My guest today is Mari Andrew, and she is what I would call a Flannor.
What does that mean?
Well, she kind of navigates the world in search of moments of discovery and wonder, serendipity and connection, novelty that drops her into those flickering moments of aliveness.
It's her muse, really, and it's found an expression in the form of beloved illustrations and words on her Instagram account with a community of more than a million people and her first book.
But these last four or five years have also led Mari into entire seasons of struggle and reflection and ultimately, revelation that has taken her from park benches in New York's East Village to a hospital ward in Spain and even random alleys in Rio.
In her new book, my inner sky, Mari shares some of these moments, from an illness that temporarily paralyzed her in a foreign country to finding home within herself again and really seeing the world anew.
It's a call to spend more time finding grace in the truth of whatever life brings us, rather than wishing and waiting for things to change.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
Something jumped out at me that I wanted to ask you about.
So I think when we first started dancing together was shortly after you were on Instagram and you were posting really regularly these super cool illustrations.
And oftentimes there'd be words or thoughts in the illustrations and then a caption.
And my initial sense of you was like, oh, cool.
She's sort of like an illustrator who is adding words to the art to give it a bit of context, and the words are pretty cool and compelling, too.
And then over time, that started to shift.
And then I dive into your new book, and I'm like, I got it totally wrong.
You're a writer who happens to illustrate, too.
And my curiosity was whether that's always been there and it's just emerging or whether you felt sort of like an evolution over these last few years to that.
Hmm.
It feels so good to be called a writer.