On Integrity, Briefly

How creativity helped me find the virtues of leading my life with what's inside.

When you share a creation, you proudly proclaim what you stand for. Hopefully. When you push your idea from the unseen, the integrity of that idea’s pretty visible. The foundation it stands on, the values it represents, the principles it upholds. It’s out there. Bringing BLAK SALT outward feels like I’m nurturing a version of myself that’s both underdeveloped and actualized, and the guide to its expansion lies the strength of its core. I’m a new parent again.

There’s a phase during the initial design process with my client in which I visualize a set of pillars that guards a sort of essence that I want to observe. The nucleus of that essence houses potent characteristics such as my client’s personal energetic blueprint, reason for being, and unique gifts. It’s what each collaboration, and each collaborator, a special opportunity.

Before I knew about the concept of integrity, I was practicing graphic design in New York City, inside a system of external validation and outside a frame of integrity. Initially, after graduating design school, I’d intended to only work with other soulful makers. The skateboarders I idolized, the musicians I adored, the cooks I mimicked; I dreamed of working with them to amplify their expression.

In the beginning of my career, it was going great. I was balancing my corporate experience with short-term collaborative projects with independent makers. But in time, I recognized I was operating out alignment with my original vision. I’d gone from pursuing passion projects to chasing a bigger corporate check. I gave design a hard-stop in 2019, around the same time everyone else started to question the values they were representing, and shortly after three back-to-back client experiences that were full of hard and humbling instances of exposing self truths.

Most recently, I was laid off during lockdown, which millions around the country experienced. Before that, I was laid off because I was too expensive. Before that, through, I was told to consider my integrity. Of course, I hadn’t considered it at all. I didn’t even know what it really meant. I’d been working remotely out of my apartment as part of a three-person team, which was a dream for me. My aspirations lay in the world of art and culture, like the design heroes I had the pleasure of working and learning from. And while I was bent on being one of the cool kids in the experimental studio, I was looking for people to work with who valued my experience, skills, and point of view. Typical design guy considerations.

What I’d failed to look at throughout my career was something that wasn’t facilitated during my education: integrating failure and mistakes, managing performance anxiety, and understanding self-worth outside the notches in my portfolio. And, through that piece of feedback, all of those notions of emotional intelligence came to the forefront.

Shortly after that interaction, after I scurried from my dream job with my tail between my legs to embark on a quest to somehow redo the past eight years, Fauna was born. Rather than focus on the past, I needed to hoist myself up for the future. After all, being present for my child meant calling in a more present self.

So that’s what I did for the next four years. In 2020, Athena and I moved to Canada, then to North Carolina, with my parents’ basement in New Jersey sprinkled (a little heavily) in between, searching for a home more aligned with what we were about: family, abundance, and community. While looking for work, I spent time learning about gardening outside our apartment, meditating on the everyday, and reading about consciousness. I started writing about this evolution of how I thought about to be, think, and make in the world. I wrote in the kitchen wherever we lived, since it was always the farthest room from where we slept, and I stopped my morning practice when it was time for me to cook breakfast for everyone. Soon, the food metaphors entered from the periphery, and I looked closely at the potentiating properties of the elements I cooked with. (That fed nicely into a brief fantasy of starting a postpartum food delivery service.)

As my practice expanded, and I incorporated more seemingly disparate activities into my days, I began to see how the graphic design career I felt like I abandoned in New York City wasn’t something to feel shameful about. Further, I saw shame as a self-infliction brought on by catching oneself living (and, in my case, working) out of integrity, and I was finally seeing a way to pull myself out of it.

I showed myself how to dig into my own inner nature and bring it outside of myself, to visualize my gifts and start to realize them. I considered my own identity design; what moves me, what brings me joy, what incites an impulse to speak my mind. This was only amplified through the life philosophies I was reading about from the I Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, and lectures about anything outside graphic design. I was passing a form of intuitive energy out of my system, and this consideration eventually manifested an art project that explores Nature as a main source of inspiration, between what we experience and who we work with. That project is BLAK SALT, so named after the unseen powers of that which deeply nourishes us. The salt that connects us to what’s inside and outside us, to each other and the universe.

If you’re catching yourself feeling a bit how I’d felt in the past, I’d only advise you to reflect on what makes your foundation strong, and to stick to it. To be sure in your actions, thoughts, and feelings, requires you to nourish your foundation’s integrity. And a big part of that is doing what you love, because that’s how you’re meant truly express yourself in this life. To live in joy, in art, in the beauty of your own spirit.

In reverence for the process,

Alex Konsevick
Creative Director