A siesta.

The pace of my life over the last five years has been fast and wonderful, thanks to the snowball I pushed down the hill to get to a place I wanted to go. I feel that I am standing in that place now, being asked to understand how I may be truly present here. I feel a pull to pause, to take a long, deep breath inside of a year and rest. What do I have to offer? Is it something new? Something changed? Any moment I slow down—in process, long drives to installs, or quiet studio mornings, these questions I’m sharing here fill my practice. Rilke says, in Letters to a Young Poet, “ Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that -- but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself.”

This resonates. So here we are together, in this small part of the internet I cherish deeply, share wholeheartedly, and have never taken a break from. I am headed off the grid for a month to take a long siesta and sit inside of my thoughts. To dream, to follow a knowing down a path where emails and DMs do not cloud my vision, and new projects stay in the meadows and along the horizon; to watch my kids and learn what they know. That’s the place where my creative heart lives happily, and she’s asking me for a little rest inside of the limitlessness of a child’s imagination.

See you in a month.

Light.

I have seen this bright band before, curving around the whitewashed brick, angling around the corner and flooding back in my direction. Today it catches me off guard, delivering a moment of unexpected delight, bringing me into my own familiar body standing in a familiar room of a familiar building. Suddenly, light reminds me to wonder, to be awake, and to remember that everything changes and grows. I am in deep relationship with light. I watch it everyday. I listen to what it has to tell me. So far, this is what I know.

Light is. It always has something to say, but it rarely asks much of me or beckons me too loudly. It welcomes me in quiet shapes, on floorboards and dooknobs, or maybe a soft, reflected line along a cheek. It asks me to stay a while. Lately, it asks me to share it. When I do this, others bring their own experiences of light to me, and soon my days are full of collected wonder. So in this way, light shows me how to live a life of intention and fullness. It is my doorway to most good things, even in hard times. What is yours?

Bravery

Being high up in the air provides you with such healthy perspective, pushing you into a kind of silence that is hard to find anymore. My aunt says she talks to my grandfather in the clouds. She always chooses a window seat for this reason, to sit as close to him as possible. I find meaning in the smallest of things. I have always been this way.

We are traveling back from Switzerland now, where I installed something that took numerous years to arrive in me. Countless hours spent learning about light and stones, relationship, and how the days move along, then countless more learning a material I find very to the point. Trial and error and over and over again to find the right process to express a lifetime of ideas about a simple thing that compels me in a deeply purposeful way. Then (maybe most importantly) to feel brave enough to let that thing be born. I understand that artists do brave work in this way.

For the art that calls to me, I am often met with people who don’t understand the purity of thought that goes into a piece of work. Instead, they climb onto my scaffolding as I am preparing the final details before leaving a part of myself somewhere else, and they question me as if I am a number on a spreadsheet in need of crossing off rather than the very soul inside of which the work was nurtured and then subsequently born. That is raw bravery, standing humbly and calmly against the kind of thinking that threatens the very essence of my life. I smile, take a deep breath in, and let the experience wash over me like the frigid ocean water does when I take a February swim in Maine. I meet the moment as I would any moment, certain of the song in my heart and my simple reason to sing it.

The work, the creation of it, the embodiment of it, and a life lived in truth are very reasons I have to be. They fill my bones and deliver me back home to count the freshly-opened poppies with my children who I have missed! They are my greatest creations in life, and they know all about counting delights and meeting everyday in kind. May they learn to understand themselves purely and to walk boldly into the world each day, therefore inspiring others to do the same.

Catalog

If you were to catalog the inside of my mind, you might first find yourself looking into the folder of windows. Of light washed along a wall, speedy and bright. Flip through a foggy day, diffuse and airy, and land on a shadow cast down the wooden floor of a hallway, so dramatic and swollen that you almost don’t see the water reflections moving on the ceiling. “How did they get there?” you may find yourself saying, and so you add that wonder into your catalog too, tucked away to figure it out another day.

Next comes my children, glimpses of their eyelashes opening and closing before sleep, or perhaps during a waking; if my memory serves me, they look the same going in as they do coming out. I see them jumping in leaves now, joyful and never-ending, in a loop of laughter, dirt, and cold necks. Puddles of rain, they lay down together, squinting and smiling until they eventually give in and keep their eyes closed, heads touching, deepening their place in the ground by letting go of any hesitation and just learning how the rain feels on a face as it pours down and down without a laugh line to river through. A seat in a car, leaving it to dance on a wintery day when there is not much else to do but play in the car until the sun sets, orange and fiery over the marsh.

I can feel the back of a fern now, the spores bumpy on my fingers. This memory in the catalog starts early, where my fingers are smaller because I am the child learning about the world. Cut to yesterday, when I found a fern on the forest floor and habitually flipped it over to check for spores. I didn’t know the spores had a place in the catalog until I wrote this just now, but apparently they do. Before them comes the ferns, before the ferns comes my father, then a whole lot of bird baths somehow, and the sound of choke cherries falling onto the ground. Night swimming, full moons, laughter again. Thunderstorms, the way people sound when their mouths form letter “s”— how they are the same, and how they are different. I spend so much time on these things.

Which brings to me right now, as I catalog more, deepening the practice that I have lived life long, of spending time inside of a single second. The sound of my mouth when I say “single second,” and how my teeth feel different in my mouth today than they did when I first said “single second” so many years ago. Then I take that realization and drive home to hug three children and meet them where they are at that moment, paying attention to their “s” sounds and wondering where they will take me next.

Ants in the Garage

I found ants in the garage today, but all I can do is feel grateful for the eyes I used to find them.

I walk back into the studio--a spare bedroom on the first floor--and my thoughts are a dense flurry of stories and connections. So I think while I work quietly in a repetitive task that allows my mind to wander. My arm unintentionally brushes the stack of prepared mica on the old piano against the wall I sometimes use as a table, and I laugh as one jumps out into my hand. “Yes! It is your turn.” How easy it is to turn anything into its own being, like this tiny piece of mica who I imagined patiently waiting for her turn to shine in a sculpture. I carry her to the wall and connect her to the chain after she shows me where she wants to live.

I cannot make this up. The richness of these moments is sometimes too much for me to swallow whole. Instead, I bask in them and enjoy the time we have together while the ants potentially devour a part of our old leaning garage and inevitably cause a new eventful moment that will present itself at some other time.

Light Totems

This sculpture was brought to me like a gift, dropped out of the sky and into my mind. I took it, and since then has felt so easy, so clear. Almost too good to be true.

The work is meant to give back, suspended in air for the purpose of reacting to it; a long sigh, a windy day, a certain stillness in the evening. The work talks to the trees and responds, pushing the light around the room in a direct response to it. I have created something so of the moment that it gives back whatever you need at the time. Maybe you never notice it, and one day when you are desperate for some reaction in your life, you see the slight glint of the sunset reflected in the mica dangling off of the wall. Suddenly, you are brought into the moment. In this room. Feeling your heartbeat. For that second, you are so aware of your place in the family of things just from a speck of light. It is September, the air feels cool—you remember that you were thinking of getting a sweatshirt from your second drawer down.

This might sound silly but it really isn’t. The work is so effortless but serious, filled with lightness to remind you that you are here. The trees are moving, the sky is getting darker—where is the sun setting? I hope you go look.