything on, had fallen through.
“No.”
That’s all she could say. She whispered it over and over like a broken prayer.
“No.”
She had built her entire sense of self around that outcome. She needed it to go that way. She had molded her identity into that shape, and now it was slipping through her fingers.
She didn’t know who she was without that shape.
It’s disturbing to realize that much of what we suffer is not what is happening. It is more of what we expected to happen, and how we cling to it. We don’t react to life. We react to the betrayal of our imagination.
We project. Constantly.
We say, “It has to look like this.” “ I want and desire it this way.”
And when it doesn’t, we mourn the version that was never meant to be anyway.
That’s what she was doing, mourning her own imagination.
And then something happened instantly.
It was like an illumination.
What if reality wasn’t fixed at all?
What if living in a mold was the betrayal, a way of not allowing her true nature?
What if reality was… optional?
She started asking different questions.
“What if this is actually a call for her to be more, together with an invitation into a new dance?”
She began to listen to life instead of talking over it. Instead of dictating how it should unfold, she let it show her the way. And there, in that surrender, a space was open where something unreasonable and unimagined could grow.
And in that space, grief became irrelevant.
What came after wasn’t what she would have chosen, or even what she thought she wanted. It was better. It was exactly what she and others needed.
Friendships she would have missed. Work that lit everyone up in ways only the new path could. For the first time, she saw the mold. And she realized: It was never her.
She saw clearly how the illusion of certainty was a cage, one that traded our aliveness for the promise of control. She saw how she had been living by an automatic script, projecting onto life and demanding it conform. And in doing so, she had rejected everything that didn’t look like what she imagined, even when it was more generous, more meaningful, more her than anything she could have dreamed up.
We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.
And when we align with our true nature, and the true nature of life itself, so does reality.
That’s the real magic.
Once you stop demanding it be something else, you realize: you were the one not being in its abundance.
It’s like a soul remembering her voice…
Like a life becoming real…
Print on acid-free, PH-neutral, and fade-resistant canvas. •
Size: 20”x28” 50,8cm x 71cm
Shipping fee is INCLUDED worldwide.
- Thickness: 1.25″ (3.18 cm)
- Fabric weight: 10.15 +/- 0.74 oz./yd.² (344 g/m² +/- 25g/m²)
- Printed on textured and fade-resistant canvas (OBA-Free)
- Mounting brackets included
- Hand-glued solid wood stretcher bars
