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Our emerging story is woven through the many, many magical moments, chance encounters, and sacred synchronicities that are born of keeping our hearts open and living the questions fully. Here are a few of those moments.
Vignette 1: In Which Offerings Finds Her Artist, and a Logo is Born...
We had just landed the name "Offerings" - or it had just landed in me - and Joanne and I were in our favorite Lucy's Tea
House drawing on napkins sketches of what the logo might look like. Not "O," we said as that was Oprah's. The two ff's in
the word jumped out at us, two women with their arms extended, their long skirts swishing behind them. So we spent the next
hour drawing all the ways the two ladies might be - in conversation, sitting under a tree, playing on swings, etc.
Afterward, we went next door to East-West Bookstore to buy some birthday cards, and there they were. Lined up on a rack
from top to bottom were cards with artwork in exactly the style, color and shape we'd been attempting to draw. I turned to
Joanne and said, "She's our logo artist." Joanne said, "Yes,...how do you know it's a she?" We checked the back of the cards,
rushed home, wrote an email to TrueArt Inc.
In a week, I was on the phone with True - or Catherine - and in a deeply soulful exchange of our stories and callings, she said to me, "I just had an astrology reading yesterday which said it was time to take my art out into the world. I've never done logos before, but if you're willing, I'd like to offer to make a logo for Offerings."
For more about the design of the Offerings "ladies" and early versions of the logo, click here.
Shortly after we received the gift of the Offerings "ladies" two other designers joined for some creative play. Patty Manero who was visiting from Italy designed our first-ever invitation fold-out card using this fun version of the ladies. Kazumi Atsuta who blew in from Craig's List to become one of our major designers, created our final logo.
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Vignette 2: In Which I Travel All the Way to Italy to Find a Designer Who Lives Next Door
I missed Florence, Italy, so much after having lived there for a few months that we impulsively decided to spend
our last air miles on a 2-week trip back. As soon as we made the commitment to go, I was contacted by a woman who wanted
to call a circle of women - mostly Italian - to talk about women's stories. A few days after we got there, I was invited
to meet with an Italian congresswoman representing the City of Florence to talk about the role of women in politics and
government.
Toward the end of our trip, we were walking through some old haunts, away from the usual tourist destinations,
when we saw, emerging from an alley, two figures looking a little lost. Amazingly, I recognized them from a party in
San Jose, California, a couple of years back! We walked around showing them our favorite places. As I shared my story
of Offerings, Jill got more and more excited, telling me how she'd left her programming job in corporate America to
find her next calling, and how she'd always had a personal interest in magazine layouts. She said, "Please let me know
if I can do anything - sweep floors, make coffee, just to be around you all when you design the magazine. I would so
love to learn how it's done." I said to her, "Guess what, Jill, you're it." A couple of months later, we had three graphic
designers beginning work on our Prototype. The happiest of them was Jill.
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Vignette 3: In Which Serendipity Saves the Day, and the Budget
Our designers, none of whom had done any design on print, let alone on magazines, were chomping at the bit to begin. We
had learned that the latest best software program for design was InDesign, an Adobe Creative Suite program, and that
publishers were converting to it from Quark. We'd also discovered that each program would cost us close to $2,000.00 -
money we didn't have.
At a party a couple of weeks later, a woman who had heard of us asked me what Offerings needed at
this time. I told her we were ready to start designing, but needed InDesign. Incredibly, she said, "I work at Adobe. Let
me see what I can do." A week after the party, I received an email from Betsy saying that a couple of Adobe employees were
willing to purchase the program for our designers - at $75.00 a package!
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Vignette 4: In Which a Silent Invitation is Accepted
I was spending the weekend in Colorado with a few people celebrating a friend's 40th birthday. Throughout the weekend, I
had a chance to speak with Philip, an experienced high level business executive, about Offerings, and he asked me very
intelligent questions about how I planned to grow the business, raise funds, etc. I was very admiring and appreciative
of both his questions and his comments and felt a great need for someone on the team to continue this kind of co-thinking
with me along business strategies. By the end of the weekend, I was in awe of him and aching to invite him to join a few
of us in a meeting two weekends later to craft our first layer of business strategies. I could not bring myself to mention
it, even when he would say, "Well, let me know how I can be of help."
On the drive back to the Denver airport, Philip continued to ask me questions about Offerings and even asked me for some input on some of the business challenges he was facing. As the car finally slowed down to drop me off at the curb, he once more said, "Well, let me know." And I said in a voice so small I didn't think he'd heard, "Will you come to our weekend retreat?" Before I knew it, I had gotten out of the car, my bags were placed on the curb and goodbye hugs were going around. All I could hear was the pounding in my head "stupid, stupid, stupid...you missed your chance!"
When Philip came to me, he put his hands on my shoulders, faced me squarely to him, looked deeply and piercingly into my eyes and said, "Look, Teresa. There has been an invitation wanting to happen here. Let's pretend you've cast it, and that I've said yes. Now let's talk about the details." I looked over at his wife Kay and she nodded, smiled and said, "He's telling the truth Teresa. This is as much for him as it is for you and Offerings." Two weeks later, he flew across the country to join us... and has been one of our mentors ever since.
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Vignette 5: In Which Nature Holds the Answer... Again (and again and again)
The Offerings Emergent Business Design Team was on its third day in retreat at beautiful Lake Tahoe, busily imagining what kind of
organization would best support our purpose and nature. We knew we didn't want the traditional organizational structure with its
reporting schemes and departments that seem only to limit the imagination and dull the enthusiasm of the people actually working
inside them. We needed a more organic, spacious, friendly place where people could answer their heart's calling; where they could
move closer to or farther from the core of Offerings as their lives and the work to be done might necessitate; where the overlapping
of interests and talents would foster not territoriality and competition, but co-creation and project sharing.
We were getting very excited about this vision. One of our advisors, Philip, started to draw on a flipchart what we were describing,
and when he was done, we were looking at a spider web sort of structure in which the core of energy radiated from inside out into
the world, and we were satisfied. Needing a break from all the excitement, Stephanie and I went down to the water. We were
clambering over rocks when all of a sudden my foot froze, mid-step, as I looked down to see a plant I'd never seen before.
At first I thought I'd trampled it as all its blossoms and leaves were lying flat on the ground, but as we looked closer, we
realized the leaves and flowers were actually growing parallel to the ground, by nature's design. We knew immediately what we
had discovered - this was Mother Nature's own version of the organizational structure we had just been imagining and sketching
upstairs! To this day we have not been able to find its name, and even the residents had never seen one like it. I keep a
photograph of it as my screen saver and so each time I wake up my laptop, I am reminded of the wonder and wisdom of Nature's
true design.
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Stay tuned for more episodes in the emergence of Offerings!