Oklahoma Blossom is for my amazing friend Diana Busch Hartley. If you are lucky enough to know her you know how truly wonderful, incredible and amazing she is. I kind of knew her but then really got to know her during my year as part of Leadership Oklahoma Class 30 which was one of the most incredible years of my life.

 

The piece is made of Oklahoma maps and some of the thank you cards that I made after each to send to all of the people who made the sessions possible.  On average I would write 150-175 cards to thank all of those amazing people.

 

As we travelled across the state together, we got to see and do so many amazing and wonderful things as well as meet some truly wonderful people. If I had to say one thing that was my biggest lesson from that year it would be to think in shades of grey. We were a very diverse group of 49 people from all over the state with very different life experience and opinions about things. What became immediately apparent to me was that my friendships with these wonderful people was more important than any opinions that I had or than being right as we discussed the topics presented during our sessions.

 

So, this piece has Oklahoma at its heart and always in the background and has a large area of grey in the middle that turns to color at the edge because if you don’t start with grey, you’ll never see the beautiful colors all around you.

 

The flower at the very center has Hugo and Slapout, two communities at the far NW and SE corners of our state on it. Slapout is particularly important because it is the home of one of my best friends from my LOK class. At first glance you would think that my friend Jordan and I have very little in common but over the course of the year we discovered that we had many things in common starting with music. My LOK classmates like Jordan have added so much incredible color to my life.