This has been a glorous week in the Ancient East of Ireland. The locals tell me they don’t refer to this area as that, only a marketing phrase drummed up by someone somewhere. I like it though and really from my short 5 week observation and field study, it seems to fit. Anyway, many adventures and experiences this week, here is one of my favorite.

At the Workbench

The geese found me before anyone else did. Three of them, two white and one grey, came down to the fence of their pen the moment I turned into the drive and announced me to the whole property the way geese announce everything, as though it were an emergency and also somehow my fault. Beyond them a little banty rooster was working the edge of the gravel with a neat small flock, scratching and pecking at whatever the morning had turned up, and along the right side of the drive ran a garden of trees and shrubs I could not have named if you paid me, every shade of green the year had left. I wasn’t sure where to park, so I stopped in the middle of the drive and got out, and a border collie trotted across the yard to inspect me, decided I would do, and pushed her head into my hand until I scratched behind her ears.

Getting there had taken the usual scenic route. The address I had sent me first to a large house behind a gated drive that was clearly nobody’s pottery or basket weaving studio, so I tried the Eircode instead, a code people here seem to trust far more than a street name, and found that the address and the Eircode disagreed by better than twenty miles. The Eircode won. I am learning. I’m still not entirely sure what an Eircode is, I had never seen one before this trip, but in fairness I rarely need GPS to get anywhere back in the States either.

Heike Kahle came out of the studio to meet me, her silver-blond hair pinned up out of the way, a lovely woman with a quick, easy welcome, and walked me toward the door. Under a covered patio to the left stood a fig tree, a big one, with a handful of figs still hanging on. It had been a strange dry year, she told me, and the tree had given them far less than usual. I reached up and touched one of the leaves without really meaning to, the way you touch something in a garden that reminds you of your own. Heike and her partner, the potter Klaus, are both German, and they have been on this piece of land for thirty-five years, long enough for a fig tree to become an old friend.

Inside, to the left, Klaus sat at the wheel in a clay-spattered apron, his long grey hair tied back, glasses on, a towel folded across his lap, easing a small bowl no bigger than his two cupped hands off the wheel head. On the bench in front of him a dozen balls of red clay stood in two neat rows, already wedged and waiting their turn like loaves on a baker’s board. Above and behind him rose shelves of unfired work, bowls and cups in that same warm red-brown, the throwing rings still spiraling up their insides, some dark with water, some gone pale and matte and nearly ready, and somewhere back there a small wood stove he fires to pull the moisture out of the room. To the right, a wide sliding door stood open, and through it was another country entirely. Willow stood on end in old wooden crates along the walls, sorted by color, honey gold and olive green, rust and a brown so deep it was nearly black. Finished baskets sat stacked along the floor, round-bellied and striped in bands of those same colors, some with leather straps for handles, some with driftwood handles, and more hung from the ceiling. Unfinished ones from a class she teaches stood about the floor, their upright stakes gathered and tied together at the top so they looked like tall willow lanterns, and the light from the big window laid their shadows across the grey concrete in long dark stripes.

It took me a few minutes to understand what I was looking at. Two crafts in one building, and each one wants the opposite weather. Klaus needs his side warm and dry so the pots give up their water evenly and don’t crack. Heike needs her side cool and damp so the willow stays supple enough to bend without snapping. There is a wood stove on her side too, she told me, and she has never once lit it. For thirty-five years they have kept two climates going under one roof with nothing but a sliding door between them, and they make it look like the most ordinary arrangement in the world.

Under the Surface

The day before, I had spent an hour in the wrong climate. Geraldine Walsh paints in Kilkenny, and I had been seeing her work all over town since I arrived, in windows and on walls, loose and confident and full of light. Beautiful landscapes in oil. Her regular workshop was full, but she kindly said I could drop in for a couple of hours on a Tuesday, so I did. My assignment was simple enough. Block in five to seven values in black and white, something like a notan, the light and dark map underneath a painting before any color goes on. I loaded a brush, put it to the canvas, and spent the next thirty minutes fighting it.

It was not the idea that beat me. I know values. I have taught values to teenagers for most of my adult life. It was everything about the doing. How much paint it takes just to cover the canvas, how blocky every stroke came out, how foreign it felt to sit at an easel pushing paint around with a stick when my hands are used to scraping wax, pressing paper into resin, working a surface with my fingers until it gives something back. I retreated to a plain seven-step value scale just to have something I could finish, and when I stepped back, what I had made looked like something a five-year-old might bring home from school. I don’t say that to be hard on myself. I know I could have done better finger painting at my own table in my own way. I had learned this lesson once already, in an online course with Milan Art Institute years ago. I am glad I know how traditional oil painting is done, and I do not enjoy doing it, and both of those things can be true. If anything, it gives me an even larger appreciation for those who create beautiful work in oil in the traditional manner.

So after an hour I begged off. The women in the class could not have been kinder, and we talked a little about America while they worked, but I felt like I was taking up room in a class that was going somewhere without me. Geraldine wouldn’t charge me for the materials I had wasted, which made me want to do something, so I bought two of her prints to take home. If I could have afforded an original, one would be riding home in my rucksack. She is a wonderful painter and a generous teacher, and none of what happened that morning had anything to do with her.

Standing in Heike’s willow shop the next day, I understood that hour a little better. The psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan spent decades making the case that people flourish when they feel competent, when they have some say in how they work, and when they feel connected to the people around them. I had the connection in that room, plenty of it. What I didn’t have was the other two, and no amount of good will was going to manufacture them in an hour. Some of us need the room warm and dry. Some of us need it cool and damp. The work isn’t to become the other kind of maker. It is to know which side of the sliding door you belong on, and to stop feeling guilty about the stove you never light.

Studio Notes

Heike walked me out to see where the willow comes from. She grows almost all of it herself, buying in a little extra only for the classes she teaches. Off to the side of the beds stood an open-fronted shed of corrugated metal with a bright yellow two-seat kayak slung from the rafters on straps, and underneath it, raised on concrete blocks, two long galvanized troughs where the willow soaks before she weaves it. A big caged water tank filled one corner, and an old clawfoot bathtub sat out on the grass by the opening, as though it had wandered off from somewhere and nobody minded. The beds themselves ran farther than I expected, stands of willow well over my head behind a wire fence, several varieties planted side by side and raised as much for their color as anything else. A path of white gravel curved along the front of a second stand I hadn’t seen from the drive, past a crabapple tree so loaded with red fruit its branches hung nearly to the grass.

The cycle is the part I keep thinking about. At the end of each season she cuts every plant clear down to a short stub, and the following year new rods come up from that stub, straight and long and ready to cut again. A bed will keep producing like that for around ten years. When she sees the yield start to fall off, a tractor comes in at the end of the season and pulls the old stumps out of the ground, and they replant in the field next door and let the old one rest. Once cut, the rods go into a drying shed for several weeks, and then into those long steel troughs to soak before she can work them. In the drying shed the bundles stand on end against wooden rails, each one cinched at the waist, dull browns down one side and on the other a stand of willow so red-orange it nearly glowed in the dim. I ran my hand down one of the brown bundles, the rods hard and light and rattling against each other, and tried to imagine them ever bending. Back in the shop, Heike showed me how they do. She picked up a basket she had going on the table and worked a handle onto it, threading a long thin rod along the thick bow of the handle and wrapping it around and around, her thumb pressing each turn snug against the last, while her pruning shears, a tape measure, and a few old iron tools worn dark and smooth with use lay scattered across the table beside her.

Klaus’s process lives in its own shed. He bisque fires in an electric kiln, which is easy and predictable for the low first firing, and then does his glaze firings in a wood-fired kiln he built himself, a good-sized thing sitting out on its own in an open board shed away from everything else. It stands taller than I do, boxy and square-shouldered, built of pale firebrick patched here and there with yellow, bound in a frame of rusted steel, its arched door bricked shut and the seams around it blackened with soot from firings past. Between the two of them the place runs like a small ecosystem. Sheep graze one field and do the mowing. Solar panels sit in another. The vegetables grow in raised beds because the native soil is poor, and building the beds let them decide what the roots would grow in. Out by the little shop where they keep inventory stood two barrel-roofed wagons on wheels, one painted a green so bright it looked freshly wet and the other grey with a yellow window, crabapples hanging red beside them, little houses that can be used for anyone who wants to sleep somewhere that isn’t a hotel.

None of it happened at once, and that is the thing I can’t stop noticing. Thirty-five years of cutting willow to the stub and waiting. Back home, willow grows wild along the Platte, and I have walked past it my whole life without once thinking of it as something you could plant, cut down to nothing, and harvest again for a decade. I am starting to suspect that this whole trip is going to be one long lesson in looking at what grows along my own riverbanks.

On the Table

I wanted a basket badly. I stood in Heike’s shop for longer than was polite with one in my hands, feeling how little it weighed and imagining it on the bench in my studio, and then did the arithmetic on shipping and set it back on the shelf. Getting it home would have cost as much as the basket. Klaus and Heike had mentioned they would be at the market on the Parade in Kilkenny on Thursday, so I promised myself I would find them there and try again with something that would fit in my rucksack.

The market was quieter than usual, Klaus said, fewer vendors than a normal Thursday, which worked out in my favor because I got another fifteen minutes with him. Thirty-five years ago, before any of this, he had been a mechanical engineer and Heike had been a biologist. Sometime around 1991 they left Germany for Ireland. For the first couple of years they worked as volunteers for an organization that paid them nothing but gave them a place to live, food on the table, and the use of a car. They took courses the whole time. Eventually they wanted to study those courses more seriously than volunteering allowed, and they left. Klaus went to college for pottery. Then he worked for other potters three days a week for a few years while Heike minded the children, and on the other days she worked on her baskets while he minded them, and back and forth like that, for years, they built the business that is now two studios, a willow field, a wood kiln, and a flock of opinionated geese.

I bought a teapot. I love it, a round, nearly perfect sphere of a pot with a short straight spout and a flat little disc of a lid, its top carved all over in small facets like hammered metal. Klaus had dipped the top half in a pale, speckled grey-white glaze and let it stop in a long diagonal sweep, and below that line the bare clay came out of the wood kiln toasted a warm red-brown, flecked with dark iron where the fire had touched it. I nearly bought the matching mug to go with it, the sensible thing, the set. But there was another mug on the table I liked better, and after standing there long enough to make Klaus wonder about me, I bought that one instead. It is smaller and rounder in the belly, with a rim that flares out to meet your lip. The same pale glaze runs down one side of it in a wide stripe, but on the mug it crazed as it cooled into a fine web of cracks like old porcelain or dry river mud, and a streak of deep red runs through it near the handle, pooling inside the rim and filling the whole inside of the cup the color of a ripe rosehip. The bare clay on its other side fired more honey than brown.

When I got back, I made tea in the cottage with both of them. I lifted the faceted lid, filled the teapot, let it steep, and poured into the mug that doesn’t match, and wrapped both hands around that round red-hearted belly while the window fogged up. Set side by side on the old wooden table against the cottage’s orange wall, they are plainly family, the same clay, the same pale glaze, the same bare toasted bottoms from the same fire. But one came out calm and the other came out crackled and running with red, and they sit together like they have been doing it for years. Two different things that don’t match and work anyway. I think I bought a portrait of the peoples mediums who made them.

In Good Company

Watch: WOVEN, a short documentary by Tristan Hutchinson about the Irish basket maker Joe Hogan and the Galway landscape his work grows out of. Free to watch on YouTube. Hogan has been weaving in the west of Ireland for decades, and the film is as much about the bog and the light and the slow seasons as it is about baskets, which is exactly why I like it.

Read: The Unknown Craftsman by Soetsu Yanagi, adapted by Bernard Leach. Yanagi spent his life defending the beauty of ordinary, useful things made by people whose names nobody wrote down, the teapot, the rice bowl, the basket by the door. I thought about it the whole time I stood at Klaus’s table trying to choose a mug.

Listen: The Lonesome Touch by Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill. A fiddler from County Clare and a guitarist from Chicago, playing traditional Irish tunes slower and quieter than almost anyone dares to play them. Two instruments that shouldn’t need each other, and listen to what happens when they decide they do.

A Quiet Note

If you are ever within a few hours of Kilkeny, call or email Baurnafea Studio to check out the awsome work of Klaus and Heike. OR you could just stop and see them at the craft market on Parade near Kilkeny Castle on Thursdays. Some of what I’m gathering in Ireland is too slow for an inbox. A story from a willow field, a print, a recipe card, a postcard, the kind of thing meant to sit on a counter for a while before it gets put away. That’s what Unhurried Letters is for, real mail that arrives in your real mailbox. If that pace sounds like something you want more of, you can find it at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

Before any of that, before the teapot and the mug, I walked into Kilkenny Thursday morning through the Butter Slip. It is a narrow stone passage with steps running up beneath two old houses, connecting St. Kieran’s Street below with High Street above, and it has been there since 1616, back when butter sellers lined it on market days. The light goes dim as soon as you step in, the rough grey plaster curves in overhead, the paving stones are worn smooth underfoot, and the whole thing feels more like walking through a cave than a shortcut, with the bright street showing at the far end like the mouth of it.

Partway in I heard what I was sure was chamber music, a small string ensemble somewhere up ahead, rich and layered and filling every inch of the stone. I slowed down to listen, and a few steps on, where the passage widened a little, I found one man with one violin. He stood against the wall in a black knit cap and a green hoodie under a black puffer vest, a purple backpack slumped at his feet, his phone propped on a music stand where the sheet music would be, and his violin case lying open on a little folding stool. That was all of it. The rest was the room. Four hundred years of stone walls were taking every note he played and handing it back to him doubled and tripled, so that a single fiddle sounded like a quartet. I asked if I could take his picture, and he nodded, so I took a quick snapshot, nothing like a proper portrait, and recorded a little of what he was playing. Then I emptied every coin in my pocket into his case, which came to about six euro, and kept walking up toward High Street with the music following me out.

(This is a one minute recording of the busker in butter slip)

I think about him alongside that sliding door in Heike and Klaus’s studio, and the stove she never lights, and my hour at the easel. He was not a better violinist because he was standing in the Butter Slip. He was the same violinist he would have been on a street corner in the open air. But he had found the room that made his instrument sound like itself and then some, and he had the sense to stand in it. I don’t know that there is much more to a creative life than that. Find out which climate your hands work in. Build it, or find it, and then stay there long enough for it to become yours. And when somebody offers you the matching set, it is all right to take the mug you love instead.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio

References

WOVEN, a film by Tristan Hutchinson about basket maker Joe Hogan:

The Unknown Craftsman by Soetsu Yanagi, adapted by Bernard Leach: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/563597/the-unknown-craftsman-by-soetsu-yanagi-adapted-by-bernard-leach/

The Lonesome Touch by Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill, Compass Records: https://store.compassrecords.com/collections/world/products/the-lonesome-touch

The Butter Slip, Kilkenny, Discover Ireland: https://www.discoverireland.ie/kilkenny/the-butter-slip-kilkenny

Deci, E. L., and Ryan, R. M., Self-Determination Theory: https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/

Unhurried Letters: https://unhurriedletters.com

Klaus and Heike’s studio https://www.baurnafeastudio.ie/

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What a great way to spend a few hours. if you love history and the feeling of solace you get from old spaces you will love the Mill at Cushendale. Thank-you to the family and friends that allowed me the visit their.

At the Workbench

Another crusty morning out here near Borris, the daylight coming up subdued and gray behind a wind that has hardly let up. My first ten days in Ireland were bright and sunny, the kind of weather that had the locals shaking their heads and telling me, almost apologetically, that it was not normal, that I should expect it cool and wet and windy. They were right. This is the Ireland they promised me, and it is windy, though somehow it is a different wind than the one that comes across the Nebraska plains, less of a shove and more of a steady press against the house, and the sound of it through the old walls made me want a fire in the wood stove. Not because I was cold, or even chilly really, just a fire for the comfort of it.

I stood there with the stove door open and the matches in my hand for longer than I would like to admit before I decided that was too indulgent at eight in the morning, closed the door, and made breakfast instead, eggs and toast and a pork chop (sorry, veggies). Then I wrote. Even though I miss playing in my studio and the smell of molten beeswax and oil paint, I love being able to write any hour I want here, and my mind seems clearer than it is at home, though I cannot tell you whether it is the seclusion settling my neurodivergent brain, the real, whole food, or just that there is less to do, less standing in the doorway waving its arms for attention.

Under the Surface

It is not that there is nothing to do. The things here are simply quieter about it. I have yet to walk more than five miles of the trails along the river, and I have spent only a few hours on foot in several of the villages around Borris rather than a full day in them. The rosehips for the jelly, or jam, or tincture, I have not decided which, are still out on the hedges. A friend gifted me some felt, and it sits folded on the chair by the window waiting for the eco dye pot. I want to take proper care of the glorious, established dirty pot Nicola keeps here, which sounds like a funny thing to say out loud, but any dyer will know exactly what I mean. Every one of those things I would file under the same heading, slow living, and none of them requires me to act like one of the productivity bros. I did that long enough.

About a year before I retired, I realized, the way a dog eventually figures out he has been chasing a stick and not a bone, that productivity was never the thing I was hungry for. Sixty-six years it took me to figure that out, and I mean, come on. Slow living as a way of life fits me the way minimalism never quite did, maybe because it is more attainable, maybe because it asks you to add attention rather than subtract things. So, with my fork in one hand and the last of the toast in the other, I started thinking about Tuesday, today as I write this, and the two o’clock visit I had booked at Cushendale. The form on their website would not work for me, so I called, and Trevor told me that was the usual way anyway, by phone or email, and just like that I was on the calendar.

Lyrics created from journal notes and substack story. Suno produced the song.

Studio Notes

I had been waiting for this one because it is special in a way that is hard to explain back home. Walking in the Sandhills we know intuitively that people stood where we are standing long before us, but the history we can actually trace runs about two hundred and fifty years, usually less, seldom more. At Cushendale there has been a woollen mill on the same ground since 1204, when Cistercian monks and the Norman knight William Marshal founded the abbey in what became Graiguenamanagh, the village of the monks. That is provenance, a heritage you can put your hand on, and it lights up my imagination.

I left the house about an hour early thinking I would grab a quick sandwich in town, which I did, though it took longer than I planned, and right about the time I set off on foot the rain started again. I went the wrong direction first and ended up down by the Barrow, so I just walked a big loop around the old abbey grounds and found my way back up the hill, pushing through the door at one minute past two with rain still on my jacket. Trevor met me there. I only had an hour with him, but he is the kind of man I would happily sit down with for a whole afternoon, deeply knowledgeable about weaving and the wool trade and about running a business. It was refreshing to talk with someone who has his hand on the pulse of an artisan business working at their scale.

The thing I had been most excited about was the water. The monks cut a channel, the mill race, to bring water down from the Duiske, a small river that comes off Brandon Hill above the town, Trevor thinks close to a mile of it, and I kept picturing them working it by hand with what would have been fairly primitive tools, through heavily forested ground full of stone and bramble. It still runs right outside the mill. You can see it out one of the windows, and I leaned my camera against the glass and took more pictures of it than I needed, because they use that water and only that water for their wet work, and it turns out the water is a good part of why their color looks the way it does.

All of the dyeing happens right there in the mill, in batches, and Trevor explained something about it that I have not been able to stop thinking about since. The wool is dyed into a small set of strong, pure colors, and when they want a new shade of yarn they do not mix those colors the way I would mix paint on a palette. They blend the dyed fibers together, and every one of the original colors is still there in the finished yarn, a red fiber lying next to a green one lying next to a yellow, and it is your eye that does the mixing. Up really close it is still a crowd of colors. From a few feet away it is heather, or moss, or whatever that particular blend was meant to become. From there the fibers go through carding and then onto the spinning mule, and the mule is its own history lesson.

Samuel Crompton worked the mule out in Lancashire in the late 1770s by combining two earlier spinning machines into one, a hybrid, which is where the name comes from, and Philip Cushen has called it less an evolution than a revolution. Theirs was built in 1890, bought by the family from a mill that was closing down, and it is still spinning, one of the last of its kind still working in Ireland. I asked Trevor why a mill that owns two of the newest, largest looms around still runs a machine that old, and his answer was simple enough that I wished I had thought of it myself. At every stage, and there are more than twenty of them between a fleece and a finished blanket, they ask whether a newer machine would make that step any better, and by better they mean one thing, would it improve the quality. Trevor told me Philip has stayed the course for decades by keeping three things in the same order, quality first, then design, then price, and the machines simply fall in line behind that.

For the weaving the answer was that the new looms do the job just as well, so the new looms came in. For the spinning the answer was no, nothing newer matches what the old mule gives them, so the old mule stays, and Philip or one of the other workers still stands beside it watching for the small problems before they turn into big ones. Trevor told me stories, too, one about the more than four thousand scarves they have been making for the Irish government to give as gifts to European dignitaries while Ireland holds the presidency of the EU Council this year, and another about how Cushendale survived when synthetics took over in the late eighties and nineties and the wool market all but disappeared, not just in Ireland but across the UK. I could not keep hold of all of that second story, and I would go back just to hear it again. I did not get the photographs I had hoped for, but I got a few I like, and I walked back down the hill to the car feeling a little like I had been wrapped up in one of their mohair throws.

On the Table

That trick of the eye has a history, and it runs straight through a dye house. In the 1820s the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul was put in charge of the dyes at the Gobelins tapestry works in Paris, and the weavers kept complaining that some of his colors, the blacks especially, looked weak and dull in the finished tapestries. Chevreul tested the dyes and found nothing wrong with them. What he found instead was that a color changes depending on what sits beside it, and in 1839 he published a thick book on what he called the simultaneous contrast of colors. Forty-some years later Georges Seurat and Paul Signac read Chevreul and built a whole way of painting out of it, laying down small separate dots and strokes of pure color and trusting the viewer’s eye to blend them at a distance, which is how we got A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and the movement people call pointillism. If you want to geek out the way I did, the whole of Chevreul’s book in its 1861 English translation, all 340 pages of it, is free to download, and I have put the PDF link down in the References.

I have taught that painting and stood in front of reproductions of it more times than I can count, and I never once thought about the fact that the idea began with a man staring at dyed wool. At Cushendale the idea has simply come home, and Jim, who has been their dyer for more than thirty-five years, lifts a blend to the window and knows by looking whether those separate colors will read as the shade he wanted. The philosopher Michael Polanyi wrote that “we can know more than we can tell,” and I suspect Jim could explain a good deal of what he does, but not all of it, and the part he could not explain is the part that took thirty-five years.

In Good Company

Watch: A Cushendale blanket from fleece to finish, a short film with Philip and Miriam Cushen that follows a blanket from Galway sheep through dyeing, the 1890 spinning mule, warping, weaving and finishing. It runs about five minutes, and if you cannot get to Graiguenamanagh anytime soon, it is the nearest thing to standing inside the building.

Read: Chevreul himself, and you can read him for free. The Met holds an original 1839 edition of De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs, with its colored lithograph plates, as a public domain object you can look through online, and the 1861 English translation, The Laws of Contrast of Colour, is on Project Gutenberg or as a downloadable PDF from the Internet Archive. Look at the subtitle, which lists painting, mosaic work, tapestry and carpet weaving, dress, and flower gardening, and tell me that man was not a maker at heart. For the people side of the story, read Mundy Walsh’s interview with Miriam Cushen, the sixth generation of the family, on growing up in the mill, leaving for a corporate career and coming home, and her grandmother’s rule of doing the right thing because it is the right thing.

Listen: The Lonely Palette, Episode 47: Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Tamar Avishai’s podcast takes one painting at a time, and this is the painting that took Chevreul’s dye-house discovery and turned it into a million dots. If you would rather stay with the sheep, the History and Heritage Podcast has a short episode, Native Breed Series: The Galway Sheep, on the breed whose fleece goes into Cushendale’s Irish wool, and how close it came to disappearing.

A Quiet Note

If you are ever within a few hours of Graiguenamanagh, call or email Cushendale and go. If you love history, slow making, and the art of handmade things, or if your world runs toward the boutique, the bespoke, or anything made one at a time, it is for you. The photographs I did like from that rainy Tuesday and the painting, along with another version of this visit, are going into Unhurried Letters, which is where the stories that need a slower telling go to live. If that sounds like something you would want in your own mailbox, or in someone else’s, it lives at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

I keep thinking about that channel of water sliding past the window while two brand new looms ran a few feet away, and only a few feet from those, a mule well over a century old doing exactly what it was built to do. Nobody at Cushendale is trying to go back to 1204, and nobody is trying to outrun it either. They ask of every step whether the new way would improve the quality or cost them some of it, no matter how much time it might save, and they keep the old way wherever the answer is no, cleaning it, oiling it, standing beside it. The water does not seem to mind at all. That is about as good a picture of slow living as I have found, not a refusal of the new, just a refusal to let go of what still runs.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio

References

Chevreul, M. E. (1839). De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs. Paris: Pitois-Levrault. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas J. Watson Library. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/900717

Chevreul, M. E. (1861). The Laws of Contrast of Colour (J. Spanton, Trans.). London: Routledge, Warne and Routledge. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76939

Chevreul, M. E. (1861). The Laws of Contrast of Colour [PDF scan, Getty Research Institute]. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/lawsofcontrastof00chev Direct PDF download: https://archive.org/download/lawsofcontrastof00chev/lawsofcontrastof00chev.pdf

Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. University of Chicago Press.

Cushendale Woollen Mills. Medieval History. https://cushendale.ie/pages/medieval-history

Cushendale Woollen Mills. Our Team. https://cushendale.ie/pages/about-cushendale

Cushendale Woollen Mills. Made Slower. https://cushendale.ie/pages/made-slower

Cushendale Woollen Mills. Sustainability. https://cushendale.ie/pages/sustainability

Cushendale Woollen Mills. Fleece to finish film with Philip and Miriam Cushen. YouTube.

Design Ireland. Cushendale Woollen Mills. https://designireland.ie/designers/cushendale-woollen-mills

Walsh, M. Weaver and Textile Designer Miriam Cushen [Interview].

Creativity Through a Female Lens

25. Weaver & Textile Designer Miriam Cushen: 'As a maker you can have your head down making but it's important to look up and ensure you’re pointing in the right direction.'

The Creative Women interview series chats to women in creative fields, and explores what is at the root of their artistic drive. Creative thinking is fundamental for a fulfilled life, and so understanding and cultivating it through shared experiences, challenges and achievements helps us all thrive…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · Mundy Walsh

Echo Live (2026, March 11). Government to spend €135k on wool scarves to give as gifts during EU presidency. https://www.echolive.ie/nationalnews/arid-41808254.html

Wikipedia. Spinning mule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_mule

Avishai, T. (2020, April 13). Episode 47: Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. The Lonely Palette. http://www.thelonelypalette.com/episodes/2020/4/13/episode-47-george-seurats-a-sunday-on-la-grande-jatte-1884

Blake, L. (2025, July 22). Native Breed Series: The Galway Sheep. The History and Heritage Podcast. https://historyandheritagepod.podbean.com/e/native-breed-series-the-galway-sheep/

Unhurried Letters.

https://unhurriedletters.com/

Nebraska’s One-Room Schoolhouses, Nebraska Life: https://www.nebraskalife.com/blog/post/nebraskas-one-room-schoolhouses

WBUR Here & Now: One-room schoolhouses are still a lifeline for rural communities

Unhurried Letters: https://unhurriedletters.com

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A week into slow living in the Irish countryside and I am content. Rested. Peaceful. Full. I have accomplished more at a slow restful pace in the last week than the whole of the previous month. And, more importantly, with intent and purpose, fully present at each stage of this experience. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy living it.

At the Workbench

The fog was down on Wednesday morning, a dense sheet of it cloaking the mountain and spilling all the way into the front field, the kind of cool Irish morning where a sweater under a jacket is exactly right. I pulled on my muck boots and drove the five kilometers into Borris a little giddy, if I’m honest, which for a morning of lace is slightly embarrassing to admit. I am an artist, but I don’t sew well, I don’t crochet, and I don’t embroider. What I do have is a deep appreciation for anything made slowly by hand, and I had been looking forward to this morning since the phone call that made it possible.

That call came from my friend Nicola, whose place I’m watching while she teaches in Australia. When I mentioned the lace, she rang one of her many friends and asked whether I might join them for a morning. Mary said absolutely. They meet on Wednesdays from ten until half twelve at the local library, which turned out to sit right beside the church, and that small fact pleased me more than it probably should have. Things move differently here. America is about two hundred and fifty years old, and I was driving past buildings older than my whole country toward a craft that has been worked in this village for the better part of two centuries.

Only one woman was there when I arrived. I introduced myself and she told me to have a seat, so I did, at a long run of tables pushed together under tall sash windows, a stone fireplace at one end of the room and framed photographs of old Borris shop fronts and estate buildings on the walls. Then the others began to trickle in, each with a bag or a tin or a zippered case, and by ten minutes past the hour the room was full, with a few more women arriving over the next two hours. Out came the work, spools of white thread, small scissors, a shortbread tin repurposed for supplies, a red binder with I ♥ LACE across the cover, and a mug with Santa Claus on it, in September, which told me something about this group before anyone said a word. One woman drew a length of thread out to arm’s length, and another was working a seam ripper through a scatter of pale stitches on a piece of dark green cotton, picking them loose one at a time.

I was introduced around the table as a friend of Nicola, which in Borris appears to be all the credential a person needs. I asked whether anyone would rather not be photographed, and then mostly I listened. Every woman there had a piece in some state of completion. A few were beginners and many had been at it for decades, most came from Borris and the villages around it, and the talk moved without a seam between what was happening with somebody’s family and how a particular stitch ought to go. Nobody stopped working to talk, and nobody stopped talking to work.

Under the Surface

The story of Borris lace begins in the worst years this country has known. When the potato failed in the 1840s and the Great Famine took hold, Lady Harriet Kavanagh was mistress of Borris House, a widow raising four children on the estate, among them a son named Arthur who had been born without fully formed arms or legs and whom she taught to paint and write with a brush held in his mouth. Harriet was a traveler and an artist herself, a woman who drew and painted and kept journals, and on her trips abroad she gathered pieces of old lace from Italy and from Corfu. She came home convinced that the women of the estate, already known as good hands at plain sewing, could learn to make something like it, and that it could be sold. Local accounts date the beginning to 1846, the first terrible year, while other histories put the real start in the 1850s, after her visits to Corfu. The dates depend a little on who you ask, but the reason doesn’t.

The method she settled on is still the one I watched on Wednesday, and a framed display on the library wall lays it out in four panels. A pattern is drawn on paper and layered with cotton fabric underneath and a clear adhesive film on top. A narrow machine-made tape (which is getting harder and harder to source) is laid along the lines of the design and fastened down with small tacking stitches worked right through the layers. The lace itself, the fillings and bars that fill the open spaces between the tape, is stitched by needle on top of all of it. Then, at the very end, the maker flips the whole assembly, snips the tacking stitches from the back and unpicks them, and the lace comes away free, holding its own shape for the first time. That was what the woman with the seam ripper had been doing. She was letting a piece go.

Lady Harriet drew many of the early patterns herself, and after Arthur married in 1855, his wife Frances took the enterprise further, running weekly classes, handing out materials, and designing patterns of her own. The lace was sold through the Irish Linen Stores on New Bond Street in London, a sample was presented to Queen Victoria, and orders came from England and the Continent and, more and more, from America, collars and pillow covers and trims going out from a village in south Carlow to people who would never see it. The Times of London described it in 1909 as a modern reproduction of Point de Milan, copied from beautiful old Italian models. The First World War began the long decline, with materials costing more, fewer hands to do the work, and machine-made lace undercutting everything, and by 1960 only a handful of women were still making it. After revival attempts that never quite took, an Australian lacemaker named Marie Laurie, who had spent years documenting the lace collection at Borris House, offered workshops in 2016, and the group I sat among grew out of those. Borris lace is now the only known surviving Irish tape lace.

I had come in thinking of it as a story about income, and it was, in years when any income at all could matter enormously. I had also been thinking of it as dignity, skilled and beautiful work rather than charity handed down from the big house. But at that table I began to think Lady Harriet made something else as well, whether she meant to or not. She made a reason for women to gather. There is good research on this, a 2010 review by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues that pulled together nearly a hundred and fifty studies and found that people with strong social relationships were about fifty percent more likely to survive over the periods studied than people without them, an effect comparable to quitting smoking. I didn’t need the numbers on Wednesday. You could see it in the room, in the way a question about a stitch opened onto a question about someone’s daughter, and in the way one woman would lean across to look at another’s work without being asked

Lyrics created from journal notes and substack story. Suno produced the song.

Studio Notes

I stood in front of that framed display for a long time, longer than a person who doesn’t sew has any reason to, reading it the way I used to read a good lesson plan. Four panels, four captions, the whole process visible at a glance: The Assembly, Laying the Tape, Stitching the Lace, The Finished Lace. Years in a classroom will do that to you, and I kept admiring how cleanly it teaches, how a stranger can stand there and understand in two minutes what takes years to do well.

My grandmother made lace. I have doilies and handkerchiefs she made, and standing there I realized I don’t know how she made them, whether it was anything like this or something worked with a tiny hook or a set of needles so fine I can’t picture her hands around them. I found myself rubbing my thumb across my fingertips, the way you do when you’re trying to remember the feel of something. It’s a strange thing to own the finished work of someone you loved and not know the first thing about how it came to exist, and I suspect a lot of us have a drawer somewhere with exactly that in it.

In the studio I have my own version of tacking stitches, though I never thought of them that way until Wednesday. The painter’s tape that holds a collage in place while the medium sets, the clamps on a panel, the masking I peel from the edge of an encaustic piece once the wax has cooled. None of it shows in the finished work, and most people who look at the finished work never think about it. I peel it away, and the piece either stands on its own or it doesn’t.

The conversation turned to education by way of the room itself. A few of the women told me that the part of the library we were sitting in used to be their school, and that some of their husbands had gone there too, and I looked around again at the tall windows and the stone fireplace and tried to picture rows of small desks where the tables stood. We talked for a while about the one-room school and everything that went with it when those schools closed, the older children helping the younger ones, a teacher who knew every family, a building that belonged to the whole community rather than to a district office miles away. Nebraska once had nearly seven thousand one-room schoolhouses, and as late as 1986 it still had more than any other state. Now, I am not sure how many, if any, are left. The schools remaining consolidated into larger districts, and the kids ride a bus past the buildings their grandparents learned in.

From there the talk drifted to what else has been lost, and it turned out the women of Borris and an artist and retired teacher from Nebraska had the same complaint. Nobody teaches the basics anymore. How to make a pot roast, darn a sock, sew a button back on, bake bread, scones or a cake, change the oil in a car or change a tire. The small, necessary skills of caring for yourself and a home used to be a rite of passage, taught by mom and dad and reinforced at school, and now they are nearly gone except in the most diligent rural households, and rarer still in town. One of the women kept stitching the whole time she talked about it, and I remember thinking the lace itself was an answer to the complaint, a skill that nearly vanished and came back because a room full of people decided to learn it together.

On the Table

One piece was finished just as my time there came to an end, a collar, though I’m not certain that’s the proper term. It was laid out on a length of black cloth so the white would show, a wide half circle of looping tape and open fillings with a border of small flowers all the way around the outer edge, the thin ties still trailing loose from the neckline. More than sixty hours of attention went into that piece, sixty hours of evenings and Wednesdays, a stitch at a time. Earlier in the morning I had watched two of the women hold a length of lace up between them, one pinching each end, while a third stood behind them talking with her hands, and I understood that nothing made at that table is ever finished by one person alone, even when only one person’s hands did the stitching.

I asked what happens to most of the pieces made there. Gifts, mostly, was the answer. There’s no way to put a price on the time it takes, and nobody seemed troubled by that. Somewhere there is surely still a market for work like this, the way there was when the lace went out to London and America, but the women I met aren’t making it to sell. They’re making it for the people they love and for the pleasure of the making, and I thought of my grandmother’s handkerchiefs again, and how they were probably gifts too, handed across a table somewhere a long time ago.

In Good Company

Watch: The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin), Colm Bairéad’s 2022 Irish-language film adapted from Claire Keegan’s novella Foster. A quiet girl is sent to spend a summer with relatives on a farm, where she is taught, without fuss, the small everyday tasks of a household and what it feels like to be cared for. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature.

Read: Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam. The classic study of how Americans stopped joining things, the leagues and clubs and circles that used to gather people around a shared purpose once a week, and what we lost when we stopped. I thought about it more than once at that table in Borris.

Listen: The Borris Broadcasts, the podcast of the Festival of Writing and Ideas, which gathers writers and thinkers each year on the grounds of Borris House, the same estate where the lace began. I so wish that the Festival of Writing was here at the same time I was. Maybe next year.

A Quiet Note

During the lockdowns of 2021, Borris lace went out by post, monthly packs of materials, instructions, and a little history mailed to older people at home and in a local nursing home, so that nobody had to stop making just because they couldn’t gather. I loved learning that. It’s the same instinct behind Unhurried Letters, something slow and handmade arriving in the mailbox instead of the inbox, meant to sit on the counter for a while. You can find it at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

Near the end of the morning the talk turned to Christmas. The venue for the annual party was booking up and a decision needed making, and delight settled over that table as the subject came up, eyes brightening, voices lifting, the way a room changes when everyone in it is looking forward to the same thing. I have no doubt it will be the event of the season. I tucked my phone away, thanked them, and walked back out past the church to the car. The whole morning had felt like a warm blanket on a cold day, and cozy is the only word I have for it.

On the drive home I kept thinking about those tacking stitches, how they hold the tape to the pattern while everything else is built on top, and how at the end they’re snipped from the back and pulled out, so that nobody who wears the collar or folds the handkerchief ever knows they were there. Lady Harriet drawing patterns from lace she found in Corfu. Frances running her weekly classes. An Australian woman documenting a collection and deciding to teach. Nicola picking up the phone, and Mary saying absolutely. None of it shows in the finished piece. All of it is why there is one.

I need to come up with something to give the group, something that says thank you properly, and I’ve been thinking about it with my hands since I got back to the house, which is usually how I know something matters to me. Whatever it is, it will have to be made slowly. Anything else would feel wrong in that room.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio

References

How the story of Irish lace is adding a new chapter in Borris, RTÉ Brainstorm: https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2023/0328/1366731-irish-lace-borris-lacemakers-history-tradition-craft/

Borris Lace, The Guild of Irish Lacemakers: https://irishlaceguild.com/laces/borris-lace/

Borris Lace, BorrisCarlow.ie: https://www.borriscarlow.ie/borris-lace

Borris Lace, Laces of Ireland: https://lacesofireland.ie/types-of-lace/borris-lace/

Harriet Kavanagh, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Kavanagh

The Borris Lace by Post Project, Age Friendly Ireland: https://agefriendlyireland.ie/initiative/the-borris-lace-by-post-project/

Holt-Lunstad, Smith & Layton (2010), Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review, PLoS Medicine: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316

The Quiet Girl (2022), dir. Colm Bairéad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quiet_Girl

Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam:

http://bowlingalone.com/

The Borris Broadcasts, Festival of Writing and Ideas:

Nebraska’s One-Room Schoolhouses, Nebraska Life: https://www.nebraskalife.com/blog/post/nebraskas-one-room-schoolhouses

WBUR Here & Now: One-room schoolhouses are still a lifeline for rural communities

Unhurried Letters: https://unhurriedletters.com

One-Click Check-In

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

I didnt publish again last week. A crazy week of travel prep and trying to get things done before leaving for five weeks. I didnt realize I would have that much to do. So, this issue is the beginning of a extended trip to Ireland and a what should be a very interesting trip.

At the Workbench

My boots are under the chair. Tall ones, the muck kind, built for wet grass and the sort of mud that will swallow a boot whole if you are not paying attention, and I wore them for one very specific reason. In about thirty hours they are going to meet Irish ground, rural and soft, the kind of place that does not show up on postcards, and right now they are sitting empty under a concourse table in Denver while I eat a protein bar and wait. I had to pull them off going through security this morning because they are too tall for the machine to read through cleanly, which felt like a strange kind of preview, taking off the boots meant for Ireland before I had even left the country.

The little commuter plane out of my hometown was packed solid, so they made everyone with a bag bigger than a purse gate check it, mine included. Somewhere over the last hour it went into the belly of that plane, and I sat in my seat a little longer than I needed to after we landed, listening through the wall to the sound of bags being thrown and the crew swearing at whatever wasn’t cooperating down there.

I picked up my bag at the gate, hauled it across two terminals to the gate I will be leaving from tonight, ate something, opened my notebook, and reached down for the water bottle clipped to the side of my pack. Gone. The whole rig, bottle, holster, and strap, torn clean off somewhere between there and here. It was the cheap plastic bottle, not the good one, so it is an easy loss to shrug at, and I have a solid twelve hours before boarding to go find a new one.

Before any of that, my sweetheart had already caught the one thing I actually would have needed. We got to the airport early, sat on a bench waiting for security to open, and somewhere in the conversation she asked if I had my driver’s license, which the international permit sitting in my bag is worthless without. I did not. She drove the fifteen minutes home and the fifteen back before I had even gone through the line. I noticed the noticing all morning, the boots, the bottle, the license. That is what a long layover does if you let it.

Under the Surface

None of this is actually about a water bottle. I have been an artist and photographer since high school, a combat photographer after that, then a stretch running a flatbed animation camera at a multimedia house, and by 1987 I was twenty seven and starting my third year of art school, still certain fine art was the thing I was actually built for. My professors did not agree, or at least they never said so out loud. What they said, almost daily, was how hard it is to make an actual living as an artist, and never once did they turn that same energy toward all the different ways a studio art degree could be used. I believed them.

I switched from art to accounting and business, which is probably not the natural landing spot for someone who is dyslexic and has ADD, though I do not regret it exactly. It was simply a thing that happened, the kind of decision that feels reasonable in the room and only shows its real size decades later. What I was doing before they talked me out of it was fiber art. Felt. Paper made from plants I grew myself specifically to make paper from. Sourcing wool, learning to full it and needle it into something with structure. I was, in every real sense, doing what I am flying toward right now but never really took it past the beginner intrigue, interest and skill level.

Studio Notes

The property in Clasheen that I am visiting is not a hobby garden. Something like twenty-five years have gone into it, thousands of specific plants, flowers, shrubs, and trees, chosen and grown on purpose for eco printing, natural dyeing, and a permaculture way of keeping a yard and garden. I did not pack dye and I did not pack a recipe. I packed a stack of blank silk and the intention to go looking once I land, which is close to exactly what I was doing at twenty seven with homegrown paper stock and a bag of raw wool, before somebody convinced me it was not a serious enough way to spend a life. Thirty nine years is a long time to take the long way back to something. Sitting in that college studio being told how hard it would be, I would not have believed I’d end up here anyway, just later, and by a much longer road than the one I was on.

On the Table

There is a place in the Nebraska sandhills I have not been able to stop thinking about since I started reading up on where I am headed to stay in Ireland. My mother grew up in the sandhills, a sod house on a hill with the Dismal River running at the base of it, and I spent enough of my own childhood visiting that ground that it got into me the way a place only gets into you before you are old enough to know it is happening.

Grass that moves like water. Plants and birds and insects that exist nowhere else quite the same way. A kind of quiet that is not empty, just unhurried. I never lived there full time myself, only visited, but it shaped something in me early enough that I have never quite been able to explain it. Reading about Clasheen this week, the plants gathered and grown there over decades, the whole property built around slow, deliberate attention to what is actually there, I recognized the vibe of it before I ever recognized the place.

It feels like home. Not anywhere I have lived. Home anyway. I do not have a tidy way to explain that, and I am not sure I am supposed to yet. Some places seem to know you before you know them, the same way, maybe, that fiber work never actually stopped being mine even during the thirty nine years I told myself I had left it behind.

In Good Company

Watch: The Eyes Have It, a 2003 60 Minutes segment on John Stilgoe and the discipline of looking closely at ordinary places. Seeing him do on camera the same thing he does on the page made the book worth pulling back off the shelf.

Read: John Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic has been on my shelf for years, and a long layover felt like the right occasion to open it again. Stilgoe’s whole case is that the ordinary, overlooked edges of a place, a parking lot, a drainage ditch, a concourse nobody lingers in on purpose, are worth actual attention, and that the person willing to look gets rewarded for it. 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.

Listen: Wendell Berry reading his own poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” recorded for On Being. Under three minutes, and it did more for the twelve hours in that Denver concourse than the protein bar did. https://onbeing.org/poetry/the-peace-of-wild-things/

A Quiet Note

Trips like this one, the slow accumulation of small true things in an unfamiliar place, are exactly what Unhurried Letters is built around. If you want the version of this one that shows up on paper, with a signed, limited edition, fine art print, a postcard and something to actually hold onto, that is where it lives. If that pace sounds like something you want more of, you can find it at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

I still have hours before boarding. The boots are still dry, still under the chair. Somewhere on the other side of that flight is a garden built for exactly the kind of work I was doing before anyone told me not to, in a place that already feels like the sandhills felt when I was a kid, for reasons I cannot fully account for yet. I do not know what to do with that other than get on the plane and find out.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio

References

References

John Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: A Field Guide to the Everyday Landscape (1998)

Touring Harvard Yard with John Stilgoe —

John Stilgoe, Writing History for the Mainstream —

The Eyes Have It, 60 Minutes, 2003 —

Unhurried Letters: https://unhurriedletters.com

One-Click Check-In

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

I didnt publish last week. The guilt has mostly evaporated. And I’m reminding myself, again, that I don’t owe myself any specific posting. Normally I post on Thursday, I decided to post today, Friday, instead. Just to be contrary. Childish perhaps? The mental games I play with myself are humorous.

At the Workbench

I saw her first on the walk from the Pousada du Valle into the center of Embu das Artes, sitting outside one of the shops in an old wooden chair, bundled against the cool Brazilian morning in a dark coat and knitted cap. I noticed her because she was looking directly at me, not staring exactly, nothing confrontational in it, the kind of eye contact that happens between strangers when neither one immediately looks away. I kept walking.

Embu was full of people to look at and things to photograph, and after several days in São Paulo surrounded by the World Wheelchair Rugby Championships, crowds, noise, concrete, and traffic, I had come there to spend some time among artists. There were galleries and stalls, paintings and carvings, jewelry and handmade objects, musicians and tourists, enough visual clutter to keep a person with a camera busy for days. I didn’t have a real camera though, no professional body hanging from my shoulder, just a phone in my pocket, which these days is generally enough. I have always preferred photographing people and texture over things arranged for me to see, and somewhere along the way I started doing that more slowly, more deliberately, happiest when I could wander without much of a plan and pay attention to whatever appeared in front of me. Given the choice between the middle of a crowd and its edges, I have almost always chosen the edge.

I walked through Embu that way for most of the afternoon. On my way back toward the hotel I passed the woman again, still sitting there, and we made eye contact a second time, neither of us saying anything. By the third pass, I had begun wondering whether she’d been there all day. Probably not. More likely I had simply started building a story around her because I had taken her photograph in my mind several times without actually taking it. I walked another block, stopped, and turned around.

When I came back, I asked whether she would mind if I took her picture. She smiled and said something I didn’t understand, then repeated it in English once she saw my face. “Of course.” Her English was good, better than good, almost no accent I could place, though by then I understood how little I knew about identifying accents in Brazil. I took the photograph and sat down on the concrete in front of her, and within a few minutes the woman I had photographed and the woman sitting in front of me seemed like two different people. The photograph had caught her in repose, serious, lined by age. But when she smiled something opened, a warmth that’s hard to explain without making it sound sentimental. She had the kind of face that became more beautiful when she talked.

We spoke for twenty minutes, maybe thirty. A person who wanders without a schedule isn’t always a good judge of time. At some point she asked what I was doing in Brazil, and I told her about the championships and the art that had pulled me toward Embu, and that I was traveling alone. “Alone by choice?” she asked. “Mostly.” “Good,” she said, and when I asked why, she shrugged. “People are afraid of being alone. I think they miss a great deal that way.”

I liked her immediately, and told her I’d always been that way myself, though the older I get the more I seem to value solitude, that I like people and conversation and had spent much of my life surrounded by students, athletes, artists, and friends, but that I also like walking alone, looking, writing, taking photographs, sitting in unfamiliar places without explaining myself to anyone. She nodded like this made perfect sense. “That is different,” she said. “You are not alone. You are paying attention.” That distinction stayed with me long after we’d said goodbye.

Eventually she asked whether I had always been an artist. Mostly, I told her, but not exactly, I’d been interested in photography when I was young and had spent time in Italy in the early eighties. “Sicily,” I said. “Ah,” she said, “Sicily,” and there was nothing remarkable about the way she said it, just the word itself, but something in her voice carried me backward.

Under the Surface

I was twenty-two when I arrived in Sicily, attached to Sigonella Naval Air Station outside Catania, working in photography, processing film from American aircraft that had been out photographing other things. It was another world then, before satellites and digital imagery made the view from above feel ordinary, and somewhere on those strips of acetate were pieces of a world most of us would never otherwise see. I told her about the old Fiat that moved from group to group around the base, passed around for a small fee whenever somebody needed transportation, a battered four-door that survived, I told her, because nobody had informed it that it was supposed to be dead. She laughed, a good laugh, and I told her about the chicken place outside the base, roasted chicken and potatoes and vegetables cheap enough that we went often, and about the swimming hole nearby, an underwater passage you could swim through and come up inside an enclosed space surrounded by rock. I loved it there.

Once I got too close to the edge and something scraped my hip. “Coral,” I said. “I had no idea coral could cut you like that.” She asked if it was sharp, if it was deep, and I told her deep enough, and touched the outside of my hip without thinking. The scar is still there, small now. There had been a function that night, and the cut was sore enough that I spent most of the evening trying not to brush against anything. “You were young,” she said. “Young men are always surprised when the world turns out to have sharp edges.” That was when I thought of Max, someone I hadn’t thought about in years.

There are people who appear in the stories we tell about our lives because we remember them vividly, and then there are people who were simply around so often that, after enough years, you can’t separate them from the background. Max was like that, somewhere between ten and fifteen years older than I was then, though at twenty-two anyone over thirty belonged to another generation. I liked her. I was engaged at the time and had every intention of staying loyal, but I liked her enough that under different circumstances I’d probably have found reasons to spend more time with her. She turned up at the lab occasionally, at parties, sometimes at the chicken place. What I never remembered was what she actually did.

“She was always around,” I told the woman in Embu, “but I never knew why.” “Perhaps you did,” she said. “You knew her name.” “Maybe.” “Sometimes that is more than people know.” I laughed and said Max was one of those people you assume must belong somewhere, too comfortable moving through different groups not to. At twenty-two you don’t stop to ask those questions. The woman in Embu looked toward the street for a moment. “Did she swim?” I didn’t know. I tried to picture the people who usually came with us to that swimming place, but the years had compressed them into a handful of faces, some names remaining, others gone. “Maybe,” I said. “Why?” She looked back at me. “She may have been there when you cut yourself.”

It was such an ordinary observation that I nearly missed it. Then I stopped. “At the swimming place?” “Yes.” “I don’t remember.” She nodded, and I tried to picture that evening again, the swim, the cut, cleaning it up, getting dressed for the function, and then, suddenly, Max standing somewhere to my left while I leaned against something trying to keep my hip from rubbing against a table. Not a complete memory. More like a photograph exposed but never properly developed.

The woman in Embu had already moved on, asking about the Fiat again, how many people drove it, what happened when it broke down. I told her I couldn’t remember. “You remember a wound from forty-four years ago,” she said, “but not the name of the restaurant?” “The wound was on me.” She smiled. “Exactly.” There was no mystery in any of it, I told myself later. An intelligent woman had asked me questions, and I had been traveling more than a week, sleeping in unfamiliar beds, meeting artists and attending championship games, and found myself in a small Brazilian town talking with a stranger whose smile reminded me of someone I’d known when I was young. The human mind is a machine built to connect things.

Eventually I stood to leave, thanked her for the photograph, and asked her name. She looked surprised, as if neither of us had noticed I’d never asked. “Marina,” she said. I repeated it. She nodded, then looked at my phone. “Do you still have the photograph?” I showed her. She studied it for several seconds. “Not bad,” she said. Then she smiled. “You always did prefer people.” I laughed. “What?” “I said you prefer people.” “I thought you said something else.” “Perhaps I did,” she said, and that was the last thing she told me.

Studio Notes

I do this in the studio more than I like to admit, take a photograph or lay down a first pass of paint and only notice what’s actually in it later, once I’ve stepped back or opened the file days after the fact. Something in the corner of a frame I swore I’d composed on purpose. A shape in the cold wax that wasn’t there in my head when I scraped it on, only visible once the layer had cured and caught the light differently than I expected. I’ve learned to trust that second look almost as much as the first decision, because the eye still deciding what to make of a scene isn’t always the eye that later gets to study it.

That night in my hotel room I opened the photograph of the woman I’d taken that afternoon and enlarged it, the way I do with most of what I shoot when I want to see if there’s a second photograph hiding inside the first. There she was, dark coat, knitted cap, her face caught in the same serious repose I remembered from before she smiled, something already at the corners of her mouth that might have been the smile arriving a half second too late for the shutter. I had been concentrating on framing her face and hadn’t noticed the small object on her purse, barely visible just under her hand until I enlarged the image again. A key ring, old fashioned, metal, several keys, one hanging from a faded plastic fob.

I couldn’t place it at first. Then I did. Not the exact fob, it couldn’t have been, forty-four years had passed, but the shape was familiar, the colors, the cheap rectangular plastic with something written across it that I zoomed in on until the image broke apart into pixels I still couldn’t read. I knew what it reminded me of anyway. The Fiat. The car we passed from detachment to detachment outside Sigonella, the car with the nickname I could no longer remember.

There were explanations, of course. She was old enough to have lived in Italy. Millions of people owned Fiats. A plastic key fob means nothing on its own, and the resemblance could have been entirely in my head. That’s probably all of it, I told myself, setting the phone down. Then I picked it up again, and for the first time noticed something I should have caught the moment she told me her name. She had said Marina. But when I repeated it, she hadn’t said yes, that is my name. She had simply nodded, and smiled.

On the Table

I keep thinking about that key ring on “Marina’s” purse in Embu and it somehow brought up an odd comparison and connection to the table I built for Elise, some of its materials from 1950’s bleacher wood from her school. An old object, traveled a long way, meaning something to somebody I’ll probably never fully understand, showing up decades later in a place it had no obvious business being. I don’t know if the woman in Embu was who I halfway wondered she might be. I know the wood on that table used to be a bleacher seat and now holds a wedding gift. Some objects mean more than we realize while we’re still looking at them for the first time.

You probably have one of your own, something worn smooth by hands other than yours, sitting in a drawer or a shop or a room you walk through every day without stopping. It might be worth picking it up this week, just to wonder what it already knows.

In Good Company

Watch: The Double Life of Véronique, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1991 film about two women, born the same year in different countries, identical, unrelated, and never once aware of each other, who nonetheless seem to feel each other’s presence across the distance between them. Streaming on the Criterion Channel. Nothing romantic in the bond at the center of it, only the possibility that a connection can exist and mean something without ever being explained.

Read: The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker. A hundred and thirty-one small exercises built around a single claim that keeps proving itself true, that attention is a skill like any other, and most of what we call missing something is really just not having looked closely enough the first time.

Listen: Memory and Forgetting, a Radiolab episode on how unreliable the act of remembering actually is, how easily a true memory gets edited and a false one gets added without our noticing either happened. Featuring Oliver Sacks. I thought about this episode more than once writing tonight’s issue.

“She Was Already There” I wrote the lyrics from my journal notes and substack story. Suno produced the song.

A Quiet Note

Letters like this one, but slower, arrive by mail instead of inbox. A travel story, a fine art print, a recipe card, a postcard, the kind of thing meant to sit on a counter for a while before it gets put away. If that pace sounds like something you want more of, you can find it at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

I never found her again. The next morning I walked back through Embu and the wooden chair was gone, the way stalls open and close and things get moved and people come and go in any market anywhere. I stopped at a small shop nearby where I’d bought a bottle of water the day before, and the same woman was behind the counter. I asked if she knew the woman who’d been sitting down the street, pointing back toward the spot where I’d taken the photograph. “The woman in the chair?” she asked. Yes, I told her. She nodded. “She was waiting.” For someone? I asked. “I suppose.” For me, maybe, I said, half joking, and she gave me the kind of polite smile people give travelers who are building something larger out of something that’s probably simple. “Maybe.”

I asked if she’d caught the woman’s name. She thought about it. “Marina, I believe.” Then, before I could say anything else, “Or Max.” I asked what she meant, and she said the woman had spoken to someone on the phone before I’d come by, and that was the only name she’d heard. “Her name was Marina,” I told her. The woman only smiled again. “Then perhaps she was speaking to Max.”

That was reasonable. Entirely reasonable, the kind of small mix-up two names can produce in a language that isn’t your own. But I made it nearly halfway back to the Pousada before I understood why it bothered me anyway. Marina had never actually said she was waiting for me, not in anything she’d told me directly. I had passed her three times before I turned around, and she hadn’t waved, hadn’t spoken, hadn’t done anything to stop me walking on. If I’d kept going, there was no reason to think we’d ever have met at all, unless she had simply been waiting to see whether I would turn around.

I’ve spent much of my life believing I was moving unnoticed through the world, and I preferred it that way, always the one at the edge, watching, photographing, paying attention. I’m not sure that was ever entirely true. Somewhere back in Nebraska forty-four years ago, or somewhere in Sicily, or somewhere in a wooden chair on a street in Embu das Artes, somebody may have been paying attention right back. I still don’t know what to do with that, other than keep noticing what’s actually in front of me, and trust that the meaning of some of it won’t arrive until much later, if it arrives at all.

You might have a version of this too. Someone who was watching longer than you knew, who said less than they meant, who was waiting to see if you’d turn around. If a name just came to mind, that’s probably not nothing.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio

References

References

The Double Life of Véronique (1991), dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski, streaming on the Criterion Channel: https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-double-life-of-veronique

The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/570033/the-art-of-noticing-by-rob-walker/

Memory and Forgetting, Radiolab: https://radiolab.org/podcast/91569-memory-and-forgetting

Unhurried Letters: https://unhurriedletters.com

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At the Workbench

I am writing this from a plastic seat in the arena in São Paulo, a few days into a trip that took twenty-four hours of travel to get here and will take ten more days before it sends me home, but the day started a long way from here. Morning does not ease into a metropolis of twenty-two million, it arrives all at once, sirens and horns and the two-stroke whine of scooters weaving through traffic that never fully stops, jets crossing overhead close enough to feel in your chest before you hear them. Somewhere underneath all of it there is still one particular songbird working through its own sweet, off-tempo little melody, getting interrupted every so often by an anxious rooster a few yards over.

The air is still cool from the night when I leave the apartment, and getting out involves more locks than I expected, lock the bedroom door behind me, lock the house door behind me, unlock the gate, go through, lock the gate again. My daypack is light, just the essentials for a day on foot, water, a rain jacket, a hat, jerky, granola, a protein bar, and the small print of a painting from our hallway back home tucked in the outside pocket, which is a strange thing to be hauling across a city like this, though I am glad I did. I take an Uber to a different part of town for espresso, end up talking for ten minutes with a friendly man from Lebanon who has run his little shop here for years, then walk over to MASP, the art museum, before Ubering back across town for tonight’s game. Somewhere in a room full of other people’s paintings, I pulled mine out of my pack and actually looked at it, the way you actually look at something, not the glance you give it on your way out the door.

Under the Surface

The painting is called Grandma Rocks. It shows my wife’s mother in an old wooden rocker, holding my youngest daughter Elise as a newborn. I have studied that woman’s face more this week than probably any week since the painting was made, twenty-two years now, trying to read whatever is passing between the two of them. What I have not really told before is the actual timing of it. Doctors had told us years earlier that another pregnancy was not something to plan on, which is part of why we adopted my youngest son and made our peace with the family we had.

People will tell you that’s when it happens anyway, once you’ve stopped trying and made peace with things, and in our case that turned out to be true, though it took its own strange timing to prove it. In the same stretch of weeks we were living out of a hospital room in Denver, not knowing some days whether our son would survive the week, we already knew that Allison was pregnant, against exactly what we had been told to expect. Elise was born just weeks after Josh finally came home, arriving healthy and loud right on the heels of it, impossible by the numbers we had been given years before.

I do not have a tidy way to explain that timing and I am not going to pretend I do. What I know is what it felt like from inside it, which was not whiplash, not grief and relief slamming into each other with no room between them. It felt like someone opening a door in a room that had gone dark, right when the dark had gone on long enough that we had stopped expecting a door. Somewhere below me right now Josh’s chair collides with another one, titanium ringing off titanium, and that specific, physical sound gives that old feeling somewhere to go besides just around in my own head.

Studio Notes

Here is the part of the story I do not tell often. Josh was sixteen, driving himself home from an out-of-town basketball game the way rural Nebraska kids do once they have a permit, coming usually directly on the heels of a 14th birthday, twelve miles of dark two-lane between the school and our house. No moon that night, the road that particular kind of rural quiet you only get after ten o’clock, when everyone with sense is already home. He was going highway speed, plus a little more than that if I am honest, fresh out of the postgame shower, hair still wet, nothing on but a t-shirt for a twelve-minute drive he had made a hundred times before.

A Black Angus cow had gotten loose from somewhere and was standing broadside in the middle of the lane, black on black on a moonless night, and he never had a chance to see it coming. The windows all blew out on impact. It was fourteen below zero that night, and he lay there with wet hair and a t-shirt and a hole where the glass used to be, the cold coming in fast enough that hypothermia became its own emergency before the Flight for Life helicopter ever got off the ground. He knew he was hurt. He could not move to get up, or to find his phone, his coat, or to move out of the middle of the road. Sixteen years old that day. His birthday. Alone. In the middle of the night, the middle of a black highway. It still hurts thinking about it.

When they finally got him out of that car, there was exactly one injury on him. No cuts. No bruises. Nothing broken except his neck, a C-5 fracture that nicked the spinal cord. What followed was months at Craig Hospital in Denver that I remember now mostly in pieces, the hum of the monitors that never stopped, months in a recliner chair that never let anyone actually sleep, the particular hallway smell of a place that runs the same at three in the afternoon as it does at three in the morning. You stop asking whether things will be fine and start just watching for whether he survives the week. Somewhere in the middle of it, in that same room, I watched my sixteen-year-old son console a doctor in his thirties who had broken his own neck a few months after Josh did, telling a grown man in scrubs that it was going to be okay. That is the moment I knew he actually would be, not because any scan told me so, but because of who he still was underneath all of it.

He got back in school right after his release and worked hard enough to graduate on time with his class. And in that same rehab gym in Denver, somebody wheeled a group of grown men through on a demonstration of a sport back then still called Murder Ball, chairs built like small tanks, wheels cambered in at a harsh angle, full contact, half war and half joy, something straight out of a set from a Mad Max movie. Josh watched it and leaned forward in his chair for the first time since the accident. Twenty-two years later he is three days into a World Championship in Brazil, and I am blessed to be sitting in these stands with a water bottle and a phone I should have charged more carefully, watching him do it again.

On the Table

There is a real body of research behind what I watched happen to my son, and to us, in the years after that hospital. Psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun coined the term posttraumatic growth in the mid-1990s to describe something they kept hearing in interviews with people who had survived serious injury and loss: change that goes beyond simply getting back to normal, a genuine shift toward deeper relationships, a clearer sense of what matters, and a kind of personal strength that was not there before the crisis forced it into being. It does not erase the crisis or make it worth having happened. It just says something true and studied, that people, more often than we expect, do not merely recover from the worst thing that ever happened to them. Some part of them gets built by it.

In Good Company

Watch: Murderball (2005), the Oscar-nominated documentary that follows the U.S. wheelchair rugby team through the sport’s early years and toward the 2004 Paralympic Games. It is blunt, funny, occasionally profane, and the furthest thing from a gentle inspiration reel. It is also, as it turns out, the exact film that introduced a lot of players to this sport in the first place. Streaming free on Tubi.

A great reel and brief 30s insight into some of what goes on in wheelchair rugby. Team USA Mic’d up featuring Kory Puderbaugh.

Read: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Written decades before Tedeschi and Calhoun had a name for it, Frankl was already describing the same thing from the inside, how a person finds a reason to keep going when the ground has been taken out from under them. Short, plain, and still the clearest thing I know of on the subject.

Listen: United on Wheels, the episode featuring Seth McBride, a three-time Paralympic medalist in wheelchair rugby and editor at New Mobility Magazine. He talks plainly about the sport and the life around it, no polish, which is exactly what I wanted to hear sitting in these stands this week.

“Everything After” I wrote the lyrics from my journal notes and substack story. Suno produced the song.

A Quiet Note

There is more to this story than one issue can hold, Paris two years ago, a Paralympic medal, and whatever happens here in São Paulo before I fly home. That fuller version, with postcards from my photos, a fine art print, and a recipe card, is headed for Unhurried Letters instead, a slower kind of telling for a story that deserves one. If that sounds like something you would want mailed to you or someone you love, it lives at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

Twenty-two years is a long time to stay devoted to anything. Josh did not choose that gym, that chair, or that first demonstration of a sport nobody around him had heard of. He chose everything after it, every practice, every season nobody back home was watching, the long unglamorous stretch that never makes a highlight reel. I thought about that walking out of a museum with my own family’s painting still folded in my pack, on my way to watch him do, in a stadium in Brazil, the thing he started choosing in a rehab gym in Denver twenty-two years ago.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio

References

References

Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (1996). The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory: Measuring the positive legacy of trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 9(3), 455-471.

Rubin, H. A., & Shapiro, D. A. (Directors). (2005). Murderball [Film]. THINKFilm, MTV Films, Participant Productions.

Frankl, V. E. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.

United Spinal Association. United on Wheels: The Wheelchair Lifestyle Podcast, episode featuring Seth McBride.

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What an awesome week. I put together a statement of use specific to AI. I need to get it on the blog and on substack so people can see exactly how I put my writing together. It is not AI, but I do use AI for editing and, for me, especially grammar. I stink at grammar. I had an amazing English teacher but sadly no interest at all at the time. Having said all of that I love working analog both writing and creating art. There is something more pure in picking up a pen at scribbling in my journal and notes cards every day. I am super exicited that I found a “system” that will help to categorize and find threads from my daily notes and journal. Zettelkasten. Not new to many of you I am sure but man, I am super excited to learn this, it is just what I have been looking for to allow me to move even further to slow, analog creation. More on this coming I am sure.

At the Workbench

Jhon and I drove to Cozad, Nebraska last week for a specific purpose, not a museum trip. We were to pick up Waters of Life, an IMPACT show, and haul it ninety miles the other direction for a curator who was expecting us on schedule. IMPACT is a small circle of Nebraska artists, international exhibition history and publication credits required among other things, so the show itself was not nothing. It rained on and off the whole drive, the kind of rain that feels fine on your arms and terrible in your stomach when everything you’re carrying is on canvas, paper or board.

We loaded through the back, since that’s where you load a truck, and I had never seen this building. The gallery is new, finished within the last year, and every trip in gave me another few seconds of a foyer I wasn’t planning to stop in, paintings I didn’t recognize, work that had entered the collection since my last visit. We had another curator waiting ninety miles away. We loaded the last box, looked at each other, and pushed the whole schedule back anyway, because the docent walking us through. Our docent, a studio art student four years into turning herself into a Robert Henri scholar purely because she kept reading, said the words, “no one connected the artist to this town for seventy years”, and I wanted the story again. Jhon had never heard it.

Under the Surface

Here is the sentence. Robert Henri, one of the most influential painters and teachers in American art, spent his whole adult life letting the world believe he had no connection to a small Nebraska railroad town. Nobody put it together until the 1950s, decades after he died. The reason took some digging.

In 1872 a professional gambler named John Jackson Cozad, banned from card rooms across the country for being too good at faro, got off a train at the 100th meridian marker in the middle of the Nebraska plains and decided, right there on the tracks, to found a town. He wanted it clean and prosperous, no drinking or gambling allowed inside its own limits, which is a strange thing to legislate against when cards built your fortune, and the 50,000 dollar seed money that purchased the initial 20,000 acres game from a faro game in Omaha. For a decade it mostly worked. Then in 1882 a fight over grazing land with a rancher named Alfred Pearson stopped being a fight over grazing land. Cozad drew a pistol and shot Pearson in the face. Pearson lived two more months before the wound killed him, and by the time it did, Cozad was already gone, convinced a rope was waiting for him even though a jury would later acquit him. He borrowed a horse and rode for Denver in the dark. His wife Theresa stayed behind long enough to sell what she could sell, then sewed the money into the lining of her skirts and into the pockets of her teenage son’s coat before the family slipped out of the town her husband had built and named after himself.

Every one of them changed their name. John Cozad became Richard Henry Lee. His son Robert Henry Cozad became Robert Henri, and for years let people assume he was Lee’s adopted son rather than admit whose blood he carried. That secret held for the rest of his life and for decades after it, right up until a Nebraska historian finally traced the threads back and asked the question nobody had thought to ask, whether the famous painter and the vanished gambler’s family were the same people.

Here is the part that has nothing to do with murder. Henri grew up to despise exactly the kind of gatekeeping that had once decided his father’s fate, respectable people deciding who belonged and who didn’t. The National Academy of Design controlled American art the way the Paris Salon had controlled European art a generation earlier, and just as the Impressionists had broken from the Salon’s velvet rope, Henri broke from the Academy’s. He organized a rebel show in 1908 with seven other painters, an open middle finger to the institutions that kept rejecting work about tenements, washwomen, and ordinary city streets instead of the polished drawing rooms academic painting preferred. Critics mocked them as the Ashcan School, meant as an insult, trash cans and gutter subjects, not real art. Henri’s circle kept painting exactly that. The son of a man who ran from what respectable people thought of him grew up to build his entire career refusing to run from it.

Studio Notes

I have spent most of my working life getting some version of the same advice Henri would have recognized instantly. Find a lane. Make yourself easy to categorize. Pick a medium and stay in it so galleries know what shelf to put you on. I never could. Photography that turned into painting that turned into digital work that turned into whatever the piece in front of me wanted to be that week, resin, wood, fiber, synthography. It is a body of work that refuses to file neatly under one heading no matter how many well-meaning people have told me it would sell better if it did. There is a version of gatekeeping in the art world that has nothing to do with murder and everything to do with tidiness, and Henri spent his whole teaching career telling students to ignore it in favor of painting what was actually true in front of them.

Standing in a gallery that didn’t exist the last time I visited, listening to a twenty-something intern who had made herself an expert on a man dead for almost a century simply because she found him interesting enough to keep digging, I felt the same permission Henri handed his own students. Nobody assigned her that expertise. She built it because she wanted to. Jhon starts his own classroom this week for the first time, five days, all day, no committee deciding what he’s allowed to be curious about in front of thirty teenagers. I hope somebody tells him what Henri told his students, look at what’s there, not what you were taught you’re supposed to see.

On the Table

Name one rule you’ve been quietly obeying that nobody is enforcing anymore, a lane you were told to stay in, a medium you were told to pick and stick with, a version of yourself you’ve kept tidy because it seemed easier for other people to categorize. This week, break it on purpose, in something small. You don’t need a manifesto. Henri didn’t start with one either. He just kept painting what others considered ashcan art.

In Good Company

Watch: "Deep Dive into Robert Henri: Artist, Painter, Teacher," the Art Students League's interview with Peter Osborne, the museum's director, filmed inside Henri's actual childhood home in Cozad. Free on YouTube, the same building we walked through.

Read: Son of the Gamblin' Man, Mari Sandoz's 1960 novel built from Robert Henri's own Nebraska childhood, the gambler father and all of it, told as fiction layered over documented fact, which felt like the right kind of book to hang out next to a piece written the same way.

Of course I have to mention The Art Spirit, Henri's own collected teachings. This really is a book that should be in every creatives library. (As always these affiliate links are for your convenience. I would strongly encourage you to buy these from your local mom and pop bookseller rather than support another billionaire.)

Listen: The Artful Painter podcast, episode 64, "Robert Henri: A Secret Identity." Host Carl Olson made it while researching an audiobook of The Art Spirit, and it goes straight at the seventy-year secret instead of around it. You can also find Henri’s entire book, The Art Spirit, as a podcast by chapter. Very cool.

“The Name He Left Behind” I wrote the lyrics from my journal notes and substack story. Suno produced the song.

A Quiet Note

If a week like this one is the kind you’d rather receive slowly than read all at once, that’s most of what Unhurried Letters is for. A print, a few words, something that arrives when you’re not expecting it. No pressure either way. It lives at unhurriedletters.com whenever you’re curious

Leave the Light On

The paintings made it to the curator dry and on time. The docent goes back to school this fall, and someone else will be the one telling this story to whoever shows up next with a truck to load. Henri spent his life teaching people to look past what they were told to see. It took the rest of the world seventy years to look closely enough to see him. Some things are worth being patient for. Most of them are worth telling as a story while you wait.

Thank you for being here. See you next week.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio

References

Art Students League of New York, “Deep Dive into Robert Henri: Artist, Painter, Teacher” with Peter Osborne — youtube.com/watch?v=8KxFN64bq-k

The Artful Painter Podcast, Episode 64, “Robert Henri: A Secret Identity” — youtube.com/watch?v=ZyCIi_PeQUk

The Art Spirit by Robert Henri, full audio, all 17 chapters — youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFkWBebh44CSnIJ_PJ8oJ9eM8eQMlKtzt

Robert Henri Museum, Cozad, Nebraska: roberthenrimuseum.org

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This week was a struggle in terms of writing. My journal this week is full of fun stuff. Sensory, some emotion as well. I was having difficulty weaving all of that into a cohesive piece that was not, well…boring. Not sure that I overcame boring but I have come to realize that writing, like art, may not always please me. There are some pieces of my art that get sanded and painted over. Some get cut up and used for other things and yet some others just end up in the bin. So with that I did have some fun visualizing the words from the page marching off to the garbage disposal. Easy for someone dyslexic to see, not far from a normal day of marching, dancing words. Anyway, the whole process of writing this week was instructional for me, so there is that. Not my favorite but created in the slow way of making that I love. For me, as always, it is about process way more that product.

At the Workbench

A man named Mack Ross found me on the sidewalk in Sheridan, Wyoming, not long after I mailed a stack of Unhurried Letters at the post office before the shops even opened. He was in his seventies, born and raised there, forty years and something like four million miles behind the wheel of a truck before the neuropathy in his hands and feet caught up with him. He did not shake my hand when we met. He pointed me toward King’s Saddlery instead and sped off in his electric wheelchair, and that is how I ended up standing just inside the door of a museum that Don King spent most of his life filling.

Leather. Saddle soap. Something earthy and musky underneath both that I could not place, the good kind of underground smell, not a basement, not a cave. Past the saddles and the rope racks was a workroom, ten or so craftsmen and women at long tables, hands moving over rope stock and half finished saddles. Nobody asked me to leave. They let me hang back and watch. I had nothing on me but my phone, no real camera, no proper lens. I stood there taking pictures with it anyway, of hands that had put more years into that one bench than most of what I have ever made.

Under the Surface

An older woman two tables over was coiling rope with a rhythm that never broke stride, feeding slack through her palm without once looking down at her hands. Across from her a younger guy worked an awl through a saddle skirt, the leather squeaking faintly with each pass, a transistor radio somewhere behind him playing low enough that I only caught it between the other sounds. Nobody looked up when I raised my phone. I noticed the regret almost right away, the feeling every photographer knows, standing in exactly the right light with the wrong tool in your hand.

But underneath that regret was something else I did not expect. I was not there to make anything. Nobody was waiting on a finished piece. There was no deadline, no client, no version of the day where I walked out with a photograph worth framing. Presence has been a goal of mine for a while now, a more intense, fully present mindset I have been trying to cultivate, and for a few minutes in that workroom I managed it. The phone in my pocket was not a limitation. It was the only tool the moment actually called for.

That is rarer for me than I would like to admit. Most of what I take in gets turned into something before I have even finished looking at it. A texture becomes a reference. A face becomes a study. I have built an entire working life on that reflex, and it has served me well. But watching that woman feed rope through her hand without looking, watching that awl catch the light on every third pass, I was not translating anything. I was just present for it.

Studio Notes

Watching those ten hands work, I felt something closer to respect than temptation. I do not have what it takes to give forty years to one craft the way Don King did, the patience, the willingness to let a single skill get slowly and completely mastered while everything else waits its turn. That is its own kind of discipline, one I have never had, and standing in that room I did not think less of myself for lacking it. I just make differently. My own bench is crowded on purpose, encaustic next to a half-finished manuscript next to a jar of something fermenting I probably forgot about, and watching those ten craftspeople did not make me wish for their path. It made me admire it, the way you admire a language you were never going to learn.

I came home with a phone full of ropes and worn wood floors and a million texture and pattern shots like normal, and a list of ideas that has only gotten longer since. Tiles glazed with alcohol ink. A whitewashed paper bag, stamped and reused. A whole run of Eco printed scarves. A splatter piece made with a pickleball instead of a brush, because a magazine at the gallery had an article about a man who paints with a fly rod, and my brain took off after it in about four seconds flat. None of that came from the workroom itself. It came from the part of me that never quite stops gathering, even when it is standing still.

On the Table

One fact from the museum has stayed with me. In 1991 the National Endowment for the Arts recognized Don King as an artist, the same year it recognized B.B. King, a saddle maker and a blues guitarist named in the same breath by the same institution. Two very different kinds of a life’s work, both called art by the same people, and I do not think that is a coincidence worth smoothing over. We need people willing to go all the way to the bottom of one thing until they hit something the rest of us can only borrow from a distance. We also need people who keep moving, gathering unlikely connections a specialist would have no reason to go looking for. Neither one is the fallback position for people who could not manage the other. They are just different instruments, and a civilization needs both kinds of hands in it.

In Good Company

Watch: The Saddle Maker, a full episode of PBS’s A Craftsman’s Legacy. Host Eric Gorges visits saddle makers Charon and Tom Caldwell at their ranch and learns how a saddle actually comes together, tree, ground seat, tooling, and all. Twenty some minutes, free on YouTube, and about as close as you can get to standing in that workroom again without the drive back to Sheridan.

Read: King of the Western Saddle: The Sheridan Saddle and the Art of Don King by Timothy H. Evans. A folklorist’s look at how King’s Sheridan style, the wild rose motif stamped into leather across half the trophy saddles in the country, turned a working tool into a collected art form. Mostly out of print these days, so a used bookstore is probably a better bet than Amazon on this one.

Listen: The Smell of Memory, an episode of Simon Sinek’s A Bit of Optimism with scent designer Dawn Goldworm, about how smell ties into memory harder than any other sense we have. I thought about it the moment I stepped through King’s front door and the leather registered before anything else did.

The Boy Who Rode Away-I wrote the lyrics from my journal notes and substack story. Suno produced the song.

A Quiet Note

Those letters I mailed before the shops opened that morning are built on the same instinct as everything in that museum, something made slower than it needs to be, sent out anyway because slow is the whole point. A travel story, a fine art print, a recipe card, a postcard, arriving by mail instead of a notification. If that is the kind of pace you are after, you can find it at unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

You do not have to make something out of everything you witness. Some rooms just want your attention, not your reflex to turn them into work. The next time you find yourself standing close to somebody else’s craft, watching hands that know exactly what they are doing, let yourself just watch. You will probably reach for your phone anyway. That is fine. The tool was never really the point. Being there was.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio

References

The Saddle Maker, A Craftsman’s Legacy, full episode:

This May, Leathercraft Takes Center Stage in Wyoming, American Craft Council: https://craftcouncil.org/articles/this-may-leathercraft-takes-center-stage-in-wyoming/

King of the Western Saddle: The Sheridan Saddle and the Art of Don King by Timothy H. Evans: https://www.walmart.com/ip/5350558463

A Bit of Optimism, “The Smell of Memory with scent designer Dawn Goldworm”:

King’s Saddlery and the Don King Museum, background: https://www.sheridanwyoming.org/explore-kings-ropes-and-saddlery/ and https://kingropes.com/about-us/museum/

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At the Workbench

I have never been to Glacier National Park in my whole life, and this week I finally went. Smoke from wildfires burning across the Canadian border hung low over the whole park, softening every peak into something closer to a pencil sketch than a photograph, and it did not matter one bit. We drove by the Weeping Wall and came across Lunch Creek trail. We hiked the short trail up to a waterfall and saw more in half a mile than I expected to see in a full day. A bighorn sheep far off on the mountainside, and separately, much closer, a young mountain goat kid that came close enough to photograph. A hoary marmot sprawled out in the sun like it had nowhere else to be. A young buck still carrying his velvet. A peregrine falcon, a Clark’s nutcracker, a Columbian ground squirrel, a chipmunk small enough to be a rumor. Wildflowers covered the ground the whole way, indian paintbrush and lupine and shrubby penstemon and a dozen others I could not name and did not try to.

We took the Going-to-the-Sun Road east across the park, crossing the Continental Divide at Logan Pass, and came down the other side into the St. Mary Valley for lunch at Two Dog Flats.

Under the Surface

That lunch stop was the first time I actually looked across the valley and realized I was looking at real glacier ice, the thing the whole park is named for. Most of us picture a glacier as some massive, gleaming wall of bright blue ice, the kind you see in documentary footage of Alaska or Antarctica. The ones at Glacier are a bit of a reality check. Sitting high up in mountain bowls, they end up caked in dirt, gravel, and rock dust from grinding against the cliffs around them, so from a couple miles across a valley they look a lot more like a dirty snowpack tucked into a shadow than the postcard version. They shrink down in your vision too, until it is almost hard to believe you are looking at a huge, moving slab of solid ice at all.

What caught me was not just the size of it, once I actually placed it. It was the age. From there my mind kept walking backward on its own, from the ice, to how young the whole colonized world is next to it, to how young America itself is next to that, and finally down to how young I am against all of it. I do not feel my age anymore. Not the way I did driving in, or for that matter, when hiking. I am not in as good of chape as I thought.

I know there is scripture on our own smallness, and philosophers too. Marcus Aurelius wrote something close to this himself, in his own private notebook, centuries before anyone called it a genre. “Asia and Europe”, he said, “are only corners in the universe, every sea a drop in the universe, a whole mountain a clod of earth in the universe, every instant of the present a mere point in eternity”. “Brief is a man’s life”, he wrote, “and small the corner of the earth where he lives, and even the longest fame after death is carried by nothing sturdier than a short chain of people who will not remember much about him either, and who will themselves be gone soon enough”. Out there at Glacier, close enough to touch the wildlife and the wildflowers both, you feel folded into the same living system as everything else rather than just passing through it looking at it.

We kept driving clear to the east side before turning back for Kalispell. Eighty-seven miles out, we stopped for gas at a little roadside stand with a hand painted sign for the Huckleberry Hut.

Studio Notes

Rip, the man running the stand told me it had been a rough year for huckleberries, not many out there this season, and then he told me the fruit itself is something of an anomaly. University botanists have spent years trying to pin down what a huckleberry actually needs to produce on command and still cannot reliably reproduce it outside the specific patch of forest floor it already calls home. Move the plant, change the soil, and it stops producing, almost like it knows the difference between where it belongs and everywhere else. That alone strikes a chord in the slowness of bloom-where-you-are-planted philosophy I like to adopt.

I bought a small container, more out of loyalty than expectation, and told the man I would take them off his hands since nobody else in line seemed to want the last of them. Doc Holliday’s line ran through my head the rest of the drive, I am your huckleberry, and for once it fit two ways at once. I have loved that movie since the first time I saw it, and never expected to actually get to think the line standing at a real huckleberry stand.

I have lived a few days’ drive from Glacier my entire adult life and never once made the trip. Most of those years I was building a business as an artist and entrepreneur, not a teacher. Coaching and teaching only came into the picture the last fourteen years. Either way, a hundred versions of not enough time, and somewhere this beautiful never won the argument against all of it. It took retiring, and a visit to see my daughter that happened to route us through Montana, for me to finally stand in front of it. Nobody rushed me into that, and nobody could have. It arrived exactly when it was ready to arrive, not one trip sooner, the same way a huckleberry only shows up where the ground already knows how to grow it.

On the Table

Carry something small this week, the way a huckleberry insists on its own patch of ground and its own timing, or the way a Roman emperor once used the back pages of a private notebook just to remind himself how small one life actually is. A notecard, a phone note, whatever is already in your pocket. Jot down one thing you notice and cannot fully explain, a plant, a stranger’s habit, a stray thought, and leave it exactly that unfinished. You are not filing it away for later use. You are just proving to yourself that you noticed. It is an easy thing and reminds us of intentional slow living even if only for a moment.

In Good Company

Watch: Goodie to check out this week start with a nod to Betye Saar who died this week at 99. I have loved her spirit and work for a while. Betye Saar: Taking Care of Business, an eight-minute LACMA-produced short filmed inside her Los Angeles studio a few years back. Her gallery announced this week that she died in her sleep at home on July 26, four days shy of her hundredth birthday. She spent seven decades turning found and discarded objects, an old washboard, a broken tool, a cast off photograph, into work that confronted racism and reclaimed her own history one recycled piece at a time.

Read: The dynamic between Stieglitz and O’Keeffe has long been a subject of study and interest for me. Georgia O’Keeffe on why she painted flowers so large. Critics spent decades reading her giant blooms as commentary on women’s sexuality, and she never once agreed with any of it. Most of that seemed to be propagated by Stieglitz, in the beginning for marketing. Her own explanation was simpler. A flower is small, we are always moving too fast to really look at anything, and nobody actually stops long enough to see one honestly. So she painted them the size of a wall, and made whoever stood in front of the canvas slow down and finally give the thing the attention it never got at its actual size. I love the realization of intent through your art. That is cool.

Listen: I love not only huckleberries but just the idea of their slow existence and resilience as well. Huckleberries, Montana’s Little Icons, Retain Their Mysteries, a short Field Notes segment from Montana Public Radio. Nobody is even fully sure which pollinator does the work, the bumblebee is the leading suspect, and every attempt to reproduce that specific wild taste in a cultivated patch has come up short.

Younger Than the Ice-I wrote the lyrics from my journal notes and substack story. Suno produced the song.

A Quiet Note

If the unhurried, own-clock side of things is what you come here for, that is exactly the territory Unhurried Letters lives in. A handwritten story, a fine art print, a recipe card, sent through the actual mail once a month. unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

Depending on the season you are in right now, some things only arrive once the years are actually right for them. A park you finally reach. A berry that will not be rushed. A life’s work carried in a small notebook clear to the end of it. None of that is late. It is just on time.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio

References

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book IV, 3, Book VI, 36, and Book III, 10. The closing line and the two ideas worked into Under the Surface, on the smallness of any single life against the size of everything, all come from these three passages.

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Access O’Keeffe, the source for the flower passage referenced in Read.

Georgia O’Keeffe Catalogue Raisonne, a second place to find the same material.

Betye Saar: Taking Care of Business, the documentary referenced in Watch.

Huckleberries, Montana’s Little Icons, Retain Their Mysteries, Montana Public Radio, the segment referenced in Listen.

No Taming the Wild Huck, Flathead Beacon, the source for the huckleberry cultivation research mentioned in Studio Notes.

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At the Workbench

I have been hanging out in my daughter’s old room this week, I do not think I am the only parent who does it. You walk in with no real reason to be there and let the room just work on you, and something about standing still in it triggers this rush of memory that feels almost chemical, like your brain rewards you just for showing up. Her room is decorated in soft neutrals, cozy, exactly the way she likes things. On the corner of her desk there is a box with a stuffed pyredoodle in it that looks uncannily like our family dog, its head sticking up over the cardboard edge like it is waiting on an answer to some question nobody asked out loud.

On her bed is a quilt her grandmother stitched by hand, one of several she owns, one her mom collaborated on, one from a different grandmother, one from my own grandmother, four generations of women’s hands under one roof. The walls are covered in things I made for her or she picked up somewhere over the years: a mixed-media piece with her boots painted and a verse from Second Corinthians about walking by faith and not by sight, a ceramic piece shaped like four horses seen from behind, a poster from her national dance team’s fire-themed competition season, an abstract portrait I painted of her a few years back. Below a hook holding two pairs of spurs, one worn plain and utilitarian, one fancier for competition, and a straw cowboy hat gone the particular dirty gold of real sun and real sweat.

There is a stand she built herself, at home in my woodshop, out of the same salvaged lumber I have written about that I used for the base of the table I built her as a wedding gift. On that stand sit the boots she wore at nine, her first real pair, tiny spurs still attached. Everything else in that room is a museum of what she became. That pair of boots is the only thing in it that remembers how she started.

Under the Surface

Those boots are older than the barter I struck at a trail-riding outfit up the road, older than the nine years of stable work that came after it, and looking at them this week I finally understood something about our house I had never quite named before. Quilts are a thing in our family. Not decoration, an actual practice, generation after generation of women sewing scraps of used fabric into something whole enough to keep a person warm for decades. I am surprised that I have not learned to quilt.

Her own room has one from her mother, from her grandmothers, from my grandmother, each one carrying the literal cloth of an earlier life stitched into the one being lived now. I do not think I understood, until I stood in that room this week, that my wife and I had been doing the same thing without a needle or thread, one stable shift at a time, one dance recital at a time, one small decision after another, none of them looking like much on their own, sewn together into something that turned out to be just as load-bearing as any quilt on that bed.

She went from mucking stalls for lessons to a trail boss, to a barrel racer, to someone who could drive a whole team. She went from dance lessons a few nights a week at four years old to a scholarship, to a national qualifying dance team, to a teaching degree, to a classroom of her own where she is starting a dance team out of her own kids now. None of it looked connected while it was happening. You do not get to see the pattern from inside the loom, you only feel the individual threads, and it is only now, looking at a boot not much longer than my hand, that the whole quilt is visible at once.

Studio Notes

I keep trying to name what I actually feel this week and none of the easy words fit. It is not really sadness. We have reached for that word plenty the last few issues and I am tired of grabbing it out of habit when it is not even the true one. It is closer to a strange, over-the-moon excitement for her, tempered by something smaller and quieter underneath it, a thread of melancholy that mostly shows up when I am standing still in an empty bedroom. On the surface I am calm about all of it. Underneath, it is more like a duck paddling, still and composed up top, feet going in every direction down where nobody can see them working.

My oldest son came home this week to see her off, which meant a rare night with two of my kids at the table again. He and I think alike, which is not always a compliment to hand a kid. He chases a question down every rabbit hole it opens, curious to a fault, restless in the same neurodivergent way I am, and I have come to see that as a gift, though it took years and a fair amount of difficulty to get there, more on the dyslexia side than the ADD.

He already helps me with more of my own systems than I probably admit out loud, and he has offered to take over the rest more than once. I should let him. He does not have the hours though, not with a training schedule eating forty-plus a week on the road to the next Paralympic cycle, so the offer just sits there, held onto, unused. Her table is done now too, cut from the same salvaged lumber as the little stand in her old room, built out of bleacher wood from the gym she grew up watching games in. It will end up in a house in Montana I have so far only seen in photographs, holding up a life none of us built for her, just the tools she used to go build it herself.

On the Table

I went looking this week for whatever explains why none of this made sense at the time and all of it makes sense now, and found a term psychologists use called narrative identity. The short version: we do not live according to a plan and narrate it afterward, we just act, mostly without a plan, one decision at a time, a stable shift here, a dance recital there, a quilt square sewn on some ordinary Tuesday, and only much later does a person look back and stitch the decisions into something that resembles intention. Dan McAdams has built a career on this idea, how people turn the raw material of a life into a story that feels like it made sense the whole time. I do not think it did, not while it was happening. I think it just piled up, one square at a time, until one day you stand in a bedroom and there is finally enough of it finished to see.

In Good Company

Watch: The Quilting Women of Gee’s Bend (PBS, 2025), about a community of women in rural Alabama whose quilting tradition passed mother to daughter for generations, each quilt built from whatever scraps were on hand at the time into something whole only in hindsight. Hit closer to home than usual this week, watching my own daughter’s bed covered in the same kind of stitching. Streaming free on pbs.org and the PBS app.

Read: The Redemptive Self by Dan P. McAdams. A psychologist’s look at how people make sense of their own lives by turning them into stories, usually stories where the struggle resolves into something worth having gone through. Closest thing I’ve found to a manual for what I was doing to my own week without realizing it. Note: The link for the book is a pesky Amazon affiliate link. I would encourage you to use your local mom and pop bookstore. If you are going to order online then by all means support any other mom and pop business by using their affiliate links.

Listen: “One Small Square at a Time,” the original song lyrics written from my journal notes this week and produced through Suno, a slow, fingerpicked Americana ballad built around the same walk through the same bedroom, the same quilt, the same boots. It exists because writing the piece made me want to hear it sung back instead of just read. If paragraphs aren’t doing it for you this week, the chorus might.

A Quiet Note

The quilts on that bed took decades to become heirlooms, one ordinary square sewn at a time by someone who was not thinking about heirlooms. Unhurried Letters runs on the same slow math: a travel story, a fine art print, a recipe card, a postcard, made now, mailed now, worth more later than it costs today. If there’s someone far away you’d like to be quietly building that kind of thing with, one mailing at a time, that’s what it’s built for: unhurriedletters.com.

Leave the Light On

Depending on your particular season will determine how this reads specifically for you. You might be sewing squares into a quilt you will not see finished for years, maybe decades. A drive to practice. A recital that seems like nothing. Show up for it anyway, even without proof that any single square matters on its own. Maybe you are further along, at the age where you get to watch something you started years ago take a shape you did not fully choose and could not have planned. Somebody, someday, maybe even you, will stand in a doorway and see the whole thing finished, warm, and a little astonishing, and feel excited and a little melancholy about it in the very same breath, and both of those will be true at once.

Tio

References

References: McAdams & McLean (2013), "Narrative Identity," Current Directions in Psychological Science. The actual peer-reviewed source behind the "On the Table" concept, with the SAGE link plus a free plain-language Northwestern writeup as a companion since the journal itself is paywalled.

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At the Workbench

The back of my daughter’s wedding table is done. Not because that’s where I wanted to finish, but because I ran out of time, and it happens to be the one side nobody but me will ever inspect closely enough to notice. Bums me out but I have to let it go.

The wood for the base came out of the gymnasium where my youngest daughter went to school, salvaged bleacher lumber from a building that opened in 1955. The district finally tore the old bleachers out in 2018, or close enough to it, my memory on the exact year is fuzzy, and replaced them with something newer and safer. I hauled the old boards home because good wood is good wood and I never turn down free lumber. Then they hung out in the woodshop for years, the way reclaimed wood always does, until a project shows up that needed them.

It took six years to tell me. Elise sat in that gym from 2016 to 2022, watched and played volleyball and basketball from those bleachers as a kid, before and after they got replaced, never knowing there was a story sitting under her the whole time. She got married this year. The table is for her. And the board I reached for to build the base bracket turned out to be the one with a heart carved into it: Billy loves Jane.

Under the Surface

I don’t know who Billy and Jane were. I don’t know if that carving is from 1955 or 1995, only that it happened sometime in a window of one to sixty-three years between 1955, when the original bleachers went in, and 2018, when they came out. Whoever Billy and Jane were, they left something behind and never came back to check if it survived. It survived. It sat quiet under gymnasium bleachers through however many thousand games, plainly visible the whole time to anyone who happened to look, waiting, hoping only for someone to recycle who wouldn’t plane or sand it away before noticing it was there.

That’s an extreme version of the same mechanism I ran into with the resin for this same table. My last pour fought me for four weeks, viscosity all wrong so it wouldn’t self-level, before I discovered the company had quietly renamed the product I’ve used for years, and I’d been troubleshooting a jug of product that was never actually broken. Four weeks to find a four-minute fix. Small potatoes next to sixty-five years, but it’s the same mechanism: the reward comes from not knowing how long the gap will last, not from the fix itself.

Dopamine doesn’t peak when you get the thing you were working toward, waiting on, or expecting. It peaks in the gap before it, in the reaching, especially when you can’t be sure it’s coming or when. Robert Sapolsky has a lecture on this, and the short version is that a monkey pressing a lever gets its biggest dopamine spike not when the food shows up, but in the seconds after the signal and before the food arrives, in the not-knowing-yet. Billy waited the longest of anybody in this story, and he isn’t even here to feel the payoff.

Studio Notes

Before I could use that board I had to scrape off a layer of hardened gum, which sounds worse than it actually was, though it did leave me picturing some freckled, ornery seventh grader pressing his gum onto the underside of his seat sometime between Eisenhower and whatever president was in office when my youngest daughter was in fourth grade, grinning like he’d pulled off a genuine crime. Once I got past the gum, there it was. Billy loves Jane, faint enough now that only taking another sixteenth inch off with the planer would erase it for good. I decided against taking that sixteenth.

My overactive brain built a whole life for two people I will never meet. High school sweethearts most likely, married by now, maybe grandkids at that same school, maybe they came back for a game some Friday night and sat, without knowing it, on the exact board where Billy had carved their names decades before and never told a soul. Insert random rabbit hole, the kind I constantly find myself chasing. I loved finding the little nugget of history on the bleacher seat. I was tempted to go through the graduating records since 1955 to see if I could find who Billy and Jane might have been. In the end I decided to write a song about it this week. That was either an overreaction or the most honest one I’ve had all year. Actually, I co-wrote the song with Suno. I write the lyrics, Suno lays the track. A fun collaboration. Billy loved Jane, long before I knew their names. That line came out of me almost whole, first try, which almost never happens. Moving on from the rabbit hole now.

I planed the board to size, trying to leave some of the carving, marked and drilled the pilot holes, cut fluted dowels and glued them in loose on purpose, meant as guidance and support rather than as fasteners, then drilled for the inserts and ran bolts through the wood into them. All that’s left now is bolting the top to the base and finishing the top itself. Finishing touches Friday morning, on a table that will hold up as a wedding gift next to a stranger’s love letter that took sixty-five years to get read. Cool.

On the Table

You’ve probably got a version of Billy’s board somewhere in your own life, something made or written or said years ago and then buried, not lost exactly, just waiting for the right person to plane down to the right layer. If a project of yours has a real wait built into it right now, paint drying, dough proofing, a decision you’re wading through, try noticing the wait instead of racing past it the way I nearly planed straight through that board without seeing the carving at all. Set a timer for five minutes. Think about the thing. Picture how it will look or feel once it’s actually done. That kind of noticing on purpose often produces a bigger dopamine spike than the moment the wait actually ends, and most of us skip it entirely, racing straight past the reach toward the outcome.

In Good Company

Two things crossed my path this week that make my four-week resin saga chasing resin problems look almost embarrassingly short.

Watch: Charles Ross broke ground on Star Axis, a naked-eye observatory built into the New Mexico high desert, in 1976. He conceived it in 1971. It’s still not finished, and it’s slated to open to the public sometime after this year, fifty years into an architectural art piece that measures earth-to-star alignments in solid granite and steel. There’s a six-minute documentary at staraxis.org worth the six minutes, if only to take in what it means to pace a life’s work against the actual movement of the stars. I can’t wait to see it in person.

Read: Cortis & Sonderegger, two Swiss photographers, build elaborate physical models over weeks, a shattered space capsule, a Hindenburg replica mid-fire, entire icons of photographic history faked from scratch just to photograph the fake and make it feel true again on film. Their process notes at cortissonderegger.ch make a strong case for how much of the reward in photographic image-making was never really about the shutter click.

Listen: Robert Sapolsky’s 2011 Pritzker Lecture at the California Academy of Sciences has a five-minute stretch, widely clipped online as “Dopamine Jackpot,” where he lays out the anticipation research plainly enough that you don’t need a neuroscience background to follow it. Search the title. It’s short, and it rewires how you think about waiting for anything. Sapolsky covers this same idea in The Great Simplification (Episode 88, “The Brain, Determinism, and Cultural Implications,” recorded Aug 2023)

A Quiet Note

Unhurried Letters runs on this same mechanism of anticipation, and I didn’t plan it that way going in, it just turned out to be true after the fact. You don’t just get an object once a month. You enter a waiting window the moment you subscribe, and some of the actual reward lives there, in the not-yet, as well as the unboxing itself. The seal that must be broken, the writing and art that took someone real time to make, all of it is doing reward work, not just aesthetic work. unhurriedletters.com It is super fun for me to create and super cool to anticipate opening. AND I think just as satisfying to open and bask in the presence if only for 20 minutes.

Leave the Light On

I still don’t think slow living is about wanting less. It’s about wanting on a longer fuse and staying present for the burn instead of skipping ahead to see if the spark was worth it. Four weeks chasing a mislabeled bottle wasn’t the good kind of waiting, and I wouldn’t sign up for it twice. But somewhere between 1955 and 2020, a kid named Billy carved a few words into a gym bleacher and walked away without ever finding out if they’d survive. They did. My daughter sat on that exact board as a girl, never knowing, and this year she’s got married, and a piece of that bleacher from 1955 is holding up her table.

One More Thing. Here is the song about Billy and Jane. I Couldn’t help it. If you want to hear it, it’s below.

Tio

References

Sapolsky, R. (2011). Pritzker Lecture, California Academy of Sciences, “Dopamine Jackpot! Sapolsky on the Science of Pleasure.” openculture.com summary and video

Star Axis, Charles Ross, ongoing since 1971/1976. staraxis.org

Cortis & Sonderegger, Icons project. cortissonderegger.ch

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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

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

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

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

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.

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

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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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.

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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