At the Workbench

Acorn shells and walnut husks crackled underfoot on the gravel path as I walked toward the Erickson house, first homesteader in Lincoln County, less than half a mile from home at the Lincoln County Historical Museum. I put my hand against the logs first, rough, hewn, charred in places, weathered into every uneven edge a tool had left behind. Then I found the chinking between them, smooth, packed tight, sealing every gap the logs left open. Two different textures doing the same job of holding up a house, one rough enough to leave a mark on your hand and one smooth enough to disappear into it. The texture of living, right there under my palm.

A whippoorwill called somewhere off through the breeze, and a meadowlark answered it, that particular flute of a sound that belongs to nothing else. Cottonwood was already snowing its summer bounty, early by the calendar but generous anyway. Abundance everywhere, in the cabin and out of it. I stood there a while, on the day the country turns two hundred and fifty, before I noticed the house wasn’t finished with me yet.

Under the Surface

Standing there, it struck me that the cabin itself was telling the story of a life. The hand hewn logs are the hard parts, the difficulties everyone notices because they cannot help but notice them. The chinking is what seals it, the sweeter parts, packed in close enough to keep the weather out and whatever else a house needs kept out, duties I couldn’t fully name standing there but understood anyway. Friendships work that way too. So does family, and grace, and the thousand ordinary kindnesses that never make it into a history book but somehow make history possible anyway. Neither one holds up the house alone.

A little further down the grounds, a second house, the Fredricson place I believe, ordered whole from the Sears and Roebuck catalog in 1899 for twenty three hundred dollars. Stained glass, thick oak trim, turned balusters on the stairs, marquetry worked into some of the decorative areas on the walls, all of it cut and set and finished by hand. What I kept coming back to were the hinges on the doors, stamped or forged, I couldn’t tell which, decorative either way. They are hinges. Nobody sees them once the doors are hung. Somebody gave them a shape worth admiring anyway, small pieces of art built into something that disappears the moment they do their job. Making has never really been about utility alone.

Everything I touched that afternoon had been left behind by somebody else, the cabins, the tools, the craftsmanship, even the museum itself, standing because someone decided the story was worth keeping. None of it belonged to me. All of it had become part of my life simply because I arrived later. Maybe that’s what the country’s two hundred and fiftieth really asks of a person, not fireworks so much as inheritance. Not money. Responsibility.

Studio Notes

Elise’s table is starting to feel like it has more days behind it than ahead of it. A few small holes to fill before the flood coat goes on the bottom, then a channel to rout for the steel support that nobody will notice once it’s set, a box to build underneath that holds the whole top in place and will never be looked at again once the table is standing in her house doing its job, and finally one last topcoat on the surface itself. Nobody will run a hand along the underside the way I ran mine along those hinges.

Dad always taught us to figure things out on our own, not to borrow tools or anything else from people if we could help it. On the rare occasion we did borrow something, it went back better than it came, a small repair made first if it needed one. If the unthinkable happened and something got broken, lost, or stolen, you replaced it immediately with the best quality you could find, even if you couldn’t really afford it. Simpler times, maybe. But standing in that homestead house on the day the country turns two hundred and fifty, it felt like more than a rule about tools. It felt close to the whole reason anyone forges a hinge nobody will see, or fills a hole in the underside of a table only the table will ever know about.

I came home with more photographs of texture than I meant to take, the way I always do. And somewhere in all of it, I saw an old friend. That’s what I’ll paint this week.

On the Table

One footnote from the museum that stuck with me: the standard homestead land grant was 160 acres, but out in the Nebraska sandhills that never worked. Normal ranching and farming techniques don’t hold up in sandy soil, so eventually the grant here was raised to a full section, 640 acres, just so a family had a chance at making the numbers survive. Even the government eventually admitted the land needed different rules than the ones written for everywhere else. Worth remembering next time a method you inherited stops working and the answer isn’t to try harder at it, but to change the size of the problem.

In Good Company

Watch: Frontier House (PBS, 2002), a six-part series that put three modern families on real homesteads in Montana to live as 1880s settlers would have, working with only the tools and skills of the period. It’s not romantic about it. The show doesn’t flinch from how hard the work actually is or how thin the margin for survival was, which is exactly the kind of unglamorous inheritance this issue keeps circling back to. Free to stream on pbs.org.

Read: Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America. Berry has spent decades writing about land, husbandry, and the difference between working a place and merely using it. He argues that care and craft aren’t separate from the land, they’re what keeps a person in right relationship with it. It’s the closest thing I know to a book-length version of the hinge. First choice would be to buy the book from your local mom and pop book store. If that doesn’t work the link is for your convenience. (NOTE: that is an affiliate link from Amazon. My understanding is that substack penalizes us for using them. Thats ok, I am not doing it for the pennies that it might earn. I am doing it to save any reader some time)

Listen: 99% Invisible just launched a new series called A History of the United States in 100 Objects, timed to the country’s 250th, hosted by Roman Mars. Each episode takes one physical object, a coin, a screw, a schoolbook, and follows the history hidden inside it. It’s the hinge idea turned into a whole show, and the timing couldn’t be better this week.

A Quiet Note

Unhurried Letters is built around the same instinct this issue keeps returning to, that some things are worth making even though, maybe especially because, they will not last forever in their original form. A handwritten story, a limited edition fine art print, a recipe card, each one made once and sent once for you to open slowly and take 20 minutes, just for you. You can learn more at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

You will make things this week that nobody sees. A seam sanded flush, a hole filled and hidden under a coat you already know is coming, a hinge nobody will ever notice was stamped instead of just poured out cheap. Do it well anyway. That may be the quietest kind of inheritance there is, whether it’s a nation, a family, a friendship, or a studio, receiving something with gratitude, improving it where you can, and handing it on a little better than you found it.

Stamped or forged, decorative either way.

Tio

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At the Workbench

For whatever reason it was a struggle this week to write something I liked. Some days are like that. So, even though I missed the boat, I resolve to show up consistently (I am unraveling that decision in my journal this week.) Some weeks journal and writing are just blah. Kind of like a painting I let go to mud. This piece, I feel, is mud but here we go anyway. Last week I spent some of a week testing many of the hand printing processes from my past against a set of old FSA photographs. FSA photographs are documentary images created by photographers working for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression to document rural poverty, migration, and everyday American life. The large format negatives and positives I made from the public domain downloads were tested with cyanotype under the UV unit, kallitype, Van Dyke brown, salt printing, chasing something I couldn’t name and not finding it in any of them. I wrote about that hunt on the studio blog if you want the full account of what didn’t work and why. That post already covers why I actually chose bond paper. What it doesn’t get into is what it means that I picked a material that isn’t built to last, and that’s the part I keep thinking about.

In the middle of that week, unrelated to any of it, I found an old photograph of my oldest daughter leaning against the studio library wall, propped among some unpacked boxes, hand embellished decades ago in conté and pastel, a process I started in the late seventies and apparently never put down. When the bond prints are ready, I’ll bring them home and start working them by hand, and I already know that first pass is going to feel like picking up an old argument I never finished having.

Under the Surface

None of that decision was really about archival anything, at least not on the surface. The real reason arrived a few days later, standing at the sink doing dishes, not thinking about paper or FSA photographs or anything else, when a thought just showed up on its own. Two thirds of the sand is on the bottom of the glass now. Not a number I sat down and calculated, just an hourglass image that arrived fully formed, the kind of math you don’t do on purpose.

I want to be careful here, because that sentence can sound heavier than it is meant to be. I am nowhere near the end of anything, as far as I can tell. There is a long list of people and places and work still ahead, and most days I feel more awake to my own life than I did twenty years ago, not less. But there is a particular kind of awareness that shows up somewhere in your fifties and sixties that was not there before, a low steady hum underneath the ordinary hours. Time is not neutral anymore. It is moving, and you can feel it moving, whether you are ready or not.

That hum tends to bring a question with it. Did I make a difference. What was any of it for. Now what. I used to assume that question was a sign something had gone wrong, some private failure to have it figured out by now. It turns out the question isn’t a malfunction. It’s on schedule.

There is a name for this, it turns out. The psychologist Erik Erikson called it generativity versus stagnation, a stretch of adulthood built around this exact question, keep contributing or start coasting. I did not go looking for the term. I ran into it after the fact, and there was something steadying about seeing it named, not because it explained the feeling away, more because it meant I had not invented it out of nowhere. Maybe that is just me finding a fancy word for something everybody already knows by fifty. Probably. I still liked finding it.

Simone de Beauvoir was thinking about the same territory a different way, in a book called The Coming of Age. Her argument, more or less: old age only turns into what she called a parody of life once you stop pursuing anything that gives your days meaning. Not permanence. Just staying attached to something outside yourself, work or people or a cause, something strong enough to keep you from turning inward and stopping there. I do not think the drive to matter is the flawed part. I think the flawed part is assuming it has to look like a monument.

For months I had been drawn to the opposite of all that, without understanding why until this piece came together. Back in February I was experimenting with anthotypes for a completely different project, plant based emulsions that fade under the very light that formed them. I liked the temporal nature of it at the time, slow art that also gets to end. You can scan a print and save the file, but the original is going to fade the way the plant that made it faded, the way we all will too. I did not think much more about it then. I just kept the thought sitting there.

Bond paper is doing the same work with different material. The original Lange and Evans negatives are kept the way archives keep things, climate controlled, cataloged, the actual paper locked away and untouched while the rest of us just access digital files. Working from plain bond is the opposite choice, on purpose. My version was never trying to be archival. It is going to amber and yellow and carry the mark of every year I keep touching it, aging the way a working object ages instead of the way a preserved one does.

I can already feel the discomfort waiting in that, putting my hands on someone else’s witness, printing faces I did not take, working them over with my own materials, knowing my version will not outlast me either. I do not expect that discomfort to go away once I actually start. I am not sure I want it to. The plainest paper in the building is not a claim that I am improving anything those photographers made. It is just a way of staying in the conversation instead of sealing it shut.

Maybe that is the actual answer to two thirds of a glass of sand, not to build something that outlasts it, but to keep my hands in the part that is still falling.That is the card stock. That is the t-shirt pricing. The goat was already finished the moment I laughed. The joy did not need a product line to justify itself. But forty years of making a living from whatever I love, forty years of the reflex that says if you love it then figure out how to sell it, that is a deep groove. It does not wait for permission. It does not even announce itself. It just starts running, the way my old travel planning used to run, mapping the route before I had decided whether I even wanted to take the trip. The planning replaces the experience. The product replaces the painting. And you find yourself three animals into a series before you have finished standing in front of the first one.

Studio Notes

Three weeks left on a table I’m building for my daughter. She moves at the end of July, and I wanted this to be finished and in her hands before the truck shows up, not shipped later as an afterthought.

Six weeks out from some travel. My son is playing for Team USA at the World Wheelchair Rugby Championships in Brazil next month, and I’ll be there watching. Planning starts now, flights, logistics, all of it, and I’m not even a little bit bothered by the paperwork this time.

The farm animal series is still going in the background too, low pressure, no name for it yet beyond what it obviously is. The Emotional Support Goat started it, and Life Coach Pig Winston has been keeping him company on the easel most weeks since.

On the Table

A small, completable thing.

Skip the bucket list this week. A bucket list points forward at things not yet done, which is its own kind of permanence chasing. Instead, do two things. First, write down three moments from the last year where you kept something going rather than starting or finishing it. A relationship you tended. A skill you kept practicing past the point of novelty. A piece of work you returned to instead of setting aside for good. Second, cut five small cards and write one continuation act on each. Water something. Mend something. Call the person you have been meaning to call. Sketch for five minutes. Read one page of the thing you stalled out on. Shuffle them. Draw one each morning this week and just do the card. No plan beyond that.

In Good Company

Watch: In 1963 a man named Jerry Gretzinger started doodling a map of an imaginary city to get through a tedious job. He set it aside in 1983. Twenty years later his son found it in the attic and asked what it was, and Gretzinger dusted it off and kept going. The map is now thousands of hand worked panels, and the entire process runs on a deck of instruction cards he built himself, paint this panel, retire this card, do a journal entry, shuffle the deck. He is well into his eighties now and still draws a card most days. There is video of him at work at jerrysmap.com.

Read: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age. Dense, but worth reading slowly, highlighter in hand. You can order it at most of your local bookstores. Support mom and pop businesses first. If you can’t get it locally, here is an affiliate link for your convenience. https://amzn.to/4eFWK9F

Listen: On Being with Krista Tippett, the 2015 conversation with Mary Catherine Bateson called “Living as an Improvisational Art.” She calls the extra decades most of us now get after fifty “active wisdom,” a genuinely new stage of life, not an extension of old age tacked onto the end.

A Quiet Note

Unhurried Letters is built around the same instinct this issue keeps returning to, that some things are worth making even though, maybe especially because, they will not last forever in their original form. A handwritten story, a limited edition fine art print, a recipe card, each one made once and sent once for you to open slowly and take 20 minutes, just for you. You can learn more at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

The sand does not care whether you build a monument or a mandala. It does not care whether you shuffle a deck of cards for sixty years either. It is going to keep moving regardless. The only real choice in front of any of us is whether our hands are in something while it does.

Tio

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At the Workbench

If I am honest about it, this week gets an F. A big one, the kind a teacher puts at the top of the paper in red ink so there is no ambiguity. Not because nothing happened. Too much happened. A tooth came out Monday. Amazing doc, very little pain from the extraction. Cool. Pickleball five days this week. A video call with a friend in Ireland sorting out the real details of me going over to dog and studio sit for a month this fall while she travels to teach, the two of us going back and forth about the property, the house, the area and how I will likely just live, experience and photograph rather than paint. An art reception. Hours in the studio with Suno making music, which is its own rabbit hole I am not ready to talk about yet. A goat painting I will get to in a minute. And directly before the reception, two hours in the mud at the arena photographing Mutton Bustin’.

A full list. An impressive list, even. The problem is that almost none of it was experienced. It was catalogued. I moved through the week the way I used to travel, which is to say I planned the joy right out of it.

I used to be the person who mapped every trip to the minute. Departure timed to avoid traffic through major city hubs. Bathroom and food stops calculated. The engineers reading this are nodding, and I get it, I loved that part too, the research and the fiddling with the details. The challenge is that by the time I got in the car the fun had already happened. The planning was the trip. The actual driving was just the part where I confirmed what I already knew.

These days I much prefer the version where I wake up and get in the car and just start going, maybe somewhere that struck me while I was sleeping, maybe nowhere in particular, and the not knowing is the whole point. I am fully aware that some of you just felt your chest tighten reading that. But think back on the times you have felt most alive. I do not know about yours, but most of mine were not planned.

This week had that same old destination-travel energy. A full itinerary, every slot accounted for, not enough room in any of it to actually be where I was while I was there. Busy, not full. We have talked about this before, the difference between those two words, and it keeps coming back around because I keep needing the reminder.

Busy is a to-do list that keeps cropping up in your brain with not enough check marks on the completion side. Full is being tired in a different way, the kind where the soreness evaporates with the balm of contentment. I was not content this week. I was accomplished. Those are not the same feeling. Accomplished is not the goal. Living is.

Except for the sheep.

It had rained most of the day. The barometric pressure was the kind you can feel in the hair on your arms, everything standing at attention, the air heavy and electric. The groomed floor of the arena had gone to mud, thick and sticking to my boots, each step noticeably heavier than the one before. Klingons, my brain said, unbidden, referring to the mud on my boots. But because I cannot help my geekiness a Star Trek reference registered before I could stop it, and I snickered at myself standing there in the mud with a camera. I still remember thinking as a kid growing up in an ag environment, I want to be a cowboy, I can ride that soft fuzzy thing. I mean how hard can it be? Kind, gentle creatures, not a bull, not a bronc.

The chute is smaller than you expect. Boots, hat, small chaps passed down from some unknown buckaroo, dragging the muddy ground. Hat set aside for the now mandatory helmet, which is a good idea. Real cowboys on either side in the chute. The rain clouds break and the coolness of the overcast begins to lift as the sun comes through as if clearing the lens for a better view. And then the kid’s face. There is a moment, and it lasts about half a second, where the expression shifts from I’ve got this to something I can only describe as theological. The sheep is not on board. The sheep has never been on board. A fist full of wool. The chute opens. The sheep explodes toward the center of the arena. Two seconds, maybe, before the ground meets the kid’s face and the cowboys’ hands are already lifting. Helmet was a good call. And the kid is asking to get back in line before the mud is off.

I could barely hold the camera. I was laughing and shooting and completely, entirely there, not checking the time, not thinking about the next thing, not cataloguing. Just in it. Two hours in the mud and I could not tell you where a single minute went. That is what full feels like. That is the grade I am actually grading for.

The only other time it happened this week was the goat.

I finished a painting, a small portrait of a goat I have been calling Certified Emotional Support Goat, and I laughed out loud, alone, standing at the easel with a brush still in my hand. I do not think that has happened before, not like that. I have painted things I am proud of, things that taught me something. But laughing alone at something I made? That was new. I love this painting more than is reasonable for a single small portrait of a farm animal. There is a look on this goat’s face that I will not describe because some of you will see it soon enough, but whatever it is, I did not plan it and I am not entirely sure how it got there.

And then, not five minutes past the laugh, I was already pricing card stock. I had a whole series in my head. The Certified Emotional Support Goat. The Life Coach Pig. The Risk Management Donkey. The Mindfulness Cow. The Emergency Preparedness Chicken. I was three animals deep into a product line before I had finished enjoying the first painting. Seriously. Where does it stop? Sometimes I want a bright red shutdown button, something like the Staples Easy button, where I could just stop the barrage of thoughts and ideas that fill up journal pages and books only to die when the ink dries because I will never get to all of them.

Under the Surface

Arthur Koestler had a word for the thing that happened with both the sheep and the goat. He called it bisociation, and his argument was that creative insight, and humor, come from the collision of two frames of reference that do not normally touch. Not from depth in one. From the distance between them. The spark is in the gap.

This week was nothing but gaps. A tooth extraction has no business next to a pickleball league. Pickleball has no business next to a conversation about watering someone’s garden in Ireland. None of that connects to photographing children on sheep, which connects to nothing about painting a goat with a look on its face I cannot explain. There was no theme to the week, no throughline, no plan. And the two moments that were most alive, the only two I would not trade, came out of that exact chaos. Not despite the scatter. Out of it. The goat painting did not come from a studio session I scheduled. It came from a week that left enough disorder in the air for something funny to show up unannounced.

There is a study from 1973 that puts a finer point on the other half of this. Researchers at Stanford watched preschoolers who loved drawing with felt-tip markers, kids who would choose markers over anything else during free play just because they liked it. One group was told before they drew that they would receive a Good Player award, a certificate with a gold star and a ribbon. Another group got the same award afterward, no warning. A third group just drew. Two weeks later, the kids who had been promised the reward drew about half as much on their own. The other groups were unchanged. The external reason had quietly replaced the original one, the one that was already working, and when the reward went away the motivation went with it.

Psychologists call it the over justification effect. Lay a visible, expected reason on top of something that was already complete in itself, and the new reason does not add to the old one. It replaces it.

That is the card stock. That is the t-shirt pricing. The goat was already finished the moment I laughed. The joy did not need a product line to justify itself. But forty years of making a living from whatever I love, forty years of the reflex that says if you love it then figure out how to sell it, that is a deep groove. It does not wait for permission. It does not even announce itself. It just starts running, the way my old travel planning used to run, mapping the route before I had decided whether I even wanted to take the trip. The planning replaces the experience. The product replaces the painting. And you find yourself three animals into a series before you have finished standing in front of the first one.

Studio Notes

I have been asking myself one question before I let an idea go anywhere: would I still be glad I made this if not one single person ever bought it? For the goat the answer is yes without hesitation. I would hang it on my own wall and walk past it every morning and it would still be doing its job, which is making me smile. That matters to me because it means the series, if it happens, and it probably will because those animals are too funny not to paint, gets to start from a place I trust. Not this could be a product line. Just this is funny and I want more of it.

The outcome might look the same from the outside. A shelf of whimsical farm animals is a shelf of whimsical farm animals no matter how it started. But I have watched enough of my own work to know that the starting engine changes how the thing feels in my hands while I am making it. Work that begins in delight and picks up a price tag later still feels like mine the whole way through. The brush stays loose. The surprises keep coming. Work that begins as a product starts tightening somewhere around the second piece. You stop following the funny and start following the plan, and the funny is the first thing to leave.

On the Table

A small, completable thing.

Think about the last time you were fully in something, not productive, not accomplishing, just in it. If it was recent, good. If you cannot think of one, that is worth paying attention to. And then ask yourself whether the things filling your week are filling you, or just filling the calendar. They are not the same, and the difference is not always obvious until you stop long enough to check.

In Good Company

Something cool to watch. Camera (2024), streaming on Amazon Prime. A nine-year-old boy who cannot speak moves to a small fishing town and finds his voice through a broken film camera and an unlikely friendship with the local repair shop owner, played by Beau Bridges. It is slow and quiet and unhurried in the best way, and one reviewer said something that stuck with me: the message about not forgetting to live the moment might have been speakin’ to me. That feels about right for this week.

Don’t forget to excercise your reading muscle. The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker. Not a cover-to-cover book. One hundred and thirty-one short prompts for paying attention to the world directly in front of you. Pick one, try it, put the book down. It is the On the Table section in book form. Yup, that is an Amazon affiliate link. Put more there for your convenience than the .22 cents I might earn if you click on it and buy something from Amazon while you are there.

Listen: Hurry Slowly, a podcast by Jocelyn K. Glei. The whole show lives in the territory between productivity and meaning, which is more or less where this issue lives too. Start anywhere.

If you want to go deeper: Arthur Koestler’s bisociation framework comes from The Act of Creation (1964). The overjustification study is Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett, “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1973.

A Quiet Note

The next Unhurried Letters fine art print is already chosen, already printed, on its way next Tuesday to the paid subscribers, set to arrive in the first week of July depending on how slow the snail moves. I am not going to tell you what it is here. That belongs to the people who signed up to be surprised by an envelope in snail mail, not a newsletter online. If you would rather be one of the people opening it next time instead of reading about it afterward, that is what Unhurried Letters is for. Oh and just for hanging on and reading this far. I have several sample copies of Unhurried Letters that I will be sending out on June 30 with the regular mailing to subscribers. If you want one, message me from the link above and send me your snail mail address. They are going out June 30, so this opportunity is only until then. Why would I give a few away? Simple. I want you to experience it and once you do I hope you will sign up. No hidden agenda.

If you have been thinking about it: unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

I gave this week an F at the top of the page and I meant it when I wrote it. But I have been thinking about it since, and I think the F is for the wrong class. Graded on productivity, on boxes checked and things accomplished, the week is fine. Everything got done. Graded on whether I was actually alive while it was happening, on whether I was in the car or still at the kitchen table planning the route, that is where the F belongs. Two moments out of seven days. The sheep and the goat. Everything else was destination traveling.

I am not sure what to do with that yet. I do not have a tidy answer. But I know what full feels like now because I felt it twice this week, and I know what busy feels like because I felt it the rest of the time, and the difference between them was not the activity. It was whether I was there for it.

Keep making. Even the silly stuff. Especially the silly stuff.

Tio

One-Click Check-In

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At the Workbench

I was at the kitchen table Tuesday morning with an espresso, which I want to say upfront is not my everyday ritual. Some mornings I just need to shift into something sharper, a little ceremony of attention before the day gets loud, and that is what the espresso is for. I don’t really drink coffee but a tasty espresso, an occasional ritual that I picked up in Italy, seems to sharpen my focus overriding some neurodivergence. I had been moving slowly all week, energy lower than I like, and I was scrolling in that loose way you do when you are not quite ready to begin anything real. That kind of unhurried noticing has gotten easier the longer I have done this, not because I have more time, but because I have stopped needing every morning to produce something.

A video stopped me. A few seconds of Native Lakota men raising a teepee together, hands on the poles, the frame going up against open sky. I do not know exactly why I stopped. Something about the movement. The unhurried coordination of it, the way the work required all of them, nobody doing it alone, nobody performing it either. I put my headphones on, turned the sound up, and found myself watching a Playing for Change feature on the Doors’ Riders on the Storm, with John Densmore in conversation and Lakota drummers woven through the original track.

The drumming came in and I felt that familiar thump in my chest. Not a grand moment. Not tears. Just a quiet internal movement, the kind you barely notice unless you are paying attention and the espresso has not pulled you fully into the day yet. Densmore was talking about the storm, about being carried rather than driving, and the drums underneath him were doing something to the song I had heard a hundred times. Making it older somehow. Making it feel like it had always been there.

I listened for longer than I intended. The espresso went cold and I did not notice until it was over. (continued beneath the image)

Under the Surface

Here is what I think was actually happening, and I mean this less as an explanation and more as something I am still working out.

The brain does not receive things in a neutral way. Every piece of music, every image, every made thing arrives into a landscape that already exists inside of us, a landscape built from everywhere we have been and everything we have lived. Neuroscientists call this predictive processing. Our brain is not passively taking in experience. It is constantly making predictions based on what it already knows, and what arrives either confirms those predictions or surprises them. The moments that stop us are usually the ones that arrive unexpectedly, finding something in us we did not know was there to be found. They find a door we did not know was there.

My connection to the Lakota is not abstract. Pine Ridge is not far from where I live, and a few years back I spent time with a crew of high school students building an earth bag structure, work that had nothing to do with ceremony, just hands and bags and sun. But partway through the week we were invited to something that did. First to watch the fire ceremony, a long and exact process, certain rocks the Lakota called “grandfathers” chosen and set into the sacred fire to heat before the firekeeper carried them over to the lodge itself. Then, separately, invited again, to go through the sweat. What a blessing. I remember the dark most. Not the kind you get used to, the kind that stays total the whole time. Bodies pressed in close around the heated rocks, shoulder against shoulder, and somehow that closeness felt less like crowding and more like being held up. Then the singing started, and the drum under it, and I could not tell you anymore where the sound was coming from or where I ended and it began. It was an out of body experience in the most literal sense I know, the kind people spend a lot of effort chasing by other means, and here it had just arrived, on its own, in the dark, with that drum going.

Sitting there, I was not thinking about myself at all. So when those drums came through my headphones years later and met Densmore’s voice, something in me recognized something I could not have recognized any other way. Not the music itself, I know the Doors well enough. It was the drumming finding a register in me that had already been opened once, in a different dark, by different hands. This is not the same experience someone else would have had watching the same video. Two people can encounter the same piece of work and receive entirely different things, not because one is more perceptive or more educated, but because they are bringing a different landscape of experiences to it. Our life is the instrument through which art is received, as much as the work itself.

Studio Notes

I have been thinking about this in relation to making, not just receiving.

If the landscape of lived experience shapes what we receive, it also shapes what we make. The places we have been, the grief we have carried, the joy that surprised us, the specific quality of light on a particular morning years ago that you have never quite named, all of it is in there somewhere, showing up in decisions we make when creating that we cannot fully explain even to ourself. That is not mysticism. It is just how human making works. We cannot make from nowhere. We make from the accumulated weight of where we have been.

This is part of why I think the multipotentialite path, the wide-ranging, never-quite-specializing, always-accumulating path, produces something that a narrower path cannot. Every practice we have picked up, every place we have been willing to go as a learner, every experience we have let matter, it all goes into the landscape. It all becomes part of what we bring to what we hear, see, feel, and what we bring to what we make. Maybe I am just justifying my complete lack of capability, or interest for that matter, to specialize. Probably. But I do not think the landscape argument is wrong on that account. Here is the part I actually believe past the joke. A maker does not get less relevant with age. The landscape just keeps getting deeper, and there is more of it to draw from every year, not less.

On the Table

Playing for Change is worth knowing if you do not already. They record musicians around the world in their own environments and layer the tracks together. The results are not always polished. They are almost always moving. This one is worth the headphones and a slow cup of something.

Behind the Song: Riders on the Storm | John Densmore | Playing for Change:

If the multipotentialite thread resonates, Emilie Wapnick gave a TED talk in 2015 called Why Some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling that is still one of the clearest things I have found on the subject. Short, direct, and it will make a few things click into place if they have not already. Maybe my second favorite TED talk after the Sir Kenneth Robinson’s one on educating creativity out of kids.

Emilie Wapnick | TED Talk | Why Some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling

The broader question I keep coming back to: what is in your landscape that shapes what you make without you fully knowing it? What place, what person, what unlikely experience is in there somewhere, waiting to surface in the work?

A Quiet Note

Unhurried Letters is a physical mail subscription, handwritten travel stories, a fine art print, a recipe card, and a postcard, arriving by mail in the middle of a world that mostly communicates at speed. If that sounds like the right kind of slow, you can find it at unhurriedletters.com. This month’s letter is really fun and outlines a flight from Portugal to Ireland. I am sure that many peeps can relate to what happened. Anyway, Unhurried Letters is a fifteen minute break from the digital world. Slow down and read a real letter, check out a 5x7 handsigned, limited edition print from the story, make the meal from the recipe card and then send out the included postcard to a friend. Cool.

If you have been thinking about it: unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

You cannot always know what is going to stop you on a Tuesday morning. You cannot engineer the collision. But you can keep putting yourself in the path of things, keep accumulating the experiences that deepen the landscape, keep being willing to go somewhere new and let it matter. The work you make ten years from now will carry things you have not lived yet. That is a reason to keep living them. That is not a countdown. It is more landscape arriving, on schedule, whether you go looking for it or not.

Go find something that surprises you this week. Put your headphones on.

Keep making. Keep growing. Be you.

Tio

One-Click Check-In

If you want to read this later or find other issues, you can find them here or hit subscribe.

At the Workbench

The robin starts before the sun shows. By the time the sky begins to lighten he has already been at it a while, and the cardinal joins him, and then the mourning doves, and then from the field just down the path comes the meadowlark, that particular flute-like sound that does not belong to any other bird. I have been out here most mornings now, mug in both hands, watching all of this etch itself into the day, the way I had no time to do before. It is my favorite fifteen minutes.

Then the meadowlark stopped.

Not the others, just him. A small quiet gap in the ensemble, and then the rest continued without him. I did not look at the sky. I already knew. When the meadowlark leaves the morning, rain is coming or is already here.

My first feeling was disappointment. I had a list that Tuesday, the good kind, every item something I had been genuinely waiting for a gap in the schedule to finally reach. The woodshop had a full morning in it: sorting through the wood stores stacked on the floor and along the walls, deciding what goes on the rack, what gets set aside for building garden beds, what gets burned or given away. The grapes were overdue for cutting back. There was a stretch of garden bed I had been looking forward to getting my hands into, elderberry to thin, a few hours of that work that feels less like labor and more like a conversation with something that has been patient with you. The rain closed all of it before the first drop fell.

Then came the guilt, which might seem like a strange sequence. We are in a drought. The garden needs this, the yard needs this, the whole ag community around us needs this. Whatever I wanted from the day, the land wanted something else, and the land was right. I reframed, the way you do, told myself the office had things that needed doing, found some equanimity about it. But the thistle was still at the edge of the bed, and the seed heads were still forming, and the clock on that particular problem does not pause for rain.

Field thistle blooms purple. Not the washed-out purple of something ordinary but a deep, architectural color, precise and almost formal, the kind of thing that stops you when you come around a corner and find it unexpectedly. There is an argument for letting it go a few more days. The garden has been hard and unglamorous work for weeks, and something that looks like that feels like a small reward for the effort. I have made that argument to myself before. But I know what comes after. Once those heads mature and the first real sun hits them after a wet spell, the seeds go everywhere. What was one manageable bed becomes a three-year conversation with thistle across the whole yard. The window between beautiful and compounding is genuinely short, and it does not announce itself.

It just closes.

The rain stopped late in the afternoon. I went out with a sharp hoe and cut every thistle at the ground, left everything where it fell except the ones with heads already forming, those I carted off since a cut thistle head can still open and seed if it has come far enough along. The roots stayed in the soil. Then cardboard over the whole bed, weighted at the edges, wet well, and four to six inches of woodchips on top. A few hours of work. By late summer that ground will be ready to plant into. By next spring it should be among the most productive beds I have.

The thistle made it that way. The plant I spent the afternoon cutting down is the reason the soil will be worth planting into.

None of that happens if I wait for a better day.

Under the Surface

In permaculture, thistle is not a weed. It is a reading of the soil. Field thistle grows specifically in compacted, disturbed ground, places where something happened and the soil has not had time to recover. The taproot drives straight down through hardpan clay, and when the plant dies, that root decomposes in place and leaves behind a channel for water and air to travel deeper than they could reach before. It builds the infrastructure that more complex plants will need later. It shows up for the hard early work, does what only it can do, and is said to disappear on its own once the job is done.

I got a look at what that work actually produces when I moved a few small logs left in one corner of that same bed last fall, remnants of a diseased almond tree I cut down. Three or four logs, maybe three or four inches across, tucked into a two-foot patch while the thistle grew up all around them. When I lifted them out, the soil underneath was black. Not just dark, but that deep, living black that means something has been happening there in the quiet, roly-polys scattering, centipedes moving fast toward the edges, worms, small spiders, all of it suddenly exposed and going about its work in every direction. That small corner, untouched and left alone, had already become something. The rest of the bed was still compacted. That patch was ready.

Ecologists call the larger process succession. Pioneer plants are the first stage, not the destination. They are the work that makes everything else possible, and they do it whether or not anyone is watching.

Every space I work in right now is in pioneer conditions. The woodshop, the metal shop, the studio, the yard, all of the beds. None of them where I want them yet. What is strange about standing in the middle of all this is that I have done most of it before, decades of it, studios built and gardens kept and workspaces made functional. The pioneer conditions have nothing to do with inexperience. They have to do with disturbance, with what happens when something in the shape of a life shifts significantly enough that the ground needs to be read again from the start.

Retirement is a disturbance event. A real one. So is a daughter’s wedding, aging parents that require help, an autistic son going through a rough season. The soil of a life compacts gradually, maintenance deferred a little at a time while the one thing that needs everything gets everything. And then the constraint lifts. The shape of the day opens. What you find underneath is not a blank slate. It is ground that has been through something and is ready, now, to be worked with again. The tangle is not evidence of failure. It is the first stage of the repair.

The thistle does not mean the garden is ruined. It means the garden is ready to come back.

And the flower is real. The beauty of it is not incidental. Something doing hard, unglamorous work in damaged soil produces a bloom worth stopping for. The impulse to stay with it a few more days is not wrong. It just has to be honest about the clock. The cost of waiting is not paid now. It is paid later, quietly, by a future version of you working through a yard full of thistle you could have managed in a single afternoon.

Studio Notes

I went into the studio once this week. Once, in a week that ran closer to forty hours of physical work in the woodshop and the garden. There is a quality to how the studio feels when you have been away from it, not dramatic, just present, the way a room with unfinished work in it registers somewhere at the edge of your awareness even when you are fully absorbed in something else.

The work outside has been genuinely satisfying. There is real reward in sorting through a stack of wood and making decisions about what it becomes, in cutting thistle at the root, in laying cardboard over ground that is finally getting what it needs. That is true. And the studio is still there, still waiting, and those two things are not in competition. They are both part of the same season.

The woodshop is nowhere near finished. Weeks of work left, equipment to move into position, wall sections to complete, the floor still mostly buried under years of accumulated material. But I can see exactly what it will be. The stove going this fall, the floor worn in the way a workspace gets worn when it is actually being used, working on something unhurried while the light comes through windows that open smoothly because I cleaned the weep holes in June. That is not a fantasy waiting at the end of the real work. That is the succession I am in, and the pioneer stage is happening right now.

Sometimes slow living is the slow work of the studio. Sometimes it is the slower work of earning the conditions for the studio to become what it needs to be. And sometimes it means just living, simply, with quiet contentment while life itself is rearranged by the master Creator allowing for the next season that we can’t see.

On the Table

The kombucha took a hit this week. My SCOBY hotel developed mold, which has happened exactly once in twenty-plus years of fermenting tea, and I had to start over from scratch. New starter, fresh tea, back to the beginning. There is something almost funny about it in the context of everything else happening right now. Pioneer conditions, all the way down. The new batch is going and it will be fine. These things always come back.

A Quiet Note

If any of this resonates, the pioneer conditions and the rebuilding and the longer, slower view of what a creative life actually looks like from the inside, that is the territory Unhurried Letters covers. Once a month: a handwritten story, a fine art print, a recipe card, a postcard. Something made and sent through the mail. The physical counterweight to all the noise.

If you have been thinking about it: unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

Pioneer plants are not confused about their role. They do not wish they were the oak tree. They do the specific work that only they can do in this particular moment, and then they make room for what comes next.

Whatever stage you are in right now, whether you are cutting things back, lifting logs to see what is already alive underneath, waiting out the rain, or finally in the long middle season of tending something that has taken real hold, you are in the right stage. The sequence is doing what sequences do.

Keep making. Keep growing. Be you.

Tio

One-Click Check-In

If you want to read this later or find other issues, you can find them here or hit subscribe.

At the Workbench

Jim was filling his 95 Ford at the pump in Bird City, Kansas when I pulled in for fuel. Two different people walked up to him mid-sentence and started talking, the easy way people do in small towns where everyone already knows the story. Did Jerry get the bearings repacked? How is Amy doing this afternoon? He asked where I was headed. I told him Limon, Colorado. He gave me directions without hesitation, the kind that come from knowing every road by memory rather than a screen. I told him I needed a paper map rather than a gps on my phone. He chuckled knowingly and replied something about us growing up with paper. Turn west at Wheeler, unincorporated ghost town, takes you straight to Goodland, hop on I-70, you’re in.

I asked about food. He didn’t quite roll his eyes but there was a glint there, something amused. He thumbed over his shoulder. Best Mexican restaurant in the state, he said, right there. He was not wrong. Chicken burrito at Los Jarochos, Bird City, Kansas, middle of nowhere, genuinely one of the better meals I’ve had in recent memory. I sat eating slowly taking in the pace, the place and the moment before getting back in the truck. The sky to the west had gone a particular shade of gray that I’ve learned to pay attention to. The day had already been more than I planned for, and it wasn’t close to finished.

Under the Surface

I’d left home that morning chasing a Tarpon 105 kayak in excellent condition at a good price, four hours south and west. The kind of find that makes you rearrange a Monday. I had seven missed calls by the time I cleared Nebraska. My youngest son is neurodivergent and lives in a supported situation in a city four hours from me. He had escalated during the morning, something about his living arrangement, and by the time I was deep into Kansas backroads with a dying phone and no charger, the calls were stacking up. His caseworker. A police officer who had eyes on him but couldn’t file a missing persons report because technically he wasn’t missing. His mother, upset, calling from her end of the situation. Noah himself, not picking up for me. The thing about a crisis at distance is that you are doing something with your hands, in this case driving through a patchwork of section roads across the Kansas high plains, while your mind is somewhere else entirely. You stay functional. You keep moving. There isn’t much else available to you.

I picked up the kayak in Limon in under fifteen minutes, loaded it, strapped it down, and pointed the truck east toward home. The sky had gone green by then, the particular green that means business. Small hail started coming down and building up on the road. My phone, down to almost nothing, showed me on the doppler that I was skirting the edge of something serious if I stayed straight. Staying straight seemed like the right call.

I noticed the section roads when I got past Last Chance, which is an actual town and whose name felt fitting given the afternoon I’d had. A half dozen cars on the road to the left. More on the right. Not regular cars. Storm chasers, geared and waiting. A two-ton truck with a full doppler array on top came up fast behind me and flew past, followed by several more. By the time a tornado touched down in the field to my left I had chasers in front, chasers behind, and chasers running parallel on both sides.

Another one touched down to my right, maybe a quarter mile ahead.

I slowed. Thought about it. The chasers in front of me turned east at the next section road, which meant they were moving toward it, which meant if I kept going straight, I was moving away from it. I kept going straight. The hail stopped somewhere past Woodrow, Colorado. By Brush it was just rain. By the interstate it was clearing. I drove home elevated, exhausted, and holding a low-grade sadness about my son that wouldn’t resolve itself until late that night when the hospital finally got involved and he was somewhere safe.

A typical day. All is good.

Studio Notes

I have been trying to figure out what to call the thing that makes a person drive four hours into an uncertain sky to pick up a kayak on a day when everything else is already complicated. It is not recklessness exactly. It’s not even optimism, though there’s some of that. It’s more like an orientation. A persistent leaning toward rather than away.

I built a digital painting magazine years ago and made a living from it before I walked away to teach. Now I’m building again, writing every week, making things, putting them into the world. The list is small. The growth is slow. Some weeks the echo comes back and some weeks it doesn’t. I’ve had people ask me, in various ways, why I keep going at it. The honest answer is that I don’t know how not to. The same pull that sent me south on a Monday morning toward a kayak I didn’t strictly need is the same pull that has me at this desk every week writing something I hope finds the people who need it.

You probably have a version of this. Some direction you keep moving in regardless of what the day throws at you. Not because the logistics are cooperating. Not because the evidence is overwhelming. Just because the thing is there and you are the kind of person who moves toward things. That’s worth something, I think. More than the subscriber count, more than the sales numbers, more than whether the sky is green or clear when you pull out of the driveway.

The Tarpon 105 is in the garage. I’m going to build a trailer for it the next few weeks. I already have a guy in McCook who sold me a boat trailer and a pile of unistrut for a hundred and twenty-five dollars, which also gave me the justification I needed for the welder I’ve been stalking for over a year. One thing leads to the next. It usually does, when you let it.

On the Table

What is the thing you keep moving toward, even when the day is fully on fire?

Not the goal exactly. The orientation. The direction you’re pointed when everything else falls away. If you know what it is, I’d genuinely like to hear. Hit reply.

A Quiet Note

Unhurried Letters goes out once a month. Handwritten stories, a fine art print, a recipe card, a postcard, all in an actual envelope. No algorithm deciding who sees it. Just the thing itself, made with some care, sent to the people who wanted it.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can learn more at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

My son is okay. Not resolved, not easy, but okay. That’s usually the best available outcome on the hard days and I’ve learned to take it. The storm moved east. The kayak is home. The new welder is at the top of the order sheet.

Whatever you’re moving toward this week, I hope you find a Jim at the pump in Bird City who points you in the right direction. And I hope the Mexican food is as good as advertised.

Keep making.

Tio

One-Click Check-In

If you want to read this later or find other issues, you can find them here or hit subscribe.

Reference

Kahneman, Peak-End Rule: The original paper is Kahneman, D., Fredrickson, B. L., Schreiber, C. A., & Redelmeier, D. A. (1993). “When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End.” Psychological Science, 4(6), 401–405. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1993.tb00590.x

If you’d prefer something more accessible than a journal article, his TED talk “The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory” covers the same ground in plain language: https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory

The TED talk is the better read unless you love the style and format of white papers from an educator or science point of view.

Sand Mandalas: Minneapolis Institute of Art: https://new.artsmia.org/hub/programming-events/tibetan-sand-mandala-history

World History Encyclopedia: https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1052/tibetan-sand-mandalas/

PBS, Collective Healing Sands: https://www.pbs.org/video/klru-collective-healing-sands-sand-mandala-project/

At the Workbench

There is a moment in a live performance, in the space between the final note and the first sound of applause, when everything the orchestra played is still in the room. The musicians hold still. The conductor’s hands haven’t moved yet. The audience takes a breath. That interval, a second or two at most, is one of the strangest and most complete feelings I know. Everything that happened is finished and present at the same time.

I have been thinking about that interval a lot lately.

A life season has that quality when it ends well. The track season I just finished, my last as a coach and teacher after fourteen years, had everything a good season is supposed to have. It had its fortissimo passages, weeks where everything was loud and fast and the stakes felt enormous. It had its pianissimo ones, quiet practices in early spring, a few athletes and a starting block and nobody watching. There were weeks where the full ensemble sound was almost overwhelming, the gym, the infield at the state meet, the faces of kids I have watched grow up inside the sport. And there were single notes that separated themselves from all of that, clear and distinct, moments that lifted out of the rest and rang on their own. A quiet word after a hard race. A rival coach I have respected for a decade shaking my hand at the end of the meet. A kid crossing the finish line and looking immediately for me in the crowd.

Then it ended. And like the orchestra’s last note, the season was finished and present at the same time. There is the word I keep coming back to. Poignant. Not sad exactly. Not just bittersweet. Something more specific than either. Poignancy is what happens when something is beautiful and finished at the same moment, and you are present enough to feel both at once. It is the emotional register of a full season, fully inhabited, now complete.

That’s what I want to explore this week. What it actually means to be inside a season rather than documenting it. What gets pressed in and retained when you’re truly there for the ending.

Under the Surface

There is a tradition in art that takes impermanence as its premise rather than its problem. Ephemeral art is work made with the full knowledge that it will not last, and often with the intention that its disappearance is part of what it means.

Tibetan Buddhist monks create sand mandalas over days, sometimes weeks, placing colored sand grain by grain in intricate geometric patterns that radiate outward from a center with the precision of sacred geometry. The name in Tibetan is dul-tson-kyil-khor, mandala of colored powders. The process itself is understood as a form of meditation, each grain placed in a state of focused devotion, the making inseparable from the spiritual work it is doing. When the mandala is complete, it is ceremonially destroyed. The sand is swept inward, the colors mixing together, then carried to flowing water and released into the current. The destruction is not a tragedy appended to the work. It is the completion of it. The impermanence was always the point.

Banksy built a shredder into the frame of Girl with Balloon before it ever went to auction. The moment the gavel came down, a remote trigger activated and the canvas ran itself through the mechanism hidden in the lower frame. Half-destroyed, half-intact, it was retitled Love is in the Bin and became something more resonant than it had been whole. The ending was planned before the beginning. The piece already knew how it would finish.

There are artists working in cities right now using superhydrophobic coatings on sidewalks and walls, images invisible in dry weather and fully revealed only when it rains. The work exists in potential until the conditions are right, and then it appears, clear and specific and briefly bright, and then the surface dries and it disappears again. Peregrine Church has been doing this in Seattle since around 2014, calling the project Rainworks. The activation event is rain. The art requires an event to become itself.

Andy Goldsworthy builds from whatever the landscape offers, ice, leaves, stacked stone, thorns. He works alone in remote places. The structures collapse, melt, dissolve back into what was there before, and he photographs them as they go. The quality of attention he brings to watching his own work fall apart is not grief. It is something closer to completion.

The Japanese have a name for this feeling. Mono no aware, sometimes translated as the pathos of things, is the bittersweet awareness that beauty is inseparable from impermanence. The scholar Motoori Norinaga articulated it in the eighteenth century, but it runs through Japanese aesthetics far older than that. The cherry blossom is the most familiar image. It is most beautiful, most fully itself, in the few days before it falls. The falling is not the end of the beauty. It is the fullness of it. Mono no aware is not sadness about impermanence. It is the recognition that impermanence is precisely what makes something beautiful enough to feel.

I think about all of this when I think about seasons. A season of life is its own kind of ephemeral art. It has a score and it plays all the way through, highs and lows and tempo changes, the full ensemble sound and the occasional single note that lifts free of everything else. And then it ends. The question is whether you were present enough to hear the whole thing, or whether you were backstage taking photographs of the musicians.

There is a principle in psychology called the peak-end rule, developed by Daniel Kahneman through research on how we actually remember experience. We do not remember experiences as averages. We remember by the emotional peak and by how the experience ended. The ending is where memory consolidates. What this means for any maker is that the ending of a significant season is not a footnote. It is the experience, looked back on. How fully you inhabit the ending determines how deep the groove goes.

I have been thinking of seasons as LP records. The grooves pressed into the vinyl are what make it playable. A season fully inhabited presses its grooves, the music is in there now, permanent, retrievable. You can put the needle down years from now and hear the whole thing again. A season you documented but didn’t fully inhabit is something different. Present on a screen but not quite yours in the body.

Studio Notes

The resonance and the dissonance are not competing feelings. They are the same talisman, front and back. The joy of the meet and the ache of it being the last one do not cancel each other out. They are one experience with two surfaces, and you only get to feel both if you were present enough to be touched by it.

I did not take a single photograph at state track. Not one frame in two days. This is strange for me in a way that’s hard to overstate. I photograph gravel. I photograph the way afternoon light cuts across a concrete step. On any trip I take, the phone is out inside the first hour. But at the meet the camera bag stayed in the van and the phone stayed in my pocket and I did not miss it once. I understood on the drive home that I had been too fully inside the season to step outside of it. The instinct to frame and document simply did not fire.

I suspect to the athletes and parents around me it may have looked like I was somewhere else entirely, quiet, inward, not my usual self. And maybe that’s right. There is a cost to full presence inside a significant ending, and one of them is that you become briefly unavailable in the ordinary social sense. The monks building the mandala are not available for conversation either. I have made my peace with that. The question of whether I was there for the people I love is answered differently than the question of whether I was available to them. I was there. I was just inside the music.

I wonder how many of us move through the endings of our creative seasons in document-and-move-on mode. A project finished, a class taught, a series closed, a medium set down for reasons we can’t fully name yet. The instinct is to photograph it and post it, which is not wrong, but there is a cost. Documentation creates distance at the precise moment when closeness is what makes the groove. You step outside the season to preserve it and in doing so you can miss the pressing.

The sand mandala monks do not photograph the mandala while they’re making it. They make it. The photograph comes at the end, and then the sand goes into the river. They know the difference between what is for keeping and what is for showing. That distinction is worth carrying into your own studio.

On the Table

This week’s practice: name a season that is ending, or has recently ended. Not a finished project. A real season, a period of making that had a shape to it, a distinct before and after. Write down, not for anyone else, what the groove contains. What the needle would find if you put it down in ten years. Not what the photographs show. What was actually happening inside you while it was happening.

If you can’t name a season that has ended recently, that is worth paying attention to. Some of us are practiced at beginnings and not practiced at endings. Some of us move so quickly from one season to the next that nothing gets time to press into the grooves of the LP. The grooves require a moment of full weight, the surface softened just enough by presence to receive the music. That is not a passive thing. It is a choice, made in the middle of everything, to stay inside what is happening rather than stepping back to frame it.

If a specific season came to mind while you read this, I would genuinely like to hear what it was. Hit reply or click Message button below.

In Good Company

Rivers and Tides (2001), Thomas Riedelsheimer’s documentary about Andy Goldsworthy, is one of the most honest films I know about making things that don’t last. Goldsworthy builds in remote landscapes from whatever is present, ice, leaves, stone, thorns, and he talks about the work with a kind of practical reverence that is very hard to fake. The structures collapse. He photographs them. Then he starts another. It is a quiet two hours that will do something to your relationship with impermanence if you let it.

Unhurried Letters is a physical subscription built around the idea that some things are worth slowing down for. Handwritten travel stories, a fine art print, a recipe card, postcards that arrive when you’re not expecting them. Each issue is its own temporal object, made with care, sent once, received once, kept or passed on. You can learn more at unhurriedletters.com.

A Quiet Note

Not much to add this week beyond the letter itself. If a season came to mind that you moved past too quickly, or one you are right now inside of, I would be glad to know about it. Just hit reply. I read everything.

Leave the Light On

The bittersweet feeling at the end of a real season is not a problem to manage around. It is a signal that something was real. You cannot feel that particular resonance, the ache-and-warmth together, both surfaces of the coin at the same moment, if you were not truly there. The temporal art does not last. The sand goes into the river. The sidewalk dries and the image disappears. The canvas shreds. None of that undoes what it was while it was happening. None of that pulls the needle out of the groove.

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Reference

Kahneman, Peak-End Rule: The original paper is Kahneman, D., Fredrickson, B. L., Schreiber, C. A., & Redelmeier, D. A. (1993). “When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End.” Psychological Science, 4(6), 401–405. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1993.tb00590.x

If you’d prefer something more accessible than a journal article, his TED talk “The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory” covers the same ground in plain language: https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory

The TED talk is the better read unless you love the style and format of white papers from an educator or science point of view.

Sand Mandalas: Minneapolis Institute of Art: https://new.artsmia.org/hub/programming-events/tibetan-sand-mandala-history

World History Encyclopedia: https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1052/tibetan-sand-mandalas/

PBS, Collective Healing Sands: https://www.pbs.org/video/klru-collective-healing-sands-sand-mandala-project/

At the Workbench

Some of you in the TOS Insiders group heard the beginning of this story yesterday. Bear with me, it goes somewhere a little different today. I spent weeks before the wedding in the studio with silk. My youngest daughter, Elise, was getting married, and I wanted to make something for the women in her wedding party. Hand-dyed. Her colors. I have worked in silk long enough that my hands know what they are doing, but I have never been more precise with the dye bath than I was on those pieces. Every measurement. Every timing interval. Everything adjusted for the weight of what it was for.

You ask yourself in moments like that whether the work is good. Not in an abstract way. In a very specific, standing-over-the-dye-bath-at-eleven-at-night way. And the answer I kept hearing was: I don’t know if it’s good, but I know I’m not holding anything back. That distinction seems more important than it used to.

Then came the toast. I had rewritten my notes four times. I stood at the microphone in front of everyone I love most in the world, looked out at my daughter in her dress, and thought: none of these words are the right words. I said them anyway. She was crying. I was something close to crying... yea, no I was crying, bumbling, stumbling. Wow. My mother was definitely crying. There is a version of that moment where I nailed it, and a version where I just stood there with tears and a fistful of notes and rambled my way through love. Probably both are true. I have been practicing letting both be enough. That practice has a name, and I have been thinking about it differently ever since last Saturday.

Under the Surface

I came across something a while back that I keep returning to. A psychologist named Roy Baumeister spent years measuring a gap most of us already feel but can’t quite name: one bad experience carries roughly the weight of three good ones. Not because we are too sensitive. Not because we lack perspective. Because that’s how we’re built. For much of human history, missing a threat cost you everything. Missing an opportunity just cost you an opportunity. Your nervous system learned that lesson and never forgot it.

And here’s the part that gets me, that same wiring doesn’t distinguish between a predator and a person who didn’t like your painting. Your body responds the same way. So, the one afternoon in the studio where nothing came right, the one voice in a hundred that said it wasn’t good enough, these register louder than all the rest combined. Not because they are more true. Just because your nervous system is very old and doesn’t know you’re a painter. Or a woodworker. Or someone standing at a microphone trying to say something real about love.

I find it genuinely useful to know this, even when I forget to apply it. The loud voice is not the accurate voice. Those are two different things, and it helps to keep them separate.

Studio Notes

I work across a lot of materials. Fiber, wood, resin, wax, paint, photography, digital painting, synthography. People ask sometimes whether that spread is a strategy or an inability to commit, and honestly I have given both answers at different times. I think it is mostly curiosity, and I believe that. But there is something else in it too, something about staying in motion through a life that keeps changing shape. My youngest daughter will be in Montana soon. My parents are in their late eighties and early nineties. I am at the end of a long stretch of coaching and teaching, and something new is pulling at me from a direction I didn’t see coming. You make differently in a season like this. Your hands know what to do even when the rest of you is still working something out, and I am grateful for that.

Most of what I have ever made sits somewhere between useful experiment and sincere attempt. Not masterpiece. And for a long time the pieces that fell short took up more room in my head than the work I was proud of, three to one, as it turns out, without me even noticing. I have been thinking about what it would mean to extend the same grace to my own creative life that I would give to anyone else’s. Not pretending the weak work is something it isn’t. Not lowering what I am reaching for. Just being a fair witness to the whole body of it, the failures and the experiments and the sideways attempts alongside the work that came out “right”. All of it belongs to the same story. You can’t get to the good work without making all the rest of it first, and I think somewhere I knew that, but I didn’t always act like it.

On the Table

One small thing this week, and you can do it right now if you want. Find a piece of your own work that you have written off. Something you made and decided wasn’t good. Give it sixty seconds of honest looking, not to convince yourself it’s better than you thought, just to look at it the way you’d look at a friend’s work before you already knew what you were going to think. Notice what you actually see when the verdict isn’t already in. Then ask yourself whether you have been a fair witness to your own making. Not a generous one. Just fair. If you try it, I’d genuinely like to hear what comes up. Hit reply or click Message button below.

A Quiet Note

If you are in a season where making feels like the thing that holds things together when other things are shifting, Unhurried Letters was made with exactly that kind of company in mind. It arrives by mail, by hand, a little slower than the rest of the world. Here is a short video. You can find it at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

Most makers I know are harder on their own work than they would ever be on anyone else’s. I am. And knowing about the three-to-one ratio doesn’t make the loud voice quiet overnight, but it does change something. It means the loudness is information about your nervous system, not a verdict on your work. Those are different things, and it is worth treating them differently.

The ninety-nine said something. Most of them said it quietly, the way good things usually do. It is worth slowing down long enough to hear it.

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If you want to read this later or find other issues, you can find them here or hit subscribe.

Reference

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). “Bad Is Stronger Than Good.” Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323

At the Workbench

There is a crack in the dining table I am building for my daughter Elise as a wedding gift. I left it in the sun for a few hours this week while I was working on something else, and the resin expanded. A crack. After the router sled. After six hours of sanding. After resealing the whole surface, finding casters, cutting new bowties, and spending an hour on a FaceTime call with Elise deciding whether to use walnut or oak for them. The answer was oak, stained dark, which was not what I had planned, but it is what the table asked for. The crack will get fixed. It always does. But it is the kind of week where you put one thing down and pick up the next problem, and somewhere in there you are also visiting your mom at the nursing home and squeezing in appointments and coaching a track meet and counting the days with students down to three and a half because the rest of the week is the wedding and also learning a choreographed father-of-the-bride dance that your daughter made up and that you are absolutely going to fumble through in front of everyone and cannot wait to do anyway.

This is the week, all of it.

Under the Surface

Slow living has an image problem.

When most people hear it, they picture open mornings and unscheduled afternoons and a general spaciousness that this particular week, and probably yours, does not remotely resemble. The fantasy version of slow living is about fewer things. Less noise. Room to breathe. And if your life does not look like that right now, the implication is that you are doing it wrong, that you have not yet cleared enough space, that the slowness is still somewhere ahead of you waiting to be found. I want to push back on that.

The opposite of slow living is not a full calendar. The opposite of slow living is a scattered mind. It is the experience of being physically present in one moment while mentally running through fourteen others: the problem you have not solved yet, the thing you forgot to handle, the conversation you are dreading, the deadline moving toward you. You can have an empty afternoon and never actually arrive in it. You can have a week like this one, packed to the edges with difficulty and tenderness and hardware problems, and be completely present inside it.

The question slow living is actually asking is not: how do I have fewer things? It is: how do I stop living in every moment except the one I am in?

I think about this because there is a specific kind of overwhelm that comes not from dread but from abundance. From a week where every single demand on your time is something you chose, something that matters, something you would not trade. The nursing home visit is not a burden; it is time with my mother. The table is not an obligation; it is a gift I am building with my hands for someone I love. The dance is not a performance I have to survive; it is a memory that does not exist yet and will, because Elise made up the choreography and I said yes. And still, the week is genuinely a lot. Still, the mind wants to fragment and scatter. Still, there are moments when you are sanding the table but you are not really there, you are somewhere else managing the mental inventory of everything else, and the sanding is happening but you are not.

That gap between being somewhere and actually being there is what slow living is trying to close. Not by emptying the calendar. By teaching you to come back.

Studio Notes

There is a psychologist named Barbara Fredrickson who has spent her career studying what positive emotions actually do in the body and brain. Not what they feel like. What they do. Her research, which she calls the broaden-and-build theory, found something that seems counterintuitive at first: positive emotions, and gratitude specifically, physically widen the scope of your attention. When you are stressed or threatened, your attentional field narrows. You tunnel. You see the problem in front of you and the periphery disappears. That is useful if the problem is a predator. It is less useful if the problem is a bolt that is the wrong size and you need to find a creative workaround.

Gratitude, Fredrickson found, does the opposite. It opens the aperture. More of the moment becomes available to you. I think about that in the context of slow living because the crowded week is also, if you can stay in it, a genuinely beautiful one. The oak bowties I cut this week were the first I had ever done with that template. The FaceTime with Elise where we decided together what the table would become was not a detour from the work; it was the work. My mother still knows who I am, and she still laughs at the things she has always laughed at, and I got to sit with her multiple times this week. The dance I am learning, which I will certainly perform with all the grace of a man who has never done it before, came from my daughter’s mind and her hands, and it will be a story I savor for the rest of my life. She went to Nationals in competitive dance this year, that’s what she does, choreograph and dance. It is a small way I get to experience her talents in a different way.

The practice of slow living, in a week like this, is not about slowing down in the conventional sense. It is about using gratitude the way Fredrickson describes it: not as a mood, not as a denial of the hard parts, but as a way of widening attention back open so you can actually see where you are. The mess and the beauty are in the same room. Gratitude helps you notice both.

On the Table

The honest inventory of one good thing. Tonight, before the week closes, name one thing that happened this week that could only have existed inside your particular, overfull, chosen life. Not the most meaningful thing. Not a peak moment. Just one real, specific thing that belongs to your week and no one else’s. For me, the FaceTime call where we decided on oak. The laugh mom still has. The thing someone said at the track meet. Whatever yours is, think about it for just a second. Not because it cancels out the hard parts, but because it is also true, and a tired mind has a habit of filing only the problems.

→ If something surfaces for you to consider, I would genuinely like to hear it. Hit reply or message me.

A Quiet Note

Unhurried Letters was built around the same idea this issue is based on: that slowness is not a pace but a quality of attention. A handwritten travel story, a fine art print, a recipe card, a postcard designed to arrive when the week is at full speed and ask you to slow down for ten minutes and actually be somewhere. If that sounds useful right now, you can find it at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

Somewhere this week, in a living room, I learned the first few steps of a choreographed dance that my daughter made up for us to do together at her wedding. I will not get it right on the day. I will probably be off by a beat or two, maybe more, and everyone watching will know it, and it will not matter at all. Because what I will remember is learning it with her. The FaceTime sessions, the practicing, the laughing. The memory is already being made, in real time, in the middle of a week that also has a cracked table and wrong bolts and three and a half days left with students and a nursing home visit and a track meet. All of it at once. All of it mine.

This is what slow living actually looks like sometimes. Not empty. Full. And present enough to know the difference.

Thank you for being here. See you next week.

One-Click Check-In

If you want to read this later or find other issues, you can find them here or hit subscribe.

Reference

Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218

Fredrickson, B. L., & Branigan, C. (2005). Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires. Cognition & Emotion, 19(3), 313–332. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930441000238

Picture a Tuesday afternoon that has been set aside for creative work. The desk is clear. The time is available. And the person sitting in front of that clear desk is finding reasons, one after another in a patient and resourceful stream, to be anywhere else in their head and life except inside the project that is waiting for them. The emails that suddenly seem important. The research that could precede the work rather than follow from it. The realization that the notes need to be reorganized before actual writing can begin. The sense that the conditions are almost right, that with a little more preparation or a little more time or a slightly different starting point, the work could actually happen.

This is one of the most common experiences creative people describe to me, and also one of the most confusing ones to be inside of, because the experience of sitting in front of the desk genuinely not knowing whether you need rest or whether you are avoiding something real is profoundly disorienting. It feels like a question you should be able to answer about yourself, and the fact that you cannot tends to generate its own layer of shame on top of the already uncomfortable situation.

The question I hear more often than almost any other in navigation sessions and in my inbox is some version of this: how do I know if I am resting or avoiding? Here are some of my thoughts on that …

Why the two are so difficult to distinguish from the inside

The avoidance pattern rarely announces itself as avoidance. It arrives dressed in the clothing of legitimate need: the sense of requiring more time, of the creative conditions being almost but not quite right, of something internal that needs to settle before the actual work can begin. These sensations are real. They are not invented. The nervous system is genuinely producing them. What makes them difficult to interpret is that the same sensations can be produced both by genuine need for rest and by the anxiety that is organizing itself around the approach to the work.

The rest pattern, meanwhile, often comes with its own internal interrogation. Even when rest is clearly what is needed, the internal voice that has absorbed productivity culture’s demands tends to treat it with suspicion. The rest feels guilty, or provisional, or like something that has to be justified and earned before it can be fully entered. This makes even legitimate rest feel structurally similar to avoidance from the inside: uncomfortable, questioned, accompanied by the persistent sense that the real thing is somewhere else that you should be getting to.

Rollo May, the existential psychologist whose book The Courage to Create remains one of the most rigorous examinations of the relationship between anxiety and creative work, argued that creativity and anxiety are inseparable for anyone who is making work that genuinely matters to them. The creative act, precisely because it involves bringing something new into existence that did not exist before, requires a confrontation with the unknown that the nervous system codes as threat. The more the work matters, the more the nervous system tends to stand at its entrance. May’s insight is that the anxiety is not incidental to the creative process. It is part of it. The question is not how to eliminate the anxiety but how to develop the capacity to move with it rather than away from it.

What avoidance is protecting

Avoidance is almost always protecting something real, and understanding what it is protecting tends to be more generative than simply trying to push through it or judging it as weakness.

The approach-avoidance conflict that psychologists describe, the experience of being drawn toward something and simultaneously pushed away from it, is particularly common in creative work because creative work frequently carries a combination of deep desirability and genuine threat. The work matters, which means the stakes of doing it badly, of revealing something unflattering, of failing in front of the people whose opinion matters: all of those stakes feel correspondingly high. The email is easier to write than the essay precisely because the essay carries more identity. The minor project is more accessible than the central one precisely because the central one is where the real vulnerability lives.

Avoidance also tends to cluster around specific transition points in creative work. Beginning is difficult for many people, particularly when the beginning requires stepping into uncertainty without a clear map. Finishing is difficult in a different way: finishing means releasing the work, and the work in its unfinished state is still protected from judgment in a way that the finished work is not. The specific stage where the avoidance intensifies is often information about exactly where the threat is located, which is worth paying attention to rather than simply trying to override.

Sometimes what avoidance is protecting is the relationship to a medium or process that has accumulated painful associations. A writer who experienced significant public criticism for a previous book may find that the approach to a new book is organized around an avoidance that has nothing to do with the new project and everything to do with what the previous project cost. The body remembers. The nervous system has logged the threat and is trying to prevent a repetition.

What rest is actually doing

True creative rest has a quality of accumulation and movement that distinguishes it, over time if rarely immediately, from avoidance. Things gather in rest. The default mode network, the brain’s resting-state system that is most active when focused task engagement steps back, continues processing in ways that feel like nothing from the outside and produce, sometimes unexpectedly, the connections and resolutions and new angles that active focused work cannot force. Distance from a project accumulates in rest, and that distance is generative: it allows return with different eyes, with the capacity to see what the too-close view could not resolve.

The body replenishes in rest in ways that are specific and real. The nervous system requires genuine downregulation time, which tends to be longer than productivity culture suggests and longer than the person in rest tends to be comfortable taking. The creative person who has been running on sympathetic activation for a sustained period, managing the anxiety and the output and the relational demands of creative life simultaneously, may find that genuine downregulation feels initially like nothing happening and eventually like something shifting, a loosening, a return of a quality of interest and aliveness that the driven state had been consuming in order to sustain itself.

Rest that is doing its work leaves you, eventually, with something that avoidance tends to foreclose: the felt sense of readiness, of having returned to baseline, of the approach to the work feeling less like a guarded door and more like an open space. This is not always a dramatic shift. It is often subtle, the difference between a slight interior tightening and a slight interior opening, detectable only by someone who has developed some fluency with their own internal states.

A practical question worth sitting with

One question has consistently opened something in navigation sessions when the rest-or-avoidance question is live: if this were genuine rest, what would the next twenty-four hours actually look like?

Sitting with that question tends to produce information. If the picture that emerges feels like relief, a genuine settling into the body and the present moment and activities that restore rather than demand, rest is probably what is needed. If the picture surfaces immediate resistance, a sense of things that have to happen first or conditions that have to be met before actual rest can begin, something closer to avoidance may be more active in the situation.

This is an orienting question rather than a diagnostic tool. It tends to illuminate rather than resolve. But illumination, in this territory, is often enough to begin with.

Getting curious rather than getting critical

The impulse to judge avoidance as failure or weakness tends to produce the opposite of what it is hoping for. Shame and self-criticism raise the threat level around the work, which tends to intensify approach-avoidance dynamics rather than dissolving them. The avoidance, which is already a response to perceived threat, responds to shame with more protection rather than less.

Curiosity moves differently. What is the avoidance protecting? What would need to be true for the approach to feel less threatening? What is the specific texture of the hesitation at this particular stage of this particular project? These questions are investigable, and the investigation itself tends to reduce the charge around the avoidance in ways that direct confrontation cannot manage.

The Creative Health Cartography workbook includes exercises in the psychological domain that approach both rest and avoidance with this quality of curiosity. The goal is to see what is actually happening more clearly, because clarity about what is actually happening is where real movement tends to begin, and real movement, in creative work as in most things, begins from where you actually are rather than from where you think you should be.

Follow Kathryn’s writing and the new podcast at createmefree.substack.com. If you’re curious about your Creative Health archetype, take the free quiz here. And if you decide to purchase the workbook or Kathryn’s Creative Health Cartography services, use WorkbookTour20 for a 20% discount.

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At the Workbench

My grandfather built a sod house with his own hands. He dug a well by hand that produced over sixty gallons of cold, clear water a minute. He burned fallen oak and collected the ash, then used the ash to make lye and grandma turned the lye into soap. He carved flutes and whistles from cattail, willow, and elderberry for the grandkids, and he never once described any of this as creative work. He didn’t have that language. It was just life, the way life worked if you were going to live it properly on fourteen acres on the Dismal River in the Nebraska Sandhills.

I didn’t grow up thinking of my grandfather as a maker. I thought of him as someone from another era, from a harder and more serious world than the one I was inheriting. It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that everything I care about as an artist traces back to that sod house, to that root cellar full of hand-packed jars, to the sound of a hand pump at the kitchen sink and the smell of damp earth and beeswax and woodsmoke. He didn’t teach me anything about art. He did something more permanent. He showed me, without a single explicit lesson, that making things with your hands was a way of being in the world. I was being calibrated, and I didn’t know it.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the people who made us makers before we ever knew that’s what we were. Not teachers in any formal sense. Not mentors who sat across a table and talked to us about our artistic development. The people who just lived the making life in front of us, who were already inside it, and whose presence told our nervous systems something before our brains had language for it. For many of us in this middle stretch of a creative life, those people are worth going back to find.

Under the Surface

There is a philosopher named Michael Polanyi who spent years trying to describe the kind of knowledge that lives in the body rather than the mind. He got close with one sentence: we know more than we can tell. I think about that line a lot, but not usually in relation to theory. I think about it in relation to my grandfather’s hands, the way they moved over wood, held his harmonica or worked a pump handle, with a quality of attention that didn’t announce itself and didn’t really need to. He wasn’t performing competence. He was just present with the material, and that presence was so complete it left a mark in me before I had any idea I was being marked.

That kind of formation is different from learning. Learning happens when we show up and pay attention on purpose. What I’m describing happened earlier and went deeper, in the years when I was just in the room, absorbing the frequency of someone who made things as a way of living. Not as a practice. Not as a creative outlet. Not someone chasing views or likes but as the actual texture of a life. The people who shaped most of us as makers were not thinking about art or craft when they worked. They were thinking about the task, the material, the next thing that needed doing, and that un-selfconsciousness is part of what made the transmission so clean. There was no message being sent. There was just a way of being, and we were close enough to catch it.

For those of us in the middle and later stretches of a creative life, it’s worth thinking about that original signal. A revisit or remembrance. Not to be nostalgic about it. To remember what making felt like before it became a practice with a name and an identity and a set of skills attached to it. The question I often wonder about and think is worth considering is not who taught us to make things. It’s who was already inside the making life when I arrived, and what the quality of their attention felt like, and what it meant to be near it.

Studio Notes

I have been working in a divided mode lately, which is either a sign of creative health or productive chaos depending on the day. The digital painting and synthography work is running in one direction, toward something quieter and more elemental, images that feel like they were made by someone who has been outdoors recently. The mixed media and physical work is running in another direction entirely, more textured and layered and genuinely uncertain, which is usually when things get interesting. Both bodies of work share something I can only describe as a looking-backward quality, less interested in newness than in depth, less in love with the surface than with what’s underneath it. I don’t think that is an accident given everything I’ve been thinking about this month.

On the Table

A practice, if you want it: spend twenty minutes this week writing down the people in your early life who made things. Not artists necessarily. The person who cooked everything from scratch. The one who built furniture in a garage. The one who grew food. The one who repaired things rather than replacing them. The one who carved wooden toys or braided rugs or kept a root cellar or made soap or patched clothing by hand. Write down what they made and, as best as you can remember, their presence and intention while they were making. What was the quality of their attention? What did the room feel like? You are not looking for a lesson in that memory. You are looking for a frequency, the note your creative nervous system was first tuned to before anyone asked you what kind of artist you were.

→ I’d genuinely like to know what comes up for you. Message me.

A Quiet Note

If the idea of implicit creative formation interests you, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft is worth your time. Crawford is a philosopher who owns a motorcycle repair shop, and his argument is essentially that working with your hands on recalcitrant physical reality teaches a kind of thinking that abstract knowledge cannot. It’s not a nostalgic book, or not only that. It’s an argument for why the making life is not a retreat from the serious world but a particularly rigorous engagement with it. I think of it every time I hear someone describe their creative practice as a hobby. Here are two videos on his philosophy. An Inquiry into the Value of Work: A Discussion of Matt Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft and Dinner and a Book-Shop class as soulcraft, a PBS gig.

And closer to home: Unhurried Letters is a physical envelope in the mail once a month, with a handwritten travel story, a fine art print, a regional recipe card, and a postcard, all drawn from my own photos and journals from real travel. It is, in its own way, an argument for the same thing Crawford is making: that slow, handmade things carry something a faster version cannot. Details and founders pricing at unhurriedletters.com.

A Quiet Note

The things your grandfather made without calling them art are probably part of why you make things and call them art. That’s not a small inheritance.

Leave the Light On

Someone made something in front of you before you knew what making was. They didn’t have a studio or a practice or a following. They had materials and time and necessity, and they built something, and you were in the room. You were being shaped. The work you make now is, in ways you may not yet be able to fully see, a continuation of something they started. Consider that for just a second. It changes the sometimes loneliness (I typically call it contentment) of the studio into something more like a relay.

Keep making.

Tio

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At the Workbench

Here are the active projects scattered throughout the studio or on my workbench this week. Seven portraits of state cross country medalists I have coached. Each one in a different artistic style. Some are works in progress, some are still just an idea waiting for time. They are going on the wall in the art room at school. The base to a table I am building for my daughter Elise as a wedding gift. A few last repairs before paint. The top is a long way from ready, still needs considerable work before resin.

And there’s more, the first test gum oil print from a series called Common Ground. All public domain images, all printed in gum oil or some other alternative photographic process. A hodgepodge of plant material for eco printing on silk scarves. A mixed media painting due for a show. A charcuterie board waiting for a final coat of resin before it goes to the gift shop. Unhurried Letters parts and pieces waiting to be catalogued and put away. Silk bag scarves for my daughter’s wedding party waiting for the final steaming.

Someone is going to read that list and think I have a problem. I used to think so too.

Under the Surface

For most of my early career, I identified as a photographer who painted. That felt honest enough. The two things were separate, distinct, each with its own logic and its own set of tools.

Then in the early 1980s the line started to blur. I began combining black and white fine art prints with watercolor and graphite. Was the result a photograph? A painting? Certainly not a painting in any traditional sense. It did not have a clean answer. I did not have a clean answer. I kept making them anyway.

Later the blur went further. Digital painting from my photo, printed and then worked on top of with traditional media. Later still, AI-assisted work using my own images, pushed in whatever direction the piece wanted to go, printed, then layered with silkscreen, graphite, paint, whatever the surface asked for. Transfers onto wood. Resin over stone and concrete I had sculpted myself.

At some point the question “what kind of artist are you?” stopped having an answer I could give in one sentence. I tried “mixed media” for a while. Too thin. Then “experimental artist.” Closer, but it doesn’t cover the writing. It doesn’t cover the permaculture certification, the organic gardening, the eco dyeing, the making of earth pigments from foraged materials, the urban farming and love for homesteading and slow living. The curiosities keep accumulating. The practices keep multiplying. The studio, woodshop, garden and metal shop keeps filling up.

Every branding course, every gallery conversation, every well-meaning mentor has said the same thing: find a lane and stay in it. Make yourself easy to categorize. Build recognition. I have tried. Many times. I get bored fast. Something in me keeps escaping toward the next material, the next process, the next room in the house. Here is what I have come to believe: the question itself is the problem. “What kind of artist are you?” is not a neutral question. It is a request to make yourself easier to categorize. For someone else’s convenience. It assumes that the most important thing about a creative person is their medium, their style, their lane. It assumes that range is a liability. It isn’t. But it took me a long time to stop apologizing for it.

Studio Notes

What I’ve been making, thinking about, or working through.

There is a structure in the brain called the Default Mode Network. I talk about it a bunch. It is most active when you are not focused on a specific task. When you are walking, showering, staring out a window, letting your mind drift. It is also the primary site of associative thinking. The place where your brain quietly holds two unrelated things next to each other until it notices something neither one contained alone.

Hustle culture is, among other things, a sustained attack on this system. When every hour is accounted for, when rest feels like falling behind, when you can’t justify “just” taking a walk, the DMN never gets the space it needs to do its work. The connections don’t get made. The surprising ideas don’t surface. The work goes technically proficient and creatively flat.

But here is the part I find interesting: the polydisciplinary creative life is actually good conditions for the DMN. When you move between silk dyeing and gum oil printing and portrait work in different styles and eco printing with plant material, your brain is constantly holding unlike things in proximity. It is not scattered. It is doing exactly what it was built to do.

Slow, intentional, unhurried attention across many things is not the enemy of depth. In the right mind, it is the condition for it.

On the Table

A small, completable thing.

The honest inventory. Write down everything that is on your actual workbench, or in your active creative life right now. Don’t edit for coherence. Don’t leave things out because they don’t seem to fit. Then hang out for a minute and ask one question: what is the thread that only you would pull through all of these things? Not the medium. Not the style. The way of seeing. The thing that makes the list yours instead of anyone else’s. That thread is closer to your real answer than any category you could fit yourself into.

→ If something surfaces, I would genuinely like to hear it. Hit reply or message me.

In Good Company

Two people worth knowing if any of this resonates with you.

Emilie Wapnick coined the word “multipotentialite” for people who have many different interests and creative pursuits rather than one defining passion. Her TED talk on the subject has been watched millions of times, which tells you something about how many people have been quietly waiting for that word. Her argument is that range is not a failure to commit. It is a different kind of capability, one the world needs and tends to undervalue. Worth fifteen minutes of your time.

Malcolm Gladwell has written about psychology, crime, sports, music history, and a dozen other subjects with no obvious connecting thread. Every book is unmistakably him. The brand is not the subject. It is the lens. The curiosity. The restless way of finding the unexpected angle on any material he touches. If you have ever felt like your interests were too scattered to add up to anything coherent, Gladwell is useful evidence to the contrary.

A Quiet Note

Unhurried Letters is itself a polydisciplinary object. A handwritten travel story. A fine art print. A regional recipe card. A postcard that can be kept or passed along. Different things that belong together. Different rooms in the same house. If that sounds like something your life has room for, you can find it at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

The next time someone asks what kind of artist you are, notice what happens in the half second before you answer. There is probably a small flinch. A reaching for the category that will make the conversation easier. A quiet editing of the real answer into something more manageable.

That flinch is worth paying attention to. It is the place where the wrong question gets asked and you instinctively try to answer it on its own terms.

You don’t have to. You are allowed to say: I make a lot of different things, and they are all connected, and the connection is me. That is not a failure to specialize. That is the whole point.

One-Click Check-In

If you want to read this later or find other issues, you can find them here → Living by Making on Substack or hit subscribe.

At the Workbench

The podcast was already queued up. I almost hit play.

This is what I do. What most of us do. Any silence that lasts longer than thirty seconds starts to feel like waste, like something that should be filled. A drive, a flight, a waiting room. We treat these as dead time to be survived, and we have a device in our pocket perfectly designed to help us do exactly that.

I didn’t hit play. I’m not entirely sure why. And somewhere in the next hour, riding passenger with nowhere to be and nothing to do, the answer to a problem I’d been stuck on for weeks quietly arrived.

I’m building a dining table for my daughter Elise as a wedding gift. The top is a 46-inch maple cookie, a full cross-section of a tree, about two inches thick and very heavy. The voids are filled with resin and copper mica powder. The radial cracks at the center will get a burst of bright orange, like something still burning at the core. Two bowtie inlays. Live edges retained. The kind of piece that takes the long way around to beautiful.

The base is an antique oak pedestal from the early-to-mid 1900s, the kind with four heavy curved feet that sweep out from a central column like something that belonged in a farmhouse dining room for fifty years. It has presence. It has history. What it didn’t have was any obvious way to accept a 46-inch live-edge cookie on top of it. I should say here that I’m an artist who woodworks. Not a professional, not an accomplished furniture maker. This project has been taxing my abilities in ways I didn’t fully anticipate, and I mean that as a compliment to the challenge. The growth alone has been worth it.

But I was stuck. Weeks of standing at the bench turning it over. The problem was wood movement. You can’t make a rigid connection between a top that size and a base that age without the whole thing fighting itself over time. And there were no natural attachment points. I’d worked through it in the studio, in conversation, on paper. Nothing seemed right. The more I pushed at it directly, the more it stayed exactly where it was.

Then I was riding. I’d just re-read a long back-and-forth I’d had while working through the engineering, put the phone down, and let the miles go by. And the answer came. Not as a flash. More like a slow arrival, the way fog lifts and you realize you can see something that was there all along.

Two pieces of C-channel steel in a cross pattern to stabilize the cookie against radial movement. A custom plate set into the base top. Inserts, bolts, two plates. A system that holds without fighting the wood’s nature. The connection that lets both things be what they are.

Under the Surface

Here’s what I think is actually happening when we fill every quiet moment with content.

We’re not managing our attention. We’re destroying our most cognitively free moments of the day, and we’ve gotten so good at it we don’t notice anymore.

There’s a network of brain regions researchers call the Default Mode Network. It activates not when you’re focused on a task, but when your mind is gently occupied. Just enough stimulus to keep boredom away, not enough to demand full attention.

Driving a familiar highway activates it. So does the ambient hum of a plane. The rhythm of miles.

What it does in those states is the interesting part: it makes connections. It pulls together memories, half-formed ideas, unresolved problems and begins quietly weaving them into something. The work happens underneath. You often don’t notice it until a thought arrives that you have to catch before it disappears.

This is why the shower is famous for breakthroughs. Why long walks unlock things. Why the drive home from a hard day sometimes delivers the answer you spent all afternoon forcing.

Studio Notes

I’ve been tracking this in myself long enough to notice two different flavors worth separating.

The first is physical containment. You’re on a plane. You’re in the passenger seat. Your body is committed to going somewhere and there is genuinely nothing else to do. The choice has been made for you. No errands can be run, no emails justified, no studio calling. I can enter flow on a plane in a way that almost never happens at my desk or easel. The absence of options is the gift.

The second is environmental displacement. You’re away from your regular surroundings. Your daily tools aren’t there. Your usual patterns don’t apply. The visual noise of your regular space, the unfinished projects, the things waiting, none of it follows you. Your brain, unmoored from its usual anchors, gets curious in a different way.

Both are useful. Both produce thinking I wouldn’t have arrived at otherwise. But they work differently, and knowing the difference has helped me use them more intentionally.

I keep a voice memo app open on long drives now. Not to record anything polished, just to catch what surfaces. Most of it is half-formed. Some of it is unusable. But a surprising amount of what has moved my work forward, including a wedding gift I was stuck on for weeks, came out of a car, or a waiting room, or a passenger seat far from home. Its like the muse is just hanging out begging for a small moment of “non committed” thinking to grab me.

On the Table

One small practice this week.

The next time you have a contained stretch, a drive, a flight, a waiting room, a passenger seat, resist the reflex to fill it immediately. Hold off on the podcast for ten minutes. Leave the phone alone. Let it just be the road, the hum, the miles.

Bring one question with you. Not a to-do item. Something genuinely unresolved, a problem at the table or easel, a direction you haven’t been able to decide, something you’ve been considering but not yet committed to. Hold it loosely. Don’t push. Just let it ride along.

Then when something surfaces, catch it. Voice memo, a note at a red light, a sentence typed the moment the plane lands. Don’t evaluate it yet. Just catch it.

→ I’d genuinely like to know what comes up for you. Message me.

A Quiet Note

Unhurried Letters started, in part, from exactly this kind of contained thinking. Stories and images that arrived on long drives and long flights, things that don’t fit a newsletter but want to exist somewhere. If you’re curious about receiving a little of that in your actual mailbox, you can find it at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

You don’t have to manufacture stillness. Life is already putting you in the tin can regularly. Long drives, waiting rooms, airport terminals, passenger seats on someone else’s errand.

The question is just whether you let those spaces be what they want to be. Not dead time. Not time to survive. Something else. The place where the thinking happens that can’t happen anywhere else.

One-Click Check-In

If you want to read this later or find other issues, you can find them here or hit subscribe.

At the Workbench

I noticed it yesterday at the track meet.

Cold wind all day. Miserable conditions to compete in, and not doing my ear infection any favors. I had been out there since early afternoon, physically drained by the time the last events finished. The to-do list back home was longer than I could hold in my head. Scarves for Elise’s wedding party. A dining table I am building for Elise and Kolin. Final prep for an art guild show. Common Ground residency changes. Bali trip logistics. The website rebuild. The long covid and west nile I am still carrying, plus this sinus infection, have made my memory unreliable lately. I honestly could not have listed everything waiting for me if you asked.

And I realized: I was not worried about any of it.

I was watching my athletes. Celebrating their wins. Helping them reframe what they thought were failures. Fully present with them in the wind and the cold, not half-present while my mind rehearsed the tasks I was not getting done.

On the drive home, I tried to figure out why. By every measure, I should be stressed. This is the busiest season I have had in years. And yet the feeling underneath all of it is not stress. It is joy. It is gratitude.

Then I saw it.

Under the Surface

There is a reason this matters, and it is not just emotional. It is neurological.

Neuroscientists have a name for what happens when you do something for someone else. They call it “warm glow.” It is the intrinsic reward your brain generates when you act pro-socially, when you contribute to another person’s wellbeing. It is not metaphorical. It shows up on brain scans.

Here is what makes it different from the regular dopamine hit you get from checking off a task: prosocial work activates your reward circuitry and your stress-buffering systems and your social-bonding circuits all at once. It is not just pleasure. It is pleasure plus calm plus connection. Three systems firing together.

The research also shows that this kind of work triggers endorphin release alongside the dopamine. That is why it can feel euphoric in a way that solitary productivity does not. You are not just completing something. You are completing something for someone. And your brain knows the difference.

I think this explains why the busiest season of my year is also the most peaceful I have felt in a decade. The volume is high, but the work is addressed. It has somewhere to go. It has a face.

Studio Notes

Let me walk through the list and show you what I mean.

The wedding scarves are for Elise and the women standing beside her. The table is for Elise and Kolin, who will gather around it for years, for meals and hard conversations and celebrations I will not be there to see. The Unhurried Letters, which I just finished and am now holding with anticipation, are for future members I genuinely cannot wait to surprise. The track season is for my athletes in their final 5 or 6 weeks with me. Even the website rebuild is for the people who will eventually find their way here.

None of it feels like obligation. All of it feels like serving.

That distinction has become everything to me. I wrote a few weeks ago about the difference between having to create and getting to create. This is the extension of that. When your work has a name attached, you are not producing. You are giving. And giving, it turns out, fills you up instead of draining you.

I love slow living. I believe in unhurried work. And I used to think that meant protecting myself from busy seasons. Now I think it means something different. It means protecting my work from becoming unmoored. From losing its destination. From turning into tasks without faces. Having said that...I still want most of my seasons to be slow, unhurried and even more purposeful.

On the Table

This week’s practice: Add a “for” column

Take your to-do list, whatever form it takes, and add one column. Not a deadline. Not a priority level. Just: “For.”

Write the name of the person, the group, the future self, or the specific human destination for each item.

Some will be easy. Some will be harder than you expect. And some, you might discover, do not have a name at all. They are just tasks you inherited or agreed to without knowing why.

That is worth seeing. Not to judge yourself. Just to understand why some of your work gives you energy and some of it takes energy away.

The tasks with names are not burdens. They are blessings in disguise.

A Quiet Note

Speaking of work with names attached: Unhurried Letters is finished. I keep opening the envelope just to look at it. I love it! If slow mail, Saturday morning rituals, and handmade surprises sound like your kind of thing, there is a place to learn more at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

Thank you for being here.

If you have been feeling guilty about a busy season, wondering if the pace means you have betrayed your own values of slow purposeful living, consider this: the question is not how much you are doing. The question is who you are doing it for?

When the answer is clear, the busyness becomes something else entirely. It becomes service. And service, done freely, is its own kind of slow living. It is presence with purpose. Attention with direction. Love, shaped into effort.

One-Click Check-In

If you want to read this later or find other issues, you can find them here or hit subscribe.

At the Workbench

Midway in my art career, when digital painting was really new, I heard it constantly. “That’s not real art.” “It’s cheating.” “The computer is doing the work.”

The first few times, I felt defensive. Then I felt uncertain. Then I started noticing something: other digital artists were getting the exact same criticism. Not just from random critics or suspicious traditionalists. From other artists. From galleries. From the same people who, a generation earlier, probably would have dismissed anything made with acrylic paint because oil was the only “serious” medium.

And then I remembered: they said the same thing about photography.

When photography emerged in the nineteenth century, critics insisted it wasn’t art. It was mechanical reproduction. It lacked the hand of the artist. The very thing that made it powerful, its precision, was what disqualified it from the conversation.

And yet here we are. Photography is in most museums in the world. It’s taught in most art schools. It’s part of the conversation now, undeniably.

I’ve watched this pattern repeat in my own lifetime. First with digital tools. Then with AI. Then when I began combining my photography with mixed media, or with AI processing. Every new combination draws the same lines in the sand.

It used to sting. Now I notice it differently. When the criticism shows up, it usually means something is moving. Something new is being taken seriously enough to be resisted.

That’s not nothing.

Under the Surface

There’s a strange kind of belonging that happens when your work gets criticized. It sounds backwards, I know. But stay with me. When no one pushes back, it often means no one is paying attention. The work is invisible. It doesn’t disturb anything or ask anyone to reconsider what they already believe.

Criticism means you’re visible. It means your work landed somewhere it could be noticed, weighed, and yes, dismissed. But dismissal requires engagement. Indifference requires nothing.

I’ve carried guilt for years about the unfinished projects, the experiments that didn’t lead anywhere obvious, the directions I pursued that didn’t fit the market or the moment, or me. But some of those directions were exactly the ones that drew the most resistance. And some of that resistance was evidence that I was moving toward something worth finding.

Not all criticism is useful. Some of it is petty. Some of it comes from people protecting their own territory. But even that kind of criticism tells you something: you’ve entered a territory worth protecting.

If your work has never been dismissed, questioned, or misunderstood, it might just mean you haven’t been visible enough to generate a reaction. Ugh, that kind of stings. That’s not a comfort exactly. But it’s a reframing worth considering.

Studio Notes

I don’t do as much pure digital painting now as I used to. The tools have moved. The questions I’m asking have shifted. I work more in mixed media, combining my photography with physical materials, sometimes running images through AI to discover what they’re becoming.

And sure enough, the same criticism shows up. “That’s not really your photograph.” “The AI is doing the work.” I’ve heard it before. I’ll hear it again. What I’ve learned is that the criticism doesn’t tell you whether your work is good. It tells you whether your work is noticeable. Those are different questions.

The work itself has to answer the first one. I still have to show up, make the marks, see what holds and what doesn’t. No amount of criticism or praise changes whether a piece is honest or false, alive or dead. That discernment is mine to make, alone in the studio.

But the criticism does answer the second question. If someone is saying your work isn’t real, it means they’ve encountered it. They’ve had to reckon with it, even if their reckoning is dismissal. That’s progress. Not proof of quality, progress of visibility. The two feel the same some mornings. They’re not.

→ Read more about sustainable, slow creative practice on the blog livingbymaking.com/

On the Table

This week’s practice: Name the resistance you’re avoiding

Think about something you haven’t shared yet. A piece of work. A direction you’re exploring. A question you’ve been asking in the studio that you haven’t spoken out loud. Why haven’t you put it out there?

If the answer is “because someone might not understand it” or “because it doesn’t fit what people expect from me”, notice that. Those are descriptions of potential criticism. And potential criticism means potential visibility.

This week, consider doing one small thing that increases the chance someone might push back. Share the work. Mention the direction. Let the question out of the studio and into a conversation.

Nothing dramatic has to happen. But the practice of making yourself visible, even to the possibility of resistance, is a muscle worth building.

→ If you do this, I’d like to hear what you put out there. Hit reply.

In Good Company

A professor recently wrote about a student newspaper article that essentially said, “We hope the commencement speaker isn’t this guy”, and they were talking about him.

His reaction wasn’t what you’d expect. He sent the article to his family group chat. Not because he enjoyed being criticized, but because he noticed something: in order to say “we hope it’s not him,” they had to consider him as a plausible option.

Being mentioned, even dismissively, meant he was in the conversation.

That reframe has stayed with me. Criticism doesn’t always mean you’ve failed. Sometimes it means you’ve arrived somewhere visible enough to generate a reaction. That’s not the same as success. But it’s a signal you’re moving.

A Quiet Note

Nothing to offer this week except this:

If you’ve been carrying criticism longer than it deserves, criticism of your medium, your direction, your pace, your creations, maybe it’s time to set it down.

The people who dismissed photography didn’t slow photography down. The people who dismissed digital painting didn’t stop it from becoming its own form. The people dismissing your work now won’t be the ones who decide what it becomes. You will.

Leave the Light On

Thank you for being here. If your work has been criticized, dismissed, or misunderstood, you’re in a long line. The critics don’t usually get remembered. The work does. Keep making. Even when, especially when, the reaction is resistance.

If you want to read this later or find other issues, you can find them here Living by Making]