Around this time last year I was watching blackthorn sloes ripen in a hedge close to my home. I was ridiculously excited about them.

There are no blackthorn trees near me now, and it took me a moment to understand why exactly I was sad this week.

For eight years I lived inland around Sligo, Ireland. When I was more able-bodied, I walked for 2-4 hours almost every day beside our branch of the Maiden River. I knew the seasonal landscape because I was outside constantly, interacting with the same place day after day.

The repetition of putting one foot in front of the other for several hours softened the part of my mind that always wants to explain, decide, and arrive somewhere useful. I would fall into a kind of reverie where I became more available to whatever was around me.

Walking was a form of prayer, a way of receiving the divine and the enchantment around me into the imaginal chamber within me.

Prayer as active listening

Many of us have inherited a very narrow idea of prayer: kneeling somewhere still, speaking formally to a god, asking for something, or silencing ourselves completely.

As I experience it, prayer is a form of relational contact.

It can happen while walking, singing, moving beads through the fingers, tending a fire, mixing pigment, or returning to the same charcoal marks until something answers back. Repetition keeps us in the conversation long enough for the relationship to deepen.

The Syrian philosopher Iamblichus described prayer as a movement into contact with the divine. Its continual practice enlarges the soul’s capacity to receive and gradually accustoms us to a vast celestial light we could not hold all at once.

In Vedic astrology, the Moon signifies manas. The word is often translated as “mind,” but it is closer to the faculty through which we sense, attend, feel, and respond before the intellect decides what an experience means. Manas is receptive and permeable. It is the part of us through which an encounter enters and becomes capable of affecting us.

Prayer does not merely create a quiet space in which manas receives. Prayer develops manas itself.

Receptivity is a capacity that becomes stronger, steadier, and more finely attuned through use.

This differs from prayer that revolves entirely around petition, or the idea that we must erase our presence before the divine can communicate with us.

Instead, our thoughts, bodies, and material reality are among the many doorways through which contact with the divine, with enchantment, occurs.

Prayer strengthens our ability to become fully present within a relationship: to receive, answer, and be changed in return.

This is also how our personal aesthetic sense quietly grows inside each of us.

Years ago, when my partner Damien and I were living in Dubrovnik, Croatia, we could walk through the same streets and come home with completely different photographs. Damien noticed people in motion, little exchanges, and the life of the city unfolding between its buildings.

I photographed the sea colliding with enormous fortress walls and watched light move across stone and water. The walls were human-made, obviously, but in my photographs they began resembling cliffs. Human presence receded until weather, sea, sky, and those huge rock-like forms were almost all that remained.

Neither of us knew in advance what in Dubrovnik would speak to our imaginations. Our attention revealed what each of us was especially attuned to receive.

Even the physical structure of our senses participates!

For example… I am extremely nearsighted. When I remove my glasses, horizon lines disappear and the world dissolves into mist, softened edges, and indistinct light. I lived with blurry vision for most of my childhood, and I would say that this attuned me early-on to be fascinated with fog and blurred horizons. The body through which I perceive participates in what I find beautiful.

Our aesthetic sense is divinely given as a capacity for attunement toward our own specific desires. But it rarely arrives as a completed artistic identity. What it becomes is relational, shaped by our bodies, cultures, landscapes, memories, limitations, and, perhaps most importantly, the encounters we continue.

What catches our attention is not arbitrary! And what repeatedly catches our attention is especially worth becoming deeply curious about.

An image visits and something in us turns toward it. We return, and if we are meant for ongoing relationship with the image or idea, it also returns. We interact and have encounters with one another; a romance may emerge, an enchantment may deepen. Through repeated contact, we begin to discover whether fascination and a budding relationship will become ongoing devotion, transform into something else, or if it’s something that will eventually release us.

And as makers, when we’ve let those encounters incubate long enough… our hands begin to move.

Making as prayer in motion

I have always preferred working with a limited set of materials. Recently all I want to learn intimately is how charcoal changes under my fingers, how it catches against different paper grains, to what extent it lifts with various erasers; how the same black produces velvet darkness in one place and a ghostly weathered mist in another.

It is evident to me that materials are inspirited with their own personalities, preferences, limits, and ways of answering. I may arrive with an image, but charcoal also has something to say about what that image can or will become. As does the paper, let me tell you.

Maker and material move together, responding to what is happening between us as the work becomes, and as we each become through the interaction.

This is what I mean when I call making a spiritual path: the practice changes what we can receive and what we become capable of answering through the ongoing act, the unfolding prayer, of making

Walking, moving beads, singing, repeatedly drawing the same image, and learning the responses of charcoal are all ways of exercising manas. Through making, the receptive faculty becomes increasingly sensitive, much as the hand learns pressure, paper grain, and the different temperatures of black through repeated practice.

The work is permeable to our interactions with the light, the dream, the place, the spirit, the grief, or the fascination that addressed us. Then as it flows from our hands it is again shaped by the proclivities and limitations of the material, the time and money available, and the body through which the making occurs.

Taste is not simply choosing what looks prettiest or constructing an image of who we want to appear to be!

In an earlier letter about Venus, I wrote about the agalma: a crafted object made capable of receiving presence. Through our beautifully imperfect mortal hands and material limitations, a small spark of spirit may choose to live in what we have created.

Imagine that! A small spark of spirit may choose to inhabit something we’ve made through our artistic choices, our developed aesthetic taste. Then is it not worthy to give extra notice to what we are noticing? To spend time exploring and incubating something before we knee-jerk jump to defining and explaining it?

Life changes, the prayer changes

I longed to live here on the Dingle Peninsula for nearly five years before I arrived. I was haunted by dreams of the thrumming sea hitting dark cliffs, wind compelling seaside grasses into swirling dervishes, fog blanketing the land, and light dancing across animated water.

Now I’m here… but my body has changed how I can receive it. Long walks are a rare luxury my body can only occasionally indulge in.

So my method of prayer has changed.

In my old home, I learned the landscape close to the ground as I walked endlessly in a pattern. Here, I am learning through watching the sky, feeling the wind move through my window, the movement of weather, listening to the sound of the surf and the veils of rain, experiencing fog erasing the horizon (and sometimes even the neighboring houses), and closely watching birds moving together over the sea.

I allow myself to watch intently what plays out in front of me through a window or open door… when suddenly a hole opens in the clouds.

Light pours onto one small section of ocean and sets the water ablaze. The surrounding landforms fall into silhouette. The sparkles become sharp and momentarily dazzling while everything around them blurs into fog, shadow, strange marks, and shapes with amorphous edges.

Time seems to suspend itself. Something ephemeral opens, a doorway to the Otherworlds. The moment feels like an eternity. Then you blink and… it’s gone.

This has seized my attention with a ferocious hunger.

I’ve already made two charcoal paintings of the same arresting encounter, and it’s moved me deeper into yet another charcoal painting of a similar encounter… That breathless moment when one small section of water dazzles so violently that I feel as if my heart might burst into a brilliant but temporal sparkle and then fade away.

The image continues to circle my mind, set my heart ablaze. Making allows me to stay with the vision a little longer, to listen to what it has to say to me, to answer the way it keeps meeting me in both waking and imaginal life, to let meaning slowly unfold on its own time.

Being a resounding instrument during this eclipse

This morning’s lunar eclipse offers a useful image for this process.

The Moon (manas, the receptive bodyheart) is being eclipsed by Rahu, the North Node whose hunger can flood the receptive field with images, longings, strange associations, and unfamiliar possibilities. Something may break through an imaginal stasis and seize our attention before we understand why it has come.

During a lunar eclipse, Earth passes between the Sun and Moon. I read this as material reality entering between inspiration and the imaginal faculty receiving it.

A vision does not incubate outside our busy, modern lives. It meets the body, the available hours, materials, money, weather, and the place where making occurs.

Earth’s interruption gives the artistic, imaginal vision the material circumstances through which it can develop a body.

This eclipse occurs with the Moon in Śatabhiṣā, whose symbol is an empty circle, while Rahu occupies Dhaniṣṭhā, associated with steady sound, rhythm, the drum, and the hollow instrument.

Śatabhiṣā gives us the open chamber where something can be received before it is intellectually understood. Dhaniṣṭhā gives us the rhythm of returning with another walk, another prayer, another piece of charcoal touching paper.

One gives the encounter room to occur. The other becomes capable of resounding because it is open enough to be moved.

Together, they bring me back to prayer as incubation: receiving and answering, opening and returning, allowing an encounter to deepen through repetition before deciding what it means.

Prayer under Śatabhiṣā might be this:

Let me remain in contact long enough to be changed quietly by what I do not yet intellectually understand.

Making under Dhaniṣṭhā is the next movement of that prayer, one mark at a time.

Incubation is not merely waiting around for clarity to arrive. It is an active courtship.

We return to the image. We draw fragments of it. We photograph what stops us in our tracks. We handle our materials without demanding that they produce a finished, fully defined, reputation-making project. We notice how the encounter changes when we approach it again, and how we are changing because we keep returning to interact.

We allow ourselves to be ardently fascinated.

We let the image remain alive and strange instead of pressing it immediately into service. We give it time to acquire depth, history, and intimacy through our repeated meetings.

The blackthorn taught me what years of this kind of attention can slowly, almost imperceptibly, root inside the body. I knew that landscape because we had grown together into a relationship through thousands of small encounters.

The light on the water is a much newer love. Our relationship will also grow slowly, almost imperceptibly, with enough time and attention. I simply need to be attentive to its return, charcoal in hand and ready for me to reply in that prayerful conversation.

So I return through the many mysterious, flirty bodies of charcoal and the marks we make together. I return through the window and the weather, to the light breaking onto water and opening a doorway to rapt enchantment. Each fragment lets me remain there a little longer. Each drawing gives the relationship more accumulated intimacy.

Our aesthetic sense is divinely given as a capacity for attunement toward our own specific desires. It becomes visible through the encounters we love enough to ardently court and pursue, and through the forms those relationships slowly learn to take in our hands.

To say it more plainly… this is where taste, our unique artistic vision, begins: with the encounters we love enough to repeat, again and again and again.

From the charcoal dust gathered in the whorls of my fingers,

I suppose it’s fitting that the first eclipse visible to Ireland since 1999 we are facing an unprecedented heat wave and drought (you read that right). My own area is coated in intermittent fog and a heavy pressure system, but continues to receive very little rain.

I sit here, writing this email, watching the undulating cloud and light forms from my window and pulling apart my charcoal kit.

I wanted to look honestly at what I use, what I do not use, and what I remain curious about trying. I have also begun cleaning and rearranging my studio so that it better serves the practice I actually have now.

As I turn over every tool, I begin asking questions:

• Are you here because I still reach for you?

• Are you here because you contain some spark of inspired possibility?

• Do you pique my curiosity?

• Or are you here because I once imagined becoming the kind of artist who would (one day, maybe) use you?

I find that I often sort my thoughts while organizing something physical. Today that has meant also sorting my thoughts about the larger decisions of my work moving forward.

There are now only 9 Creative Court Reports remaining.

Once they are claimed, I will be closing the reports for the foreseeable future.

I had previously believed that I would eventually replace this enormous report with a smaller version. I have spent countless hours trying to imagine what that version might look like.

What I realized is that I do not want to make this work smaller. I want to go deeper. What an eclipse revelation! We’re going to dive into it at the end of today’s email.

But if you’ve felt the clarion call of learning more about the Creative Court…

These are the final 9 spots to commission the original, fully expanded Creative Court Report. Each one is a bespoke exploration of Venus, Mercury, Mars, the Moon, and the agreements they require in order to support your physical creative practice. These custom reports are generally between 21 and 30 pages.

They are $247, with a current delivery window of 4–6 weeks after I receive your completed creative questionnaire.

Commission Your Creative Court Report

Today’s eclipse has helped me think more carefully about what it means for any maker to release an old creative identity without destroying the living knowledge held inside it.

Reading the Eclipse Through Two Traditions

Today, August 12, we have a total solar eclipse at 20° Leo. (Considering how slow I’m editing this email, it is probably happening just as it hits your inbox.)

As an eclipse in tropical Leo, it also touches creative identity.

Leo is the home of the Sun: the place where something singular emerges from the heart and gathers enough authority to place its name upon what it has made. Within the Creative Court, Leo speaks to the identity of the maker, the courage to create from one’s fiery heart-center, and the willingness to let that creation be seen.

Eclipses are interruptions in light.

A solar eclipse temporarily obscures the Sun, and with it our ordinary access to vitality, authority, purpose, and a coherent sense of self. The Sun has not ceased to exist, and its light has not been destroyed! Yet for a brief interval, we can no longer receive its normally reliable light.

That makes eclipse periods complicated times for making sweeping judgments about who we are.

I should explain that although most of my astrological work is grounded in traditional Western astrology, lunar astrology (the Moon, nodes, eclipses, nakshatras) is one place where I deliberately draw from Vedic astrology as well.

I have been privately studying the Vedic treatment of the Moon, the lunar nodes, and the nakshatras for several years. The nakshatras are the 27 lunar mansions through which the Moon travels (with Abhijit sometimes counted as a 28th lunar mansion). Each has its own presiding intelligence, power, mythology, and particular way of shaping experience.

In my studies, I have found the Western treatment of eclipses useful but… incomplete. What can I say? I’m a bit of a meaning and detail junkie.

Jyotish has preserved an extraordinarily deep and continuous body of knowledge around the Moon and the nodes in particular. I have also found its descriptions startlingly precise in lived experience, especially when we are trying to understand the strange inner mechanics of a creative life.

So I am reading today’s eclipse with an overlay of the Vedic lens of interpretation on top of the basic Tropical Leo significations.

Using the Vedic sidereal zodiac, the eclipsed Sun and Moon fall in the nakshatra Ashlesha. Ketu, the South Node involved in this eclipse, occupies the nakshatra Magha.

These two lunar mansions give us a considerably more textured story than the familiar instruction to “release what no longer serves.”

Ashlesha and the power that binds

The name Ashlesha comes from a Sanskrit root that carries the meanings of embracing, adhering, joining, clinging, and entwining.

Ashlesha is the nakshatra of the wise serpent deities, the Nagas.

Its power concerns binding: the force through which one thing attaches itself to another and becomes difficult to separate.

We could say that a great deal of physical art-making falls under this same concept.

Making depends upon binding. Pigment adheres to a surface. Fibers are twisted, crossed, and tightened until they become thread, and then joined again to become a knitted or crocheted object. Clay particles gather into a body under pressure and are transformed by fire. Repeated gestures gradually come together into one cohesive skill. A hundred scattered encounters with a material slowly cohere into something we can finally call a practice.

Creative identity is also a binding agent.

It gathers years of incomplete experiments, private desires, technical knowledge, disappointments, habits, and moments of revelation into the conviction:

This is what I do. This is the kind of artist I am.

Some form of binding is necessary. Without it, nothing coheres long enough to acquire form, let alone depth or roots that endure through time.

The trouble begins when the bond can no longer discern devotion from captivity.

An unfinished project remains in the studio because allowing it to remain unfinished might say something subtle (and dangerous, possibly hurtful) about our discipline, seriousness, or worth. Supplies are kept because they belonged to an earlier dream, and quitting is rarely seen as a virtue.

A book continues exerting authority long after its instructions stopped bringing pleasure to the hand. A particular medium becomes so entangled with the identity of being an artist that changing materials feels like betrayal. A former teacher’s judgment (or perhaps that of a peer) may continue speaking every time we approach the page.

A successful piece of work may become its own kind of trap, demanding that everything afterward resemble it closely enough to preserve the recognition it once received.

Ashlesha asks us to look closely at the bond.

The serpent imagery also introduces poison, but there is an important distinction here: the snake carries its venom in a particular pouch. Its entire body is not poisonous. (And if you have been around for my earlier work, I’m a big advocate of Paracelsus’s wise idiom “the dose makes the poison”; we use poison as medicine all the time.)

A humiliating experience may have poisoned our relationship with a material, but the skill we developed through that material remains real!

An abandoned project may have become saturated with guilt while still containing one image or idea that simply will not leave you alone. A teacher may have harmed our confidence while also passing down legitimate knowledge that is now an intertwined part of our creative practice.

We do not have to condemn the whole body to remove the venom! We can ask where the poison is actually stored:

• What has become bitter because it has been held past its living time?

• Where has creative intelligence become trapped inside shame, resentment, comparison, or obligation?

• Which old attachment is protecting something precious, and which one has begun slowly squeezing the life from it?

The wisdom of this eclipse is to resist the urge to dispose of our entire creative history and instead discern what remains alive inside the coil.

Who sits upon the creative throne?

Ketu, meanwhile, occupies Magha.

Magha is connected with the Pitris, the ancestral intelligences who carry memory, merit, obligation, and inheritance between generations and states of being. Its symbol is the throne.

Magha concerns the authority we inherit, the position we occupy, and the accumulated conditions that allowed us to arrive where we are.

Ketu… complicates these things.

In the Vedic framework I use, Ketu is the headless body: the force that moves backward toward the source, removing the familiar identity through which we ordinarily understand ourselves.

That does not mean throwing away every object or abandoning material life! That is not so much surrender as it is abandonment.

The deeper surrender concerns attachment.

When we abandon something, we may be trying to outrun an attachment that continues haunting us. Ironically, the more hellbent we become on escaping it, the more deeply we can sink into its tar pit.

For the maker, Ketu in Magha asks:

Who or what is sitting upon the throne in the studio?

It may be an old teacher whose definition of mastery still governs the hand.

It may be the audience (real, imagined, or conspicuously absent) whose recognition has become the measure of whether the work is “real”.

It may be a former success, an inherited tradition, or the artist we once believed we were destined to become.

It may be the long shadow of someone we both admire and envy, causing us to abandon our own desires and ambitions so we can obsess over theirs.

Sometimes guilt sits there, issuing commands about everything we must complete before we are permitted to begin anything new.

Because this is a solar eclipse, the recognizable creative “I” may feel less reliable for a while.

This is my style. This is what I am known for. This is what proves I am serious. This is what makes me an artist.

The eclipse darkens the authority of those statements.

This has the potential to reveal an identity that has reached completion. It can also produce wounded pride, depleted confidence, and a sudden urge to reject parts of the creative life that still contain vitality.

Ketu’s knife is not always delicate, nor is it always precise.

I would not use this eclipse to decide that you are no longer an artist, destroy a body of work, abandon a practice you still love, or make a grand announcement about your total reinvention.

The eclipse interrupts the light by which we ordinarily evaluate ourselves. It does not necessarily provide an accurate verdict on our work.

Decrease is not automatically purification.

The South Node can diminish an inflated ambition or release a project that has swollen far beyond its life. It can also diminish confidence, pleasure, energy, recognition, and our felt connection with creative purpose.

Sitting with this tension before taking impulsive action would be wise.

Is this a genuine act of detachment?

Or am I trying to run away, only to find myself sinking deeper into the tar pit of attachment?

A parable quoted by Oliver Burkeman in a recent newsletter feels useful here:

Two monks encounter a woman who cannot cross a raging river. Although they have taken a vow never to touch a woman, they carry her safely across. Miles later, one monk is still fretting over what they have done.

The other finally says, “I set that woman down hours ago. Why are you still carrying her?”

You have not found freedom from something if you remain entirely preoccupied with it.

The monk who responded to what the moment required and then continued walking was freer than the one who obeyed the rule outwardly while remaining trapped by it inwardly.

A deliberate creative surrender

A more useful way to work with this eclipse is through deliberate, reversible reduction.

Clean one drawer or sort one box of materials. Look through the books and instructions surrounding your practice. Choose one unfinished project whose claim upon you has become oppressive and allow it to become officially unfinished, rather than eternally pending.

You might ask of each:

• Do I actually use this?

• Does touching it produce curiosity, pleasure, or some small movement toward the work?

• Does it belong to the practice I have now, or only to an artist I once believed I should become?

• Am I keeping it because it contains living possibility, or because releasing it would force me to admit that an old creative identity has ended?

And then… sit with it.

Let the answer resound for a while. Allow yourself to feel what arises without immediately turning the feeling into a decision. Wait until the initial urgency has cooled enough that you can tell the difference between clarity and impulsiveness.

An ascetic purge is not necessarily our goal. Simply becoming aware of the attachment may be enough for you right now.

Remember, eclipses are not single earth-shaking events! This is the first eclipse in a longer (Tropical) Leo–Aquarius story that will unfold across roughly 18 months. We are at the beginning of a journey.

There is no rush to make a decision today, or even this week.

The eclipse may provide the first recognition of something that will loosen gradually until you genuinely know it is ready to be released.

Some artists have already made a virtue out of deprivation (which is quite Ketu of them).

So many of us feel guilty purchasing good materials. We distrust pleasure, beauty, ambition, and the desire for a materially supported creative life. Some artists give away what they need, minimize what they know, and call the resulting hunger spiritual “purity”.

But… these are all another way of injuring the tender creaturely heart of your creativity.

If you feel clear and ready, you may release the supplies that have become instruments of your own entrapment, while also keeping what gives you creative sensory pleasure.

In my case, I already have an active practice of using my materials. This clearing is an act of clarity rather than penance or an attempt to run away. It is helping me move forward with greater strength of purpose and momentum.

You may find that you are ready to release a project whose only remaining substance is guilt or obligation. Before doing so, consider what you can keep from it; perhaps a fragment that still contains inspiration or knowledge.

A creative journey rarely travels in a straight line! We may carry an image through many iterations before we discover its final form (if there even is such a thing). If you have made peace with the journey a project has you traveling, even without the finished object you originally imagined, perhaps it is ready to loosen its claim upon you.

Releasing a creative title or identity may be the hardest task of all.

Can you release the title that has become restrictive—or the idealized self-concept that sits on a pedestal you can never realistically reach—without discarding the sovereignty and confidence you earned through the practice? Would moving into another form expand your capacity to create?

Or would it shrink you into something so bound by the illusion of safety that you can no longer find the momentum to move?

We know a release is wise when we can shed the skin without throwing away the body.

Every creative experience has changed the living creature inside it. It’s vital to our creative hearts that we honor those experiences, rather than trying to erase them.

Let the small animal (that’s you!) rest

Once you have decided what you are willing to release (or what you simply need to contemplate releasing) allow the small animal of your body to rest.

Eclipses are poor times for enormous projects that require endurance and discipline. The vital energy of the Sun and the embodiment of the Moon are being disrupted.

Let the small animal of the body lie down somewhere quiet and become accustomed to whatever space has opened within your creative practice.

There is no need to fill it immediately! There is no need to rush another identity onto the empty throne! We have a whole 18-month story through which to let that unfold!

Instead…

• Notice what your hands still want when they are no longer being asked to prove who you are.

• Notice which skills remain after the title, aspiration, or fantasy has loosened.

• Notice what returns (or emerges) after the obligation has been resolved and closed.

Rest gives the knowledge time to incubate into many new and wondrous forms. After all, change is the hallmark of life. Nothing living remains in the same form. Give your creativity permission to live.

If we reinvent ourselves too quickly, we may simply coil the same old hangups around a new medium or idea.

What the Creative Court keeps teaching me

This eclipse falls in my tropical tenth house, co-present with my Midheaven, and I can feel it working through my own public role.

I have loved creating the Creative Court Reports.

They have allowed me to enter another person’s chart and spend time with the planets responsible for their making life: Venus and her sense of value, Mercury and their craft-intelligence, Mars and his force of action, the Moon and her creaturely rhythms.

Every planet opened a long, wondrous conversation. Each had its own needs, desires, resources, frustrations, and relationships with the rest of the chart. Each could be understood from several different angles, all of which changed what practical advice would actually be useful.

The material resisted compression. Every attempt to make the report smaller removed something essential.

What I (re)learned is that I love depth.

I love following one question far enough for the obvious answer to fall apart and something more precise to emerge. I love understanding why a planet behaves as it does, how its condition reverberates through the chart, and what that means in the actual material life of a maker.

Trying to condense each planet into a shorter portrait began to feel like a disservice to the planets and to the people trying to build creative lives with them.

At the same time, the current report is Herculean. Writing four deeply individual planetary portraits and bringing them together through the Craefter’s Concord is not a form I can offer indefinitely while preserving the depth, clarity, usefulness, and sustainability I want my work to possess.

And, if I’m being honest, a couple of very particular planets are pulling at my attention and asking me to enter a deeper initiation with them. (More on that in an email soon!)

So I am letting this form reach its completion.

I do not have to reject what the Creative Court has been in order to finish it! These reports have clarified what kind of artist and astrologer I am, what kind of work I believe genuinely helps artists and makers, and how deeply I want to enter the subjects I choose to explore.

If that knowledge is to keep living and growing in value, it needs a form that allows me to carry it with greater depth and clarity, within what my body can sustainably hold.

So… there are 9 Creative Court Reports remaining.

If you have wanted this complete, deeply detailed study of your making life, these are the final nine opportunities to receive it. Once they have been claimed, I will close the Creative Court Reports for the foreseeable future.

Each report is $247 and is generally between 21 and 30 pages, sometimes longer. The current delivery window is 4–6 weeks after I receive your completed questionnaire.

Commission Your Creative Court Report

For now, I am gently cleaning the studio while I watch the fog drifting between the sea and the cliff-hills.

I am also finishing the work already entrusted to me. I am considering what I use, what I still love, and which forms have completed the work they came here to do.

The old skin does not need to be hated. It preciously held the creature while she grew.

As it loosens, I can honor what it gave me by continuing to change.

May you have a revelatory loosening that deepens your creative wholeheartedness 💙

From the charcoal dust gathered in the whorls of my fingers,

P.S. Did you enjoy the exploration of the astrology through the nakshatras? I find them incredibly illuminating and deeply resonant… but I only want to keep pulling these into the work if you also found this to be revelatory and valuable. Let me know!

A brief note before we enter today’s letter:

There are 17 commissions remaining in the final release of the original long-form Creative Court Report.

These reports generally range between 21 and 30 pages, sometimes longer depending on the chart. Each includes an individual portrait of Venus, Mercury, Mars, and the Moon, including a practical synthesis of how your Creative Court can work together.

Here’s what Fen R. had to say about their report:

Letting the report settle in and it makes so much sense, and that sense is creating space for permission to create the way I do. The advice was so practical I'm already integrating in. I've taken to jotting a phrase or image each morning from my dreams in my commonplace book (its going to need to be renamed I think). My Venus placement also gives me a lot of joy; I am a hub, a weaver, a connecter, and also a seidth worker so it again makes perfect sense that I am so focused on the relationship between the things. Thank you for helping connect the dots, I feel like my creativity has a story I can inhabit now instead of a puzzle to struggle with.

Once these final commissions are gone, this version will close while I rebuild the report into a more contained form that is physically sustainable for me to continue offering.

Commission Your Creative Report

The Attention She Deserves

Since July 9th, I have been trying to write about Venus in Virgo. The difficulty has been finding words that do not return her to the same narrow definition that pop astrology has kept her confined to.

Even the flattering descriptions can become another kind of reduction. The careful lover. The meticulous craftsperson. The person who remembers how you take your tea. Acts of service. Impossibly high standards.

These things may describe her behavior, but they do not tell us what moves beneath it. They give us the evidence of her love without bringing us any closer to its source.

I wanted to find an articulation of Venus in Virgo that did not depend upon pop astrology’s tired little collection of virtues and flaws. A Venus who could be demystified without being diminished. Because demystification should clear away the false assumptions surrounding a thing so that its actual enchantment can grace us with its brilliant shine.

I sat with her and gave her the kind of sustained, patient attention that did not immediately demand an answer. I followed one question until it revealed another beneath it. I tried to understand the elemental conditions surrounding her and the older image of the Virgin from which Virgo receives her name.

Venus in Virgo blossoms with sustained, devoted, attention.

We often say that Virgo pays attention to detail, as though she simply possesses a sharper lens than the rest of us. But the incredible level of detail is what becomes visible because she has remained with something long enough for its particular nature to emerge.

As Thích Nhất Hạnh once wrote:

“Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love.”

Venus in Virgo’s sharply attuned attention is not simply a hunt for defects. It is the desire to grow closer through understanding.

She knows she can never reach complete understanding because the beloved cannot be exhausted that way. Venus in Virgo follows what can be known, allowing each discovery to carry her toward the next threshold while something living remains enticingly beyond her reach. Venus in Virgo understands the eroticism of curiosity and fascination.

The Virgin and the Integrity of Things

The older image behind Virgo is the maiden—the parthenos. In Woman’s Mysteries, Ancient and Modern, M. Esther Harding recovered the ancient Virgin as “one-in-herself”: a woman whose nature was not defined through her relationship to another person. Demetra George later carried this archetypal understanding into astrology through her early work on Vesta, Virgo, and virginity.

In this lineage, the Virgin is not defined chiefly by sexual abstinence, but rather that she belongs to herself. Her body, her labor, and her creative life-force gather around a sacred center of her own rather than passing into the ownership of another person (like a spouse). Virginity becomes an image of something sovereign, self-possessed, and uncompromised.

We can hear a faint echo of it when we speak of virgin wool, virgin soil, or virgin olive oil. The word describes something that has not yet been mixed, diluted, or worked over into another substance. It remains close to its own nature.

Meditating on these concepts helped me find a way into understanding the complexity of Venus in Virgo.

Venus is a planet of attraction and concord. She draws separate things toward one another. She governs the mysterious pleasure of composition: what happens when one color is placed beside another, when two lives begin arranging themselves around a shared center, when the maker discovers that these particular materials belong together.

Yet Virgo is temperamentally cold and dry.

Dryness separates. It reveals where one thing ends and another begins. Coldness allows those distinctions to hold their shape with sharp boundaries and articulation.

In Pisces, the sign of Venus’s exaltation, moisture softens the borders between things, giving the proper conditions for commingling. One substance joins with another. The drop returns to the ocean. Lover and beloved dream of becoming inseparable, of being subsumed to each other.

I have been thinking about this alongside Lauren Hall’s essay “Desire Is Dead,” and its exploration of eros as an encounter with the Other.

The Other draws us because they cannot be produced entirely from within us. They have their own history, appetite, and way of answering the world.

We pursue the Other precisely because something remains over there that we do not already contain.

Love may inspire understanding, but understanding does not ever fully erase this distance. At its most beautiful, understanding makes us more attentive to it.

Desire needs a distance to cross

Venus in Virgo does not want to destroy that distance through dissolution. She understands the pleasure is in the pursuit.

She approaches the distance through relentless curiosity, through an ever-deepening hunt. She looks closely enough to perceive the beloved with obsessive accuracy.

This paper is not that paper. This pencil is not that pencil. Graphite is not charcoal.

Each thing must be permitted to belong to itself before Venus can discover what kind of relationship may exist between them. This is the quieter dignity hidden inside her fall.

This desire for understanding can look analytical from the outside. Yet analysis is only a well-worn tool in Virgo’s hand. The deeper intention is Venusian.

Again, Venus brings things into relationship, and in Virgo, she does this by perceiving their distinctions with extraordinary care.

Venus in Virgo loves the integrity of a thing becoming more fully itself.

She separates in order to perceive. She sorts because careless combination can destroy the very qualities that awakened her interest. Then, once she understands something of each nature involved, she begins arranging the conditions under which they might meet without either one disappearing.

And perhaps this is why so many Venus in Virgo people love sketchbooks, journals, archives, marginalia, working drawings, old recipes, and every surviving record of how something was made.

The finished art often obscures it’s own history. Earlier decisions disappear beneath the final surface. The wrong color is painted over. The sentence that opened the essay is gone by the time the essay reaches us.

Venus in Virgo craves seeing evidence of your curiosity in motion.

She wants to know how the beloved became (and continues to become) itself. She follows the history, the small decisions, the mistakes that altered the course of the work. She wants the drafts and the notes in the margins. She wants to see what the maker tried on their journey to arriving here. She wants to know what you were thinking, how the work changed you, and what your hands learned that your mind could not have discovered alone.

The sketchbook is intimate because it preserves the trail of your attention in action.

It says: I wanted to understand, so I stayed with my curiosity until it blossomed into another curiosity, and another, and another.

I was reminded of this while reading one of my favorite manga, Sasaki and Miyano. In chapter 23.5, one of the characters (Hirano) says:

“Like… How you always do your best for the team, right, Kagi-kun? I wanna find someone who gives their all to what they love, just like you.”

I believe we are all moved by the sight of devotion in action. We often mistake it for attraction to talent or accomplishment. But it’s really that someone’s love has become visible through what they demonstrably give themselves to, repeatedly. Venus in Virgo is enraptured by that sort of devotion.

When Attention Has Nowhere to Go

This is where the old description of Venus in Virgo as a perfectionist begins to unravel.

Perfection is strangely unlike Virgo.

It belongs to an imaginary world where nothing has been tested. No material has resisted the maker. No body has grown tired halfway through. No beautiful idea has been altered by cost, weather, appetite, accident, or the present reach of our skill.

Virgo belongs to the world where these things happen. She wants to place the idea on the table and see how it behaves there. She wants to make one alteration, observe the result, then allow what she has learned to shape the next attempt.

Her discernment grows through contact with reality.

Virgo is Mercury’s earth sign. Here, curiosity is applied to the physical world. An observation leads to an adjustment. The adjustment produces a different result. The result gives Mercury something new to consider. The mind and the material begin answering one another.

Virgo is practical, and perfectionism is not in any way practical.

Perfectionism creates an imaginary condition that life is never permitted to challenge. The perfect work remains untouched by the limitations of time, skill, money, material, or body because it remains safely unmade.

Virgo wants to know what actually happens.

Cut the page. Make the mark. Change the proportion. Try it again and watch closely.

If something can work better, Virgo wants to find out how.

Venus brings her own concerns into this process. She is still seeking beauty, pleasure, desire, and relationship. Yet in Virgo, she seeks a beauty capable of functioning in the life that must hold it.

Can this object withstand use? Does the method encourage the hand to return? Does the work become more itself as it is refined? What has to be altered so that pleasure can remain alive inside the process?

Venus in Virgo does not examine the beloved because she is searching for a reason to reject it. She pays attention because she wants the relationship to deepen. Her standards are an instrument of intimacy.

This is why I think Virgo is better understood as utterly enchanted (dare I say, obsessed?) with the process itself.

A process allows curiosity to move.

One question enters the hands and returns with evidence. The material yields somewhere unexpected. A method that appeared elegant in theory becomes cumbersome in practice. The failed attempt reveals that the real difficulty has been hiding several layers beneath the first one.

Each answer changes the question.

Venus in Virgo takes pleasure in following that movement! She grows closer to the beloved through every new articulation of its nature. Her attention becomes more precise because the relationship itself is becoming clearer, sharper, stranger, more interesting.

The difficulty begins when her questions cannot become experiments.

Perfectionism begins when this curiosity loses somewhere to go.

Perhaps the experiment feels too expensive to risk or the body cannot perform it yet. The work has become so public that every uncertain gesture feels exposed. Perhaps fear has gathered around the possibility of discovering that the idea will not work, or that the maker cannot yet make it work in the way they imagined.

The curiosity remains alive, but it cannot enter matter. Without contact, nothing answers back.

Every possible problem retains its full weight because reality has not been permitted to cut them down to actual size. One question produces five more. Improvements gather around an object that does not exist yet. The imagined work becomes increasingly intricate while the distance between the maker and their first move grows wider.

What begins as curiosity becomes a dam built to contain disappointment.

If every difficulty can be anticipated, perhaps no material will be wasted. No limitation will have to be encountered. The beautiful thing can remain (theoretically) perfect for as long as it remains untouched by the conditions required to bring it into being.

Yet Venus in Virgo cannot grow closer to something she is never allowed to meet.

This is what perfectionism takes from her: it interrupts the exchange through which her love becomes embodied. She can no longer be surprised by the material, corrected by the attempt, or changed by what another nature reveals.

Her attention continues, but the beloved has disappeared from the room.

What restores her is a small, tangible encounter. A question narrow enough to enter the afternoon. A material permitted to answer in its own language. One attempt whose purpose is to reveal something rather than prove anything.

This is why the sketchbook belongs so naturally to Venus in Virgo.

It gives curiosity somewhere to move before it has found a final destination. The page can hold a partial understanding without requiring it to become complete. A question may travel through the hand, leave its evidence, and remain open enough for another page to answer later.

The sketchbook provides a space where the relationship can become realized through the embodied pursuit of curiosity and possibility.

A sketchbook is a temple to our pursuit of understanding the Other.

The Sketchbook as a Love Letter

During this Venus in Virgo transit, I began binding small sketchbooks for myself.

Their construction is simple. I fold sheets of paper into signatures, pierce them, and painstakingly sew them together. The thread remains visible along the spine, so the books carry the evidence of how they were made before I have drawn a single thing inside them. I have also left them without covers because I want the record to start with whatever clumsy marks I make first. I want charcoal to settle into the grain and gather along the edges where my fingers hold the page. I want the thread to soften through use. I want the corners to bend, the paper to remember pressure, and the faint ghost of one drawing to pass onto the page facing it.

I want each sketchbook to become an intimate, raw record of the journey I am taking toward greater understanding, deeper devotion.

A love letter records what attention to the Other has done to the mind and heart of the person who has been paying it. We are always changed from the exchange of love.

The sketchbooks are love letters in this sense.

Their pages will preserve the movement of my attention: where an image first appeared, where the perspective went wrong (sigh, so many times), where my hand became curious about a shadow and followed it. Some pages may contain only the beginning of a thought. Others will show an image passing through several forms before I recognize what has been trying to emerge.

The sketchbook is evidence of our pursuit of understanding the Other, until we are close enough to call it intimacy (often in the form of a larger or finished project).

Every creative practice has some version of a sketchbook, the little love letters where we record the attention we pay to our creative desires.

It may be a bound book, a document crowded with fragments, the voice memo made before a melody vanishes, or the strange little sample kept because the material did something worth remembering. This is where we grapple with what has attracted us. We approach it, lose it, find some partial articulation, then follow what we have learned into another attempt.

We are often still discovering what we love while we are making these records. That is also what makes them intimate. They hold the moment before our attention has arranged itself into a finished statement.

Venus in Virgo loves these records because she understands that beauty has a lineage.

A finished work does not arrive untouched from the mind of its maker. It descends from earlier forms. Sketchbooks allow us to trace the lineage of an image through everything that fed it. This is where the larger work grows before it knows that it is becoming larger.

And perhaps this is why looking through another person’s sketchbook can feel more intimate than standing before their finished work.

We are seeing the lineage and journey of their attention, the tangled growth of their devotion. We are watching desire take root before it flowers into certainty. The page shows us where they lingered, what they could not leave alone, and how their love became capable of making what it had first only dimly imagined.

Over time, my own sketchbooks will carry this history of love as a garment etched into the pages. Their dirt will reveal where I returned. The softened thread will remember every opening.

Each book will say:

I wanted to understand, so I stayed. I followed what you revealed into another curiosity, and another. I was enchanted, am still enchanted, by the chance to understand you deeper. I allowed the pursuit to leave its marks on me. Together we were changed and grew closer, yet always remained distinct. I am better for it.

Give Curiosity Somewhere to Go

Perhaps this is the invitation Venus in Virgo extends to us: give your curiosity somewhere physical to go.

If a question has been circling your creative life, find the smallest form in which you can meet it. Something narrow enough to enter the time, materials, skill, money, and physical capacity available to you now.

Open the sketchbook and let the question touch the page.

You may be trying to understand how charcoal creates the soft atmospheric distance you keep seeing in another artist’s work. You may have an image hovering at the edge of your imagination, though you cannot yet tell whether it wants to become a painting, a poem, or the fainting haunting of a melody.

Begin there.

Allow the attraction to become an experiment. Watch what happens when the imagined thing encounters the actual size of the page, the nature of the material, and the body that has arrived to work with it today.

The first attempt will answer something.

The charcoal may catch against the paper in a way you had not expected. The beautiful method you researched for three weeks may feel terrible in your hand, while some accidental mark opens the door you had been searching for.

Approach the problem with love, that is to say, with curiosity. Take it one question, one action, one experiment at a time. And then treasure what it reveals.

Keep whatever caused your attention to sharpen, change direction, or sink its roots more deeply into the thing that first enchanted you. Some of these records will remain small love letters to a curiosity that entered your life for an afternoon. Others may contain the first living cells of something that will occupy you for years.

You cannot always know which kind you are making! They can only emerge from repeated, curious contact.

Let the beloved answer your curiosity with its own nature. Remain with the exchange long enough for its marks to gather on the page, in the material, and within the changing articulation of your hands.

This is how perfectionism begins to loosen. The beautiful thing no longer has to remain untouched inside the imagination, protected from every condition that might alter it. It can enter the world and begin revealing what it actually is.

Venus in Virgo understands that intimacy develops this way.

Each page becomes a love letter giving evidence for your desire to understand better, understand more.

The distance between you and the Other is very rarely entirely conquered! Complete understanding would bring the pursuit to an end, and Venus in Virgo knows the pleasure lives in the hunt, and the beloved is more nuanced than we can conceive.

There is always another page waiting, another form the question might take, another chance for the beloved to answer in a way we could not have imagined alone.

From the charcoal dust gathered in the whorls of my fingers,

P.S. There are 17 original long-form Creative Court Reports remaining. Once they are claimed, this version will close while I reshape the offering into something more sustainable.

If you would like the full 21–30-page version of your Creative Court, you can commission yours here:

Commission Your Creative Report

Mercury is finally direct, and I have an announcement that feels very appropriate for the end of their retrograde:

I am opening 25 final spots for the original, fully expanded Creative Court Report.

These reports are $247 and have a current delivery window of 4–6 weeks. Once these 25 spots are claimed, I will be closing the offer for a while.

When it returns, the report will have a different shape.

Commission Your Creative Court Report

So let’s talk about why…

I thought I was making a much smaller thing (whoops)

When I first created the Creative Court Report, I promised one to two pages about each member of the Court: Venus, Mercury, Mars, and the Moon.

Then I planned to write another two to four pages bringing everyone into a Craefter’s Concord, where we could look at the practical agreements these four planets might need in order to support a satisfying and sustainable creative practice.

Altogether, I imagined the report would be somewhere between six and twelve pages 😅🫣 Silly me.

This was my first time offering them! I had spent a long time researching the planets of praxis, looking at charts, and developing my own framework for applying this astrology to the lives of contemporary makers. I knew what I wanted the reports to do, I simply had no idea what would be required to do it well.

It turns out I am apparently incapable of meeting someone’s Venus and asking her to explain herself in a page and a half 🫠

The same thing happens with Mercury, then Mars, and then the Moon.

Once I sat down with real charts and questionnaires, each planet required more attention and care.

People shared their paintings and stories with me, their sculptures, textiles, unfinished manuscripts, strange creatures, beloved tools, and the creative questions they had carried for years. Some invited me into practices that were already thriving. Others showed me places where the work had fallen silent and was only beginning to move again.

One page became three… Sometimes three became five… 😅😅😅

Then I would reach the Craefter’s Concord, where the whole Court finally sits down together, and discover that their agreement needed another five to seven pages.

What I thought would be a relatively small report became an individual studio document that often approaches thirty pages.

I kept thinking I would learn how to make the next one shorter. Instead, I became better at seeing what was happening in the chart. The reports grew more detailed because I could see more clearly how the planets were speaking to one another, where they were pulling apart, and how closely their disagreements matched what the person had already told me about their creative life.

Sometimes the maker who believed they lacked discipline had been trying to force themselves into a method that exhausted their Moon.

Someone who felt scattered across many art forms had a Venus who gathered beauty through variety and combination. Their interests were already speaking to one another beneath the surface. They needed help recognizing the connections they shared.

Another person had a Mars who could begin with tremendous force, while the rest of the Court needed a slower structure to help him carry the work beyond that first glorious rush.

Once the living person entered the room with the living planets, remaining brief became seemingly impossible.

More than 35 people have now commissioned Creative Court Reports, and the response has been more beautiful than I could have anticipated 🤯

Again and again, people have told me that they feel seen 😭💙

They have written to say that the report helped them understand why a practice they thought should work for them never quite did. It gave them permission to return to a neglected material, work in shorter sessions, take their bodily needs seriously, or stop measuring their art against a form of mastery they never actually desired.

Several people have told me they wanted to get up and make something as soon as they finished reading 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

These are some of the greatest compliments I can receive!

What Mercury began

I opened the Creative Court Reports on July 5, about a week into Mercury’s retrograde through Cancer and my natal ninth house.

The ninth house is the part of my chart connected with astrology, study, meaning-making, divine inspiration, and the larger frameworks through which we try to understand a life. It is also where my Moon lives.

I had been quietly developing this work for months. I studied my own chart first, then the charts of family and friends. I began offering small pieces of the framework in readings, paying attention to what became visible when I looked at astrology through the very particular question of modern creative practice.

Then my Mercury and Mars got hold of the idea.

In my chart, Mercury and Mars have a close relationship (I think of it as a classic anime rival-relationship, they spur one another on). They are clever together, quick, experimental, impulsive, and a little rebellious. They learn by beginning the work and seeing what happens. Meticulous advance planning is rarely a successful route for them to take, it short circuits their genius and momentum.

They would rather get their hands on the material, make the first mark, and allow the work to answer back.

So I opened the doors to this offering.

I had not yet written several complete sample reports first or calculated precisely how many hours each one would require. Why would my Mercury and Mars do something so sensible when they had an adventure to begin?

I had an idea I believed in, enough research beneath me to trust it, and a strong feeling that people would find it useful.

This is an extremely recognizable part of my own creative process. I often begin by jumping in, making contact with the materials, and discovering the true form of a project from inside it.

I find out through the doing.

The work reveals its scale once it is alive in my hands. Assumptions change. New possibilities appear. Sometimes the thing I thought I was making opens its mouth and announces a much larger appetite. Often similar to No-Face from Spirited Away.

So… that is what happened here.

Mercury and Mars were right about the idea! The reports have found the people who needed them, and the response has been more heartwarming than I could have anticipated.

They were also right about how I needed to learn. I could only understand the real shape of the Creative Court Report by entering each chart, meeting each Court, and allowing the work to show me how much attention it required.

When the work talks back to you

One of my favorite things to watch is the restoration of old paintings.

Even when a painter was trained in an intensely academic tradition, where the artist’s hand was meant to disappear beneath technical accuracy, something of the maker always remains.

You can see it in the direction of the brushstrokes and the pressure of a line. One painter has a distinct way of portraying shadows, while another is drawn towards light-flooded illumination. Preference for color, temperature, or softness is part of their distinct visual language underneath the scaffolding of technical precision.

However thoroughly an artist learned the rules of their time, they leave small traces of themselves inside the work.

We cannot fully remove ourselves from the things we make.

The artist’s hand reaches far beyond visible brushwork. It is present in the materials we are drawn toward and the subjects that follow us across years. It lives in the strange way we prepare to work, in what our attention notices first, in the problems we enjoy solving and the ones that drain all pleasure from a project.

It can be found in the person who needs to cover an entire wall before they can understand an image, and in the person who builds a world inside a sketchbook small enough to rest in their palms. It appears in charcoal ground deeply into the tooth of the paper, in cloth pieced slowly from saved fragments, in sentences gathered from dreams before you fully understand their meanings. (All genuine Creative Court examples!)

We compare our practice to someone with a different body and a different Creative Court. We decide that our own methods are too slow, too scattered, overly repetitive, insufficiently disciplined, or simply too weird. We become suspicious of our pleasures. We ignore the materials that make our hands itch to begin because we believe we ought to be making something more “serious”.

Eventually, the work starts talking back to us.

It shows us what we return to after every attempt to leave it behind. A form reappears. A color refuses to be abandoned. The same creature walks through the margins of every notebook. The body keeps reaching for the soft pencil, the rough paper, the small loom, or the half-finished story waiting beside the bed.

This is what I most want the Creative Court Reports to help people recognize and accept.

Venus reveals the beauty that has a claim on us. She has her own sense of taste, pleasure, attraction, and value. She knows what draws us close enough to care.

Mercury joins intellect with the hand. They learn the craft, gather tools and techniques, improvise when the usual road closes, and scheme how an inward image might cross into physical form.

Mars gives us the courage and force to interfere with matter. He makes the cut, applies pressure, takes the risk, and begins before every uncertainty has been settled.

The Moon carries the practice through a living body. She remembers and imagines. She feels the changing weather of the inner life and knows whether the conditions around the work can be embodied again tomorrow.

When I write a report, I meet these planets as people. I listen for who speaks first, who keeps interrupting, who has been quietly holding the entire practice together, and who may have been pushed into a corner while someone else controls the workshop.

Every Creative Court has its own beautifully unique arrangement. The Creative Court Report aims to understand the people who have actually gathered there, because their relationships shape the artist’s practice.

The report can offer practical help with real frustrations. It can show us where a practice needs more support or a different method.

I am overjoyed when someone realizes the thing they kept trying to correct may contain some of their greatest creative intelligence.

A living practice necessarily changes shape

Accepting our artist’s hand does not mean every habit must remain exactly as it is. The hand itself is alive. It responds to new materials, changing bodies, new inspirations, shifting responsibilities, seasons of devotion, and long fallow stretches when very little seems to move.

A sustainable creative practice needs room for these changes.

The hours available to us may contract. A material that once behaved beautifully begins causing pain or irritation. A method that carried us for years starts leaving us cold. An idea grows much larger than the structure originally built around it.

We learn what the work requires by doing it.

Sometimes that knowledge arrives through pleasure, when a process suddenly feels so alive that we cannot imagine returning to the old one. It can also come through fatigue, resistance, frustration, or the gradual recognition that something we love has become too difficult to continue in its present form.

The Creative Court Report illuminates the breathing, living entities of a creative practice, and how they grow and change together.

I love writing these reports, and I want to continue making them. Their current size, however, requires far more time and labor than I understood when I first designed the offer. In order for the work to remain useful and sustainable, its structure will be changing.

After these final 25 reports, I will rebuild the offer into a shorter format.

The future report will include a three-to-five-page synthesis of the entire Creative Court, followed by a substantial five-to-seven-page Craefter’s Concord. It will still introduce the maker to their Venus, Mercury, Mars, and Moon while giving most of its attention to the agreements that can help them create. The long individual planetary portraits will no longer be included automatically.

I may eventually offer those deeper planetary portraits separately, so someone who wants to spend more time with their Venus or Mercury can invite that member of the Court into the room alone. (There are also the beginnings of workshops and other forms of this work quietly gestating behind the scenes right now.)

The final 25

If you have been wanting the original, fully expanded Creative Court Report, I am opening 25 final commissions at $247.

You will receive an in-depth individual portrait of your Venus, Mercury, Mars, and Moon, followed by the full Craefter’s Concord that brings them into conversation around the actual conditions of your creative practice.

These reports frequently approach thirty pages and are written entirely for you. I study your chart alongside your questionnaire, creative history, materials, current frustrations, and the work you most want to bring into being.

The current delivery window is 4–6 weeks.

Once all 25 spots have been claimed, I will close the reports for a while so I can finish the existing commissions and rebuild the offer with care.

Commission Your Creative Court Report

The greatest reward of this work has been watching people recognize and embrace themselves.

This is the power I found in exploring my own Creative Court: the relief in discovering that your creative practice does not need to resemble anyone else’s in order to be real.

Your methods may be strange. Your rhythms may refuse the schedule you once imagined for them. Your attention may travel by a winding path, following a flash of color or a half-heard phrase until it finds the hidden passage into the work.

That path leaves traces. Over time, those traces become a deep relationship, through multiple encounters.

My hope is that these reports help you have more encounters that build that relationship into something recognizably, undeniably yours.

From the charcoal dust gathered in the whorls of my fingers,

A Standing Note on AI and Authorship

I have resisted making a statement about AI because I do not want every piece of writing on the internet to become a small courtroom where authors are expected to prove that they made their own work. Still, the atmosphere around generative AI has become so muddy and accusatory that I want to offer one clear account of how I work and where I stand.

I have watched friends who have never used generative AI in their creative projects paste their writing into so-called AI detectors and receive verdicts declaring it 80% machine-written. These are people whose work and processes I know, often with substantial bodies of work that predates generative AI.

I have also experimented with putting my own drafts through these programs. Strangely, the more carefully I edit a piece, the higher the alleged AI percentage sometimes climbs. The rougher version passes as human. Once the sentences become clearer and the rhythm more deliberate, the detector grows suspicious.

That should tell us something about what these programs are measuring, and what they cannot possibly know.

AI detectors do not establish authorship. They make statistical guesses based on patterns in language.

Even the companies developing this technology acknowledge how unreliable that can be.

OpenAI withdrew its own AI classifier in 2023 because of its low rate of accuracy and warned that human writing could be incorrectly and confidently labeled as machine-generated.

In May 2026, the Authors Guild tested five prominent detectors using ten articles published before generative AI became widely available. One detector classified every article as predominantly AI-written, returning scores between 71% and 100%. Another gave the same pieces scores of 0%.

A machine producing a percentage does not transform that percentage into forensic evidence.

Large language models were trained on vast quantities of human language, including literary and academic writing. We fed machines the work of human beings and taught them to imitate the patterns they found there. Now people are using other machines to accuse human writers of sounding too much like the material those systems learned from in the first place.

The circle is absurd.

In the interest of transparency, here is how my own writing process generally works:

As a chronically ill and disabled person, I often begin by speaking. I dictate my thoughts about a subject into transcription software, sometimes at considerable length. I organize that material into a rough outline, although the outline rarely survives unchanged once the real writing begins. I then develop the piece through writing, research, and repeated revision.

Before publishing, I use editorial and readability tools such as Grammarly and Hemingway. I use them to catch errors and show me where a sentence may have become difficult to follow. I’ve personally worked hard to regain clarity in my written communications after a few years of extreme brain fog and exhaustion from chronic illness and burn out; these tools have been vital to help me do this.

Automated writing assistance of this kind existed long before the current generative AI boom (Grammarly was founded in 2009) and writers have used grammar checkers, spellcheck, dictation software, and readability tools for many years.

These tools make my work more accessible to me. They help me communicate my ideas as clearly as I can. I decide which suggestions to accept, which to discard, and when the style of my specific writing matters more than a program’s idea of correctness.

The research, experiences, interpretations, creative practice, and years of thought behind this publication are my own. I remain responsible for every sentence published under my name.

I care about the ethical questions raised by generative AI. There are serious conversations to be had about consent, creative labor, environmental cost, the scraping of artists’ work, and the industrial production of empty content.

Those conversations deserve considerably more rigor than uploading someone’s writing into an unreliable detector and treating the resulting percentage as proof of wrongdoing.

I will not participate in AI witch hunts. I will not treat detector scores as evidence against another writer, and I will not continually place my own work on trial before programs incapable of knowing how it was made.

This is my standing statement on the subject. I will continue using the accessibility and editorial tools that allow me to do my work, and I will continue placing my attention where it belongs: on making that work honest, thoughtful, and worthy of the people who choose to read it.

You may be wondering about the delay since my last letter… Well, for the last couple of weeks, both my body and one of my paintings have been having a meltdown.

We have been moving through what qualifies as a heat wave here on the Dingle Peninsula. Compared with the temperatures much of the world is enduring, it feels faintly ridiculous to call it that. Nevertheless, the heat was enough to push my already chronically ill body into a fairly severe flare.

It was also enough to make my painting melt.

The painting was part of a method I have spent months developing. It was my first work on gessoed wood panel, and the surface had been drying for weeks. Then, as the temperature rose and conspired with the intensifying humidity, the medium reactivated. Passages I had believed were stable became nearly liquid again. The paint smeared beneath my hands and transferred onto my skin.

The body of the painting could no longer hold the form I had given it.

And my body reacted to the paint as if I had plunged it into boiling water.

Then… my body kept reacting whenever I worked with the medium.

Through painful trial and error, I have come to believe that I am reacting to gum arabic itself. All of the materials I rely on are high in gum arabic content: watercolor, gouache, Neocolor II crayons, and the thickening medium I use for my method. I react to all of them.

At nearly the same threshold, the body of the painting and the body making it, my body, lost their tolerance for the method.

One could no longer remain stable, while the other could no longer sustain the process.

This is one of the Moon’s less romantic lessons about bringing something into being. A vision does not become fully material simply because we have made it visible. It must acquire a body capable of holding its form, and the maker must have a body capable of maintaining the relationship required to make it.

A brief note before I continue:

This is one of the relationships I examine in a Creative Court Report: how the Moon receives, supports, complicates, or redirects the visions and methods of the rest of your planetary Creative Court.

I currently have 5 spots open for these custom written reports for the standard rate of $247, with a delivery estimate of four weeks.

Commission Your Creative Report

Grieving a material relationship

This has been an unexpectedly grievous discovery.

Gum arabic is not one obscure substance I can simply remove from the cupboard. It is fundamental to several families of art materials I have loved and used for years. It was also the primary binder in the medium I had been experimenting with… The method I had invested in as the central pillar of my current practice and my future art ambitions.

I had invested money in it, certainly, but also time, curiosity, physical effort, and hope. I had learned how the material moved. I knew how to push it across a panel, wipe it away, lay it down again, and build an atmosphere through accumulating layers.

The material and I had developed a close, intimate relationship through the many encounters we had while working together.

My hand learned its drag and slipperiness. My eye learned what it did while wet, what happened when it became tacky, and what it would become when dry. My body began anticipating how much pressure would move it and what kind of mark would remain behind.

To lose a way of making is therefore not merely inconvenient.

There is grief in discovering that a relationship you developed out of love is no longer safe for your body to enter.

This is especially difficult for me because I am an intensely kinesthetic maker. I need to feel my world in order to understand it.

When my fingers are enclosed in gloves, something strange happens to my proprioception. I lose the immediate sense of where my hands are and what they are doing. My grip and movements become clumsy. My body seems to develop a temporary lack of coordination.

Gloves would remove the very contact that allows me to work intuitively. Over the years, I have used brushes less and less, relying more upon my hands and fingers, cloths, wiping, pressing, and physically moving paint around. I find gesture through contact. Some painters discover their most organic mark-making by standing three feet from the canvas with the longest brush known to man. I find it by getting close enough to wrestle with the material.

I am not a particularly clean or demure painter. At my most absorbed, I probably work more like a gorilla rearranging the physical world. Even if gloves did not disrupt my sense of touch, the method is messy enough that the paint would almost certainly find its way inside them or onto the rest of me.

For me, a barrier is not a viable solution because touch is central to my methods.

But touch is more than a personal preference here. It is where my body meets the material body of the work. It is how I learn what a substance will permit: its drag, softness, resistance, temperature, fragility, and response to pressure.

Touch is where I encounter hyle.

The matter an image must enter

The Greek word hyle means matter or material substrate.

In my last letter, I wrote about the Moon’s relationship with memory, dreams, and the imaginal life. An encounter enters the soul, remains after its physical source is gone, and acquires an inward form capable of returning. But that imaginal body is not yet a painting, sculpture, garment, loaf of bread, or any other physical creation.

To return fully, it must cross another threshold.

It must enter hyle.

An image cannot become a painting through vision alone. It requires pigment and a surface willing to receive it. A sculpture must enter clay, stone, wax, wood, metal, or some other substance capable of being modeled, carved, cast, joined, or assembled.

She does not merely make the invisible visible. She brings it into relationship with weight, chemistry, texture, temperature, vulnerability, and duration.

Luna introduces the image to all the relational conditions of earthly life.

Wood responds to fluctuating temperatures. A binder softens in humidity and heat. Paper buckles beneath water. Pigment fades with enough sun exposure. Clay cracks in the kiln. A maker’s hands stiffen, tire, tremble, swell, or become inflamed.

Matter permits the image to live here, but living here means becoming subject to change.

In the old philosophical worldview, generation was always entwined with corruption. Whatever enters physical life can also soften, warp, crack, fade, rot, smear, or lose the form it once possessed. The same material conditions that allow something to come into being continue acting upon it after it has been made.

My painting had successfully entered hyle. Pigment and binder had acquired shape upon wood. But generation is not secured by a single moment of arrival. The work still had to survive heat, humidity, chemistry, and time.

The Moon’s work did not end when the painting became visible.

Generation requires continuance. Something unfinished must be enclosed, nourished, and held together long enough to become what it is trying to become.

This is the fertile dark.

A seed does not germinate because it possesses a sufficiently beautiful vision of a flower. It germinates because the surrounding world can hold it: darkness, moisture, temperature, soil, time.

If those conditions change beyond what the forming life can bear, desire cannot negotiate on its behalf.

As Regent of the Creative Court, the Moon asks the material questions…

• Can the maker’s body sustain this process?

• Can this substance carry the image?

• Can the work retain its form in the environment it has entered?

• What scale, pace, and method remain possible now?

These questions determine whether the intentions of the entire Court can acquire a life on Earth.

Otherwise, inspiration remains a dream. Beauty remains a longing. Skill can be practiced faithfully and still feel frustrated by its results. Courage cannot compensate for a body or material arrangement that is no longer stable.

Divine discontent

As an example, my own chart contains a particularly complicated version of this negotiation.

My Mercury is strong, angular, retrograde, and inclined toward strange methods. It likes invention, experimentation, and the slightly heretical solution. But Mercury is in aversion to my very powerful domicile Moon. The technical intelligence and the generatrix cannot see one another directly.

Mercury can speak to Mars, and Mars can speak to the Moon. But Mars is also in exile and not especially interested in the conventional route of doing things, since that route is most often blocked to him. Together, Mercury and Mars are quite willing to take things apart, misuse materials, ignore the instructions on the label, and see what happens when I move paint around in ways it was not designed to move.

All three meet in my hands. Mercury devises the method. Mars pushes, scrapes, wipes, wrestles, and acts upon the material. The Moon receives the consequences through the body and determines whether the resulting form can continue to exist.

This arrangement has produced some of my most exciting experiments. It also means that the method I devise and the form my Moon can sustain do not always agree.

There is often a distance between what I can imagine, what I can invent, and what the whole living system of my chart can bring into material stability. I have come to think of this distance as a form of divine discontent.

Most makers know some version of it (much to our annoyance and chagrin).

The poem in the mind and the poem on the page are not identical. The vessel that emerges from the kiln is not the vessel the hands thought they were building. We reach toward one image and something related, but indisputably other, meets us in matter.

Sometimes this is a technical gap that closes with practice.

Sometimes it becomes the enduring friction through which a creative life develops.

And sometimes the material world issues an edict with enough gravity to change the practice itself.

When the image changes bodies

I will not pretend I received this development with serene lunar wisdom.

I was devastated. Truthfully, still devastated.

My health and circumstances have already taken enough of my creative life at different points.

But… I know what happens when creative expression has nowhere to go. When I cannot make for long periods, I become less present inside my own life—more miserable, more blocked, less wholehearted.

Don’t get me wrong: I have never successfully forced myself to do things through pain. I have always lost the battle whenever I treated my body as an obstacle to be conquered instead of a partner with whom I must respectfully collaborate.

The images have not stopped coming.

My body has simply made it very clear that they can no longer return through this particular arrangement of gum arabic, pigment, and skin.

Thankfully, I also find great joy in working with charcoal.

The irony is not lost on me. The material my practice can presently tolerate is a substance whose specially prepared forms have long been associated with absorption and purification, especially good for reactive bodies. After weeks in which my body and my paintings both seemed to be inflamed and liquefying, I have been led toward something dark, absorbing, elemental, and quiet. Like the fertile void of the night, where the Moon rules as queen.

More importantly, charcoal allows the tactile, Lunar relationship to remain.

There is less distance between my hand and charcoal than there ever was between my hand and paint. I work almost entirely with my hands, pushing it into paper, blending it with my fingertips, grinding it into the tooth of the surface, and wiping it this way and that in broad, gestural marks.

My Mercury can still experiment. My Mars can still move with intuitive force. My Moon has found another material capable of receiving them without asking my body to sacrifice itself in the process.

The same nocturnal images continue to return: fog, darkness, the shifting edge of the landscape, the light that appears when the world has nearly disappeared. What has changed is the hyle into which they enter.

The Moon is wrapping them in charcoal now.

While I search for the paper that can hold the work in the way I want, I have also begun binding my own sketchbooks. I fold the sheets into signatures, pierce them, pass thread through paper, and make a small physical place in which the next image might live.

I will speak more about those books next time.

For now, making them has been a balm. After so much material refusal, I can put my hands on paper and thread without fear. I can remain inside the physical intimacy of making while my practice puzzles out its next body.

Perhaps this is one reason so many artists move between more than one medium, even when only one becomes the work for which they are publicly known. We are curious, certainly. There are too many ways to speak for a creative person to remain entirely uninterested in all but one.

But it also allows the practice to wax and wane alongside the rest of material life.

A poet also paints. A sculptor also bakes. A painter also binds books.

The Moon changes, our bodies change. Our resources, desires, capacities, seasons, and environments change. A living practice must be able to respond to those fluctuations without demanding that we override them.

The Moon herself does not remain full. She waxes, wanes, disappears into darkness, and gathers light again. Her continuity takes the form of rhythm: relinquishing one form, entering another, moving with the conditions that make life possible now.

“Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement.” - Haruki Murakami

I am still grieving the material relationship I lost. Grief belongs to the lunar story, too. Generation and corruption unfold in the same matter.

And when the old arrangement can no longer hold, the Moon turns toward the dark and begins again.

From the charcoal dust gathered in the whorls of my fingers,

P.S.

If anyone is interested in buying a bundle of watercolor and gouache paint, Neocolor II crayons, and various brushes and palette knives, let’s chat privately via email or dm. You’ll get a sweet deal on professional art supplies, and I’ll feel happy they went to someone who I know will cherish them.

I have watched hundreds of storms through my studio skylight.

A few of them have never ended.

The weather itself moved on, of course. The cloudbanks crossed the roof. The bruised light altered, rain struck the glass or passed us by, and eventually another sky replaced the one that had held me so completely.

But something of the encounter remained.

I remember these storms with my body: the sudden change in pressure, the atmosphere drawing close around the house, the strange color of the room before rain. I remember the awe of watching something immense, beautiful, and entirely beyond my control moving just overhead.

The storm passed through the world once.

Then it passed into me.

Other images arrive through a different door.

A dream may possess its own landscape, weather, and sequence of events, bearing no obvious relationship to anything we have recently seen. Yet we awaken with the feeling of having encountered something: an impossible wave, an unfamiliar house, a sentence that follows us into the morning.

Sometimes the dream disappears almost immediately. Sometimes one image remains for years.

In my own work, dream-weather and physical weather continually exchange qualities. Storms, waves, nocturnal skies, and the atmospheric ocean move between observation and dream until I cannot always locate where a particular image began.

This week, as the Moon disappeared into darkness, I found myself making small charcoal and pastel fragments from somewhere inside that exchange.

They are atmospheric scraps: darkness, pressure, a pale opening, the suggestion of light gathering behind weather. I have been allowing them to stop before they become finished objects, without requiring myself to make them something bigger than whatever feels right for this low-energy (high heat) season.

Small things are entering form. Whether they will go any farther remains undecided.

And this has brought me back to a question at the heart of the Creative Court:

When does the act of making actually begin?

A brief practical note before we go farther:

All 25 founder spots for the Creative Court Report have now been claimed, which means reports are currently available at their regular price of $247, with a four-week delivery window.

Because my docket is already quite full, I am accepting only 7 more commissions before closing my books for a bit.

I need the space to complete the reports already entrusted to me… and to continue developing a top-secret experiential project currently taking shape right now 😈

If you have been wanting a Creative Court Report, this is the time to reserve one.

Commission Your Creative Court Report

The cycle beneath the cycle

We usually recognize creation once the body becomes visibly involved.

The hand reaches for charcoal. The needle enters cloth. The wheel begins to turn. Energy rises or falls; a habit holds or breaks; the work moves or stalls.

These are all lunar matters. Most of us already understand the Moon through some version of them: body, mood, need, rhythm, and fluctuating capacity.

We also tend to understand lunar creativity through the calendar. Waxing Moons are associated with building and increase; waning Moons with editing and release. New Moons become beginnings, Full Moons culminations.

The Moon’s visible phases give us an elegant way of contemplating change. But they can also tempt us to make lunar creativity far more orderly and measurable than it is.

We begin looking for a dependable energy cycle: the correct week to begin, the ideal phase for production, the point at which an idea should be ready to become a project. We have tried to make the planet of fluctuation behave like a modern creative productivity calendar, which is a rather strange fate for the Moon.

Actual creative lives are continually altered by encounters that cannot be scheduled. A dream arrives. A particular quality of light catches us during a walk. Something glimpsed once follows us for twenty years, while yesterday’s urgent idea leaves no trace by morning.

The older cycle of generation was capacious enough to include these mysteries.

It began before the body acted upon matter. It included the subtler stages through which something emerged from possibility, became perceptible to the soul, entered memory, acquired familiarity, awakened desire, and perhaps—perhaps—eventually gathered a physical body.

Not every seed completed that passage.

Some images visited once and disappeared. Others returned until familiarity deepened into love, obsession, or devotion: a relationship with something that would not leave the maker alone.

Only then might the hand begin reaching toward matter.

This is what makes the Moon so important within the Creative Court.

Venus may recognize what is worthy of love. Mercury may discover a method. Mars may supply the force required to act.

But the Moon is the Regent who receives their light and determines how—or whether—it can enter material life.

She governs far more than the amount of energy available on a particular day. She governs the intricate cycle by which something begins acquiring form within a living creature.

If we recognize only the final physical stage, every period without visible production appears empty. We overlook the dream that has not yet found a medium, the encounter still changing inside memory, or the fragment that needs no larger future in order to have participated in creation.

It begins when an encounter enters the living soul, remains after its world has disappeared, and acquires an imaginal form capable of returning.

Dreams and the first imaginal body

Dreams make this mystery impossible to dismiss.

The dream-world is perceptible while we inhabit it. It has places, presences, movement, and atmosphere. We may stand beneath an impossible sky or feel the approach of something for which waking language has no useful name.

Then we wake.

The place is gone, but the encounter may remain.

Often it dissolves immediately. Sometimes only one thing survives: a color, a sentence, an animal watching from the edge of a road. And sometimes a dream follows us for years with a vividness that makes the ordinary distinction between “real” and “imaginary” feel non-existent.

The fourth-century philosopher Synesius of Cyrene took this territory very seriously. In his treatise On Dreams, he described the imaginative pneuma—a subtle, breath-like intermediary occupying the borderland between incorporeal soul and dense physical body.

He called it the “first body of the soul.”

The phrase is extraordinary.

For Synesius, this imaginative spirit was the shared organ of sensation through which dreams and images became perceptible, a boundary where things otherwise distant from one another could make contact. The dream had already acquired a kind of body: imaginal, changeable, capable of being encountered and remembered. Synesius places the imaginative pneuma between incorporeal and embodied life.

This is the Moon’s first act of generation.

From the dark, something gathers enough distinction to appear.

The image may never become a sketch, much less a finished work.

Yet for one moment, possibility has accumulated into form. Something previously unseen has become perceptible to Psyche.

It has an atmosphere. It can move us. It can leave a memory.

This is already a creative event.

Imagination is an encounter

Our modern language makes it difficult to honor this stage because imagination has inherited the flimsy reputation of unreality.

We say something is “only imaginary” when we mean that it has no consequence or legitimate claim upon us. Imagination becomes a private theater in which the conscious mind invents pictures for its own amusement, separate from the serious reality happening elsewhere.

For my own practice, the older idea of phantasia is much more interesting.

Aristotle distinguished phantasia from immediate sensation and discursive thought. It was the faculty through which an image arose for us. A physical thing could move the senses and disappear, while the movement it created continued. We close our eyes, but the image remains.

Aristotle places phantasia between perception and thought.

This gives us one movement of imagination: the physical world touches the creature, and the encounter continues inwardly after its source has gone.

Synesius gives us another: the dream itself may be the encounter.

The image does not always arrive as a copy of something first perceived while awake. It may appear in its own imaginal country and cross into waking life because something of it survives in memory.

In an actual creative life, these movements mingle.

Dream changes perception. Perception enters dream. A physical storm gives pressure and light to the dream; the dream gives the waking eye a form it now knows how to recognize. Imagination becomes the place where inner and outer encounters exchange qualities until their origins are no longer cleanly separable.

This is how storms work in my paintings.

My work begins in the storm-lit skies and Atlantic weather of the Dingle Peninsula, where sea and sky often seem to become one continuous body. The images hover between observation and dream: waves, cloudbanks, nocturnes, horizons, the breathless pause before a storm breaks.

The atmosphere moves through me as much as around me.

When I paint a storm, I often feel as though I am riding the weather from within a dream or trance. I am trying to meet something that has already moved between sky, body, dream, memory, and image more times than I can count.

The painting may eventually become one more place where that encounter occurs.

But the encounter, the activity of relational life, did not begin with the painting.

Memory gives the encounter duration

For an image to return, something must hold it after the original encounter has ended.

This is the work of memory.

We often speak as though the mind were a computer and memory an archive of stored information: accurate or inaccurate, retrievable or lost.

The older Psyche was the life-principle of a creature—the sensitive, responsive soul through which a living body nourishes itself, grows, senses, moves, desires, and decays. Aristotle called it the first actuality of a natural body capable of life.

Aristotle Psyche is what makes a potentially living body actually alive.

Memory belongs to that creaturely life.

Aristotle compared perception leaving a memory to a seal impressing its figure into wax. The receiving surface matters. Some experiences barely mark it; others encountered once leave a deeper impression than those repeated a hundred times. Memory, in his account, belongs directly to sensory perception and requires an image or presentation.

Aristotle’s account of memory is bodily, sensory, and imaginal.

We remember because we were affected.

Emotion matters here in its oldest, most physical sense: the capacity to be moved. The body was present. Psyche registered scale, pressure, pleasure, danger, beauty.

This is why a few of the storms above my skylight have never ended.

I do not remember them as meteorological data. I remember the scale of the sky, the strange light before rain, the atmosphere pressing close. Yet memory does not preserve the storm unchanged. The weather is worked upon by later storms, dreams, illness, desire, and time.

Memory gives the encounter duration, but duration is not stillness.

What remains in us remains alive enough to change, just like the Moon.

The images that become familiar

Countless images enter us without becoming part of our creative lives.

Dreams disappear. Ideas flicker and leave no trace.

Perhaps they were never ours to make. Perhaps their only life with us was the brief contact itself before they returned to the vast dark from which possibilities emerge.

A garden produces more seed than it can bring to maturity. Some seeds never open. Others wait in the soil for conditions that may not arrive for years.

And then there are the images that keep returning.

They become familiar.

Familiarity is deeply lunar: repetition, closeness, recognition, the intimacy created through renewed contact. (To say nothing of how familiar spirits and guiding and guardian daimones were governed by the Moon in Hellenistic thought.)

The image enters a dream, reappears during a walk, catches in the throat when a particular blue arrives at twilight. Each encounter alters it slightly and deepens the relationship.

This is where the Moon begins speaking with Venus.

Memory can hold many things, but desire gives one image gravity.

Venus recognizes something there as beautiful, necessary, worthy of love.

This one.

Return here.

At first it may be fascination. Then preference. Then an obsession that begins reorganizing attention around itself. The image becomes a kind of haunting—not necessarily frightening, though it can be unsettling. It simply will not leave us alone.

And because it returns, we come to know it. Because we know it, we become capable of loving it with greater specificity. Through repeated contact and encounter the relationship develops its own history: recognition, separation, return, frustration, pleasure, devotion. Just as being familiar with a lover means you could trace and almost feel the shape of their hip, without them being in the same room.

This is more than an idea we have decided to execute.

It is a love affair between Psyche and an image.

The familiar form may eventually gather enough devotion, memory, and imaginal substance to ask for another body. The hand begins reaching toward charcoal, clay, pigment, fiber.

The rest of the Creative Court starts to stir.

But not every beloved image enters physical reality, either. Love does not eliminate circumstance. Desire cannot by itself provide time, strength, material, skill, money, method, or the bodily conditions required to make a thing live on Earth.

That final jurisdiction belongs to the Moon as generatrix and Regent.

And that… is the next part of her cycle.

Priming the pump

For now, the Moon is dark.

The New Moon is often called empty, but empty is a deceptive word. A dark field may contain more seed than it can ever grow. Beneath the visible surface, there can be rest, decomposition, and first stirrings too small to announce themselves yet.

My practice currently looks a little like that.

I am not pressuring myself toward large paintings or projects. I am making fragments: small experiments with charcoal and pastel, light and darkness, the atmosphere thickening around a pale opening. I let them stop when the contact feels complete, even if the object does not.

Perhaps some will return in a larger form. Others may remain exactly what they are: the first slight condensation of an image that never wanted a finished body.

The fragments keep the exchange open. They allow dream-weather to cross a little farther into matter without demanding that it complete the entire lunar cycle of generation.

I think of it as priming the pump, or at least attempting some familiarity.

The dark is being allowed to remain dark. Psyche is receiving. Memory is gathering. An image is becoming familiar through repeated contact. A few marks have entered paper.

The work may go farther. It may not.

Either way, I’m honoring and keeping myself receptive to the creation that began before my fingers touched the charcoal.

It began when something emerged from possibility and became perceptible. When memory gave the encounter duration. When desire recognized one presence among thousands and loved it enough to keep returning.

The unseen had already taken its first body.

What allows that imaginal body to become flesh, pigment, clay, cloth, or object—and what determines whether it ever does—is the next turn in the Moon’s cycle.

From my paint-drenched heart to yours,

I had intended to send this on Sunday. I also tried, more than once, to make it smaller.

But Venus would not cooperate.

The further I went into the old material, the more immense she became. And perhaps I have a particular investment in this as a maker, because Venus touches so much of what I care about: desire, beauty, value, form, sensory life, the mysterious force that makes one thing feel alive to us while another does not. Still, even I was startled by how thoroughly she has been flattened in the modern imagination. We have reduced an astonishingly complex and powerful being into a handful of pleasant stereotypes, while almost entirely overlooking the stranger and more formidable Venus waiting beneath them.

So although I had planned to wait, today is Friday, her day. The Moon is in her own home, and Venus has just entered Virgo, where she possesses a quieter dignity that almost no one seems interested in discussing. It felt wrong to hold this until Sunday.

This is a long letter. Make yourself a drink and settle in and enjoy this Venus sermon.

I believe it contains some of my best writing, and more than anything, I hope it opens a door into the true scale of Venus: what she means in the life of a maker, certainly, but also what she may be shaping in every life through desire, value, beauty, and the things that we have found over time are strangely, sneakily necessary.

A brief note before we enter the deeper chambers of today’s letter:

There are now only 7 Creative Court Reports remaining at the founding rate of $197.

Once those 7 have been claimed, the report will move to its standard rate of $247.

Each one is a bespoke written study of your physical creative process through the traditional birth chart: your taste, method, momentum, bodily rhythms, material instincts, recurring tangles, and the agreements your inner Court requires in order to make together.

Commission Your Creative Report

Not the Venus we have inherited

I have been trying to write about Venus.

Or perhaps, more truthfully, I have been trying to find a doorway large enough for her.

This has proven difficult because Venus has been made so terribly small in the modern imagination. We have folded her into the pleasant surfaces of life: romance, attraction, cosmetics, sweetness, charm, the colors we prefer, the clothes we wear, the things we find pretty.

None of those associations are exactly false. But they are fragments. Bright shells washed onto shore after some much larger temple sank beneath the sea.

Because when we go backward into the older chambers of the tradition, we find a Venus of almost incomprehensible scale.

In one of the Orphic hymns, Aphrodite is invoked as sea-born, night-loving, crafty, all-connecting, and of awful mien—awful in the older sense of the word: full of awe, formidable, majestic, capable of inspiring wonder and dread.

And then the hymn says something so extraordinary that I have not been able to stop thinking about it:

From her, Ananke (Necessity) first came.

And the three Fates are ruled by her decree.

The Fates. Those ancient sisters who spin, measure, and cut the thread of mortal life. The powers before whom even the gods bend. Those who determine what is allotted, what must unfold, what cannot be escaped.

And somehow, impossibly, behind them stands Venus.

Not decorating the edge of fate.

Directing it.

This is not the Venus we have inherited. This is not the harmless patroness of pretty things, reclining languidly while the supposedly more consequential planets govern war, law, death, time, and destiny.

This Venus is implicated in the hidden machinery of the cosmos.

Desire does not merely distract us from necessity.

Desire gives birth to necessity.

I keep turning that idea over because it rearranges nearly everything. What if the things we desire most deeply are not incidental to the life we live? What if attraction is not merely a soft preference floating over the hard architecture of fate?

What if desire is one of the powers by which fate enters us, takes hold of the senses, and quietly begins directing the course of a life?

Because we do not choose our deepest attractions through reason.

The original enchantment compels us.

We do not choose the particular quality of light that enters us like a blade. We do not choose which colors seem to contain an entire world. We do not choose the music that catches beneath the ribs and makes the air in the room feel altered. We do not choose which textures our hands ache to touch, which landscapes haunt our dreams, which forms we continue drawing in the margins long after we believed we had moved on.

Something appears. Something in us recognizes it.

And then the trouble begins.

Because once a thing has been recognized as beautiful—or true, or alive, or worthy of love—it becomes very difficult to return to the life we inhabited before that recognition.

The painter sees a blue that does not yet exist on the palette. The ceramicist glimpses a vessel whose curve is not quite available to the hand. The weaver begins to understand that roughness and softness must somehow be made to live together in one cloth. The sculptor becomes haunted by the figure hidden in a form that everyone else still sees as stone.

At first, perhaps, this is only attraction. Then it becomes a question. Then a devotion.

Then an irritation, a restlessness, an ache, an impossible standard waiting at the far edge of one’s present skill.

Until finally it begins reorganizing the life around itself.

You buy different materials. You study particular masters. You reject techniques that can produce a competent object but cannot produce the thing you have seen inwardly (dammit). You spend months learning how one pigment behaves beside another. You become preoccupied with the grain of wood, the softness of fiber, the pressure required to lift an edge of charcoal back into light.

You return to the workbench after disappointment. You build your days around the possibility of touching it again—maybe, one day (dammit).

And this is the point at which preference begins to resemble fate.

Desire directs attention. Attention alters choice. Choice becomes repetition. Repetition becomes practice.

Practice, continued over years… becomes a life.

The vitality of aesthetics

Part of our difficulty is that we have inherited a very thin understanding of aesthetics.

We tend to think of aesthetics as the surface appearance of a thing, separated from its deeper substance. A work has content, meaning, technique, ethics, perhaps political consequence—and then, somewhere toward the end, it also has an aesthetic draped over it nicely.

Aesthetics: the pretty arrangement laid over the serious thing beneath? I think not.

In the ancient geocentric imagination, aesthetics was not a passive theory of appearances. It was a physical and sacred science of alignment.

The cosmos above was understood as an ordered and ensouled structure, while the world below the Moon was the unstable realm of matter: clay, blood, weather, growth, decay, color, texture, heat, moisture, fracture, and change.

To shape matter beautifully was therefore not merely to decorate terrestrial life. It was to bring something of celestial order down into physical form.

The maker stood at the threshold between worlds.

Through proportion, color, rhythm, material, ornament, and touch, something invisible could be translated into a thing the body could see, hold, wear, inhabit, or offer. The workbench became one of the places where the order of the heavens could enter the raw matter of the Earth.

This is one of the older and stranger meanings hidden inside the word cosmos.

In modern English, cosmos generally means the universe. But the Ancient Greek kosmos could mean both order and ornament. It is also the root of our word cosmetic.

To ornament a thing was not necessarily to add a frivolous flourish after the meaningful work was complete. It was to order the sensory experience. To dress raw structure in a form through which its inner nature could become visible.

To bring the parts into relationship.

A chair may already stand. A vessel may already hold water. A wall may already keep out the weather. But when the maker refines the edge, chooses the glaze, repeats a motif, balances weight against emptiness, or places one color so that another begins to sing, they are doing more than embellishing utility.

They are performing an act of kosmos.

They are asking matter to enter harmony.

This makes Venus not merely the patroness of beauty, but the mistress of ordering through beauty. She understands that the sensory world can be arranged so that the eye, the hand, and the spirit are led into concord.

She knows that ornament is not always excess.

Sometimes ornament is revelation.

And this makes our apprenticeship to Venus much more demanding than the pursuit of prettiness. Under her tutelage, the maker learns how to dress the raw bones of reality in the form that allows them to become luminous.

Saturn may give us the hard fact of the material world: weight, limit, resistance, structure, finitude. Mars may cut, strike, fire, scrape, and force matter across the threshold of change. Mercury may measure, calculate, design, and discover the method.

But Venus knows toward what form the labor is moving.

The clay is heavy. The wood is mute. The pigment is only powder. The cloth is a loose gathering of thread.

And yet through the maker’s attention, each may become an agalma: a vessel of delight, a crafted thing capable of holding presence.

An agalma was not merely a pleasing object. The word carried associations of glory, delight, and sacred offering—something made beautiful enough to invite the presence of a god.

There is something almost unbearably beautiful in that idea.

That a material object might be shaped with such care, proportion, grace, and devotion that spirit would be compelled to dwell within it.

That the work could become a trap for… delight.

That the maker might take cold, heavy terrestrial matter and make it luminous enough to host a little of the cosmos.

The Greek word aisthesis, from which our word aesthetics descends, referred first to sensory perception: the living act of apprehending the world through the body.

The eye receiving color. The skin meeting texture. The ear recognizing interval, dissonance, and resolution. The body sensing proportion before the intellect can explain why one arrangement feels whole and another feels violently wrong.

Aesthetics belonged to sensation because value first enters us through contact.

A small physical manifesto

Before we can argue that something matters, some part of us has already leaned toward it.

And the ancient phrase to kalon, often translated as “the beautiful,” carried an even stranger doubleness. It could also mean the noble, the excellent, the worthy.

Beauty and goodness were not understood as entirely separate territories.

The beautiful was not merely what decorated the good. It was one of the ways value disclosed itself.

This does not mean that every pleasing object is morally pure, nor that every ethical act must be conventionally attractive. The world is considerably more complicated than that. But it does mean that aesthetic choice is never as empty as we pretend.

When you choose austerity over excess, or excess over restraint, you are making a declaration about what deserves space. When you preserve the crack, the scar, or the visible repair, you are saying something about damage, endurance, memory, and what remains worthy of care. When you smooth every trace of the hand from an object, you are saying something different.

When you let shadow consume half the image, crowd a surface with ornament, leave a field almost bare, or insist that beauty must contain decay, discomfort, tenderness, humor, strangeness, violence, or grief, you are not simply styling a surface.

You are creating a small physical manifesto.

You are showing us how you believe things should exist together.

This is one of the deeper meanings of Venusian concord.

Concord is often treated as simple harmony: everything pleasant, balanced, and in agreement. But concord is also a treaty.

A concord is what happens when separate forces, each with their own nature, find a way to enter relationship without being annihilated.

At the workbench, concord might mean teaching rough wood and delicate gold leaf to inhabit the same object. Allowing a bitter green to remain bitter while discovering the red that makes its bitterness necessary. Finding the exact proportion through which weight and emptiness begin to answer one another.

Venus does not always make things sweet.

She makes them belong.

She is the connective intelligence that senses where kinship is possible, what must be brought nearer, what must remain distinct, and when the disparate parts of a work have entered into a living agreement.

This is why aesthetics matter so profoundly. They reveal the maker’s instinct for relationship.

How should darkness relate to light? How much tension can a form hold before it breaks? What deserves emphasis? What should be softened, sharpened, concealed, repeated, interrupted, or allowed to remain unresolved?

How should the world be arranged?

Your answer appears in the work long before you are able to speak it.

Your taste is your philosophy becoming material.

Your hand in fate, the stars enter clay

And perhaps it is also something more.

Perhaps taste is one of the ways the invisible necessity of desire begins reaching toward physical destiny.

Because when Venus places a value inside us—this blue, this form, this quality of movement, this impossible relationship between softness and stone—it is still only inward. It is a summons without a body.

The Fates may hold the thread, but the maker must still take it up.

The maker becomes the instrument through which Venusian desire enters material reality.

This is the crossing-place where Ananke and the Moirai meet the human hand. The necessity is inward: the thing that must be pursued because it has become beautiful enough to command devotion. The weaving is outward: every choice, repetition, sacrifice, technical problem, abandoned method, changed material, and physical act through which that desire begins taking form.

And suddenly fate is not only something that happens to us.

Within the limited sphere of our hands, our attention, and our materials, fate is also something we participate in crafting.

Not because we are omnipotent. Not because desire guarantees fulfillment. But because every time we bring an inward value into matter, we alter the world that will be available to us and to others.

We make a new object. A new image. A new arrangement of color and form. A new vessel through which someone else may encounter beauty, recognition, grief, delight, or truth.

The Kingdom below aligns, however briefly, with the Kingdom above.

The invisible becomes tangible.

The stars enter clay.

Apprenticed to desire

To make a physical thing is to become apprenticed to this Venus.

Not the Venus of generic beauty, because there is no single Venusian beauty.

One maker’s Venus wants the polished, symmetrical, lucid, and almost impossibly refined. Another wants erosion, patina, the edge worn down by weather and handling. One wants luminous abundance, ornament multiplying across every available field. Another wants the quiet authority of almost nothing.

One seeks tenderness. Another, impact.

One is compelled by the classical body, another by the malformed, the haunted, the hybrid, the creature that seems to have crawled out of a dream and refuses to explain itself.

Venus does not dictate one aesthetic law to every maker.

She issues the particular law of value inside a particular life.

For me, that law often arrives as a deep blue.

Anthraquinone blue is the mother color of my palette. It appears in nearly everything I make, sometimes openly, sometimes buried beneath so many layers that no one looking at the finished painting would know it was there.

But I know.

Without it, the world of the painting often feels uninhabited.

This is not a decision I made for the sake of consistency. It is not branding. It is not a rational conclusion about what color will make my paintings recognizable.

It is closer to allegiance.

The blue keeps returning because I keep finding something inside it that I have not yet exhausted: night, sea-depth, storm, distance, sorrow, shelter, the bruised threshold before rain, melancholic romance.

It is not the only color I love. But it is one of the colors through which the world becomes most fully itself to me.

And perhaps every maker has some version of this.

A color. A pressure. A shape. A material. A subject. A scale. A quality of motion. A silence. A type of edge.

Something that may change its outward form over the years while retaining an inward continuity. A secret instruction.

This is what it means to be apprenticed to Venus.

She plants in us an image of value that we did not invent and cannot entirely explain, and then leaves us with the lifelong problem of incarnation.

How will you bring it here?

How will you take what exists only as longing, sensation, attraction, or half-glimpsed inward form and give it weight, texture, edge, temperature, and body?

Venus herself does not necessarily perform this labor. Her power lies not in force, but in attraction so complete that force begins organizing itself around her.

Mars may possess the heat to act, the courage to cut, the strength to strike, scrape, press, or alter matter. But Mars alone does not know what deserves to be made.

Mercury may possess method, calculation, dexterity, cunning, and the thousand technical adaptations by which an inward image can cross into form. But Mercury alone does not know which image is worthy of translation.

The Moon receives the entire affair into the breathing and fluctuating conditions of the body: stamina, habit, hunger, fatigue, mood, repetition, and the actual physical life through which a work must gestate.

But Venus issues the decree.

This color. This relationship. This world.

Build toward this.

She does not lift the hammer because the sovereign does not quarry the stone. She makes the imagined temple so necessary that the rest of the Court begins to labor.

Under this older philosophical framework, Venus becomes something like the final cause of physical action: the end toward which the work is secretly moving.

We do not cut, calculate, measure, mix, sand, polish, carve, revise, and repeat merely for the sake of remaining in motion. The toil is not the final destination. The technique is not the final destination. Even mastery is not the final destination.

The labor moves toward the moment when the object has entered concord. When the proportions settle. When the disparate materials begin breathing together. When grace arrives, and the hand finally understands that nothing more is required.

Then the work ceases. The maker steps back.

And Venus, who set the whole Court in motion, also grants the final rest: the pleasure of beholding, the sweetness of completion, the quiet permission to savor what has been made.

This, too, is part of her power.

She is not only the desire that begins the journey.

She is the delight waiting at its end.

Becoming more intimate with desire

This is part of what I study in the Creative Court Report.

Not simply your Venus sign, reduced to a few generalized preferences, but the actual condition and authority of Venus within your creative kingdom.

What has your Venus deemed worthy? What forms, materials, sensations, atmospheres, and standards of beauty have become necessary in you? Whose values are you serving when you make?

Does your Mars know how to act on Venus’s decree? Can Mercury discover a method capable of translating it? Can the Moon sustain the bodily conditions through which the vision must become real?

And where might you still be mistaking admiration for belonging—trying to make another person’s beauty because you have not yet learned to recognize the particular law of your own?

The Creative Court Report is a bespoke written study of these relationships: Venus, Mercury, Mars, and the Moon as the intimate working Court through which desire, skill, action, and embodiment meet the materials of the Earth. It is designed to help you understand not only what is beautiful to you, but what your entire creative process requires in order to carry that beauty into form.

There are 7 reports remaining at the founding rate of $197 before the price moves to $247.

Commission Your Creative Report

The end of (today’s) thread

This is why I have struggled to find a doorway large enough for Venus.

She does not remain politely in the chamber we assigned her.

Follow beauty backward and it opens into perception. Follow perception backward and it opens into value. Follow value deeply enough and it becomes desire.

Follow desire across years of attention, choice, labor, pleasure, sacrifice, failure, and return, and it begins to look very much like fate.

Until suddenly we find ourselves again before that astonishing old hymn, looking at Aphrodite not as decoration at the edge of destiny, but as the dark, sea-born power from whom Necessity arises.

The one who places the image within us.

The one who turns toward the Fates and says:

Spin the thread here.

Around this blue.

This body.

This longing.

This impossible thing asking to be made.

And then turns toward us…

Places the thread into our hands...

And waits.

From my paint-drenched heart to yours,

P.S.

It’s clear from this letter, reduced to one third of its original length, that Venus cannot be contained in a single email.

There may be an entire interactive workshop here—something participatory and hands-on, devoted to desire, taste, aesthetic fate, creative devotion, and the forms that have been asking to enter the world through us.

If you feel the pull of that, reply and tell me. I am listening.

Before we begin, a quick reminder: the Creative Court Report is still open.

I released 25 reports at the founding rate of $197, and more than half have already been claimed. There are now only 12 spots left at that price.

After those 12 are gone, the report will move to its standard rate of $247, simply because each one is a deeply bespoke written study and quite a lot of work.

So if you’ve been thinking about commissioning one, now is the time.

Commission Your Creative Report

Today I want to introduce the next member of the Creative Court: Mars.

If Mercury is the clever hand, then Mars is what gets the hand moving at all.

And I do mean moving.

Mars, Kinesis, and Horme

In the Hellenistic tradition, Mars is not only about war, conflict, iron, or fire in the dramatic sense we tend to associate with him often. He was also connected to the older philosophical ideas of kinesis and horme.

Very simply: motion and impulse.

The body crossing the threshold into action.

The ancient astrologers often described Mars through force, heat, cutting, boldness, speed, severance, impact, physical labor, and what Valens called the “sudden start.” Ptolemy describes Mars as active, eager, headstrong, full of velocity. In medieval astrology, Abu Ma’shar links Mars to the “animal power” — that instinctive force that moves the limbs and sends heat through the blood.

Which is to say: Mars is not merely aggression.

Mars is the motive force.

Mars is the part of the soul that says, enough planning. Move now.

That matters a great deal when we are talking about physical makers.

Because in craft, Mars is often the one who performs generative action.

He cuts, and something can finally be shaped. He scrapes, and something hidden emerges. He applies pressure, and the material yields. He risks spoiling one version so a (potentially) better version can come forward.

This is why the older texts also connect Mars to what were called the crafts of iron and fire: blacksmithing, metalwork, carving, masonry, labor with hard materials, trades that require friction, impact, pressure, heat, severing, endurance, and force.

The astrologers of times past understood that the act of creation is not always soft or palatable.

To make a cabinet, wood must be chopped and sanded. To carve stone, the surface must be struck. To sew, cloth must be cut. To paint, the untouched white field must be broken. To sculpt, the outer mass must be destroyed so the form within can emerge.

Mars governs that threshold.

He is the courage to alter matter.

He is the willingness to ruin pristine blankness so that something else may emerge.

He is the gardener who prunes in order that new blooms can grow.

He is the surgeon who removes the broken and infected so that we may heal and grow into health.

Cutting/severing/incising isn’t just an act of destruction: it can be incredibly life giving.

And if Mercury tells us something about method, dexterity, and the hand’s problem-solving intelligence, then Mars tells us something about momentum.

What gets you into motion. What overcomes inertia. What kind of force helps you act. What kind of pressure kills the work instead.

This has become one of the most helpful ways for me to think about creative practice, because you can have beautiful ideas, genuine taste, and real skill — and still be unable to begin.

You can know exactly what you want to make and still remain at rest.

That is often a Mars challenge.

Giving the finger to what’s “proper”, once again

My own Mars has taught me this rather bluntly.

I have Mars in Taurus, in detriment, and it is angular. It also rules my 6th house, which in traditional astrology is known as the house of apprenticeship, labor, and the things we must toil at in order to become skillful.

So again, much like Mercury (whom I wrote about last time), we are dealing with a planet in my chart that does not behave in the most standard or socially legible way. (Nevermind that every artist you read about is 100% a proudly certified weirdo doing things their own bizarre little way.)

But it’s imperative we address the friction between what we’re told we should do, and what is instinctually ours.

Because when you have a planet that is challenged, or idiosyncratic, or operating outside the script people expect, you are often told — subtly and directly — that the way you function is not quite right.

Not proper. Not efficient. Not respectable enough. Not how it is done.

If you internalize that too deeply, it can kill your momentum stone cold dead.

That has certainly been true of Mars, for me.

Mars in Taurus is not a quick, sharp, elegant little blade in my life. It does not want to move fast just for the sake of speed. It needs rhythm. It needs contact. It needs a bodily sense of pleasure. It needs beauty worth pursuing. It needs to feel the material.

And perhaps most importantly, it needs motivation to arise from an instinctive, somatic place.

For me, that has meant that I cannot sustain a practice through methods that feel overly delicate, overcontrolled, or hyper-technical, even if I am capable of doing them.

When I first began trying to recover my art practice as an adult, I assumed the problem was discipline. I thought I needed to learn the “right” way. So I threw myself into highly technical modes of drawing — repetitive, careful, measured, conventional. The sort of thing that looks very proper from the outside.

And I could do it.

That was not the issue.

The issue was that I hated the process.

The more I forced myself into methods that worked against my instincts, the less desire I had to make art at all. I became less motivated, less certain in my mark-making, less willing to return.

This was another moment that again revealed and emphasized an essential insight into the needs of a maker’s process:

For many people, the problem is not discipline. It is fit.

It is a mismatch between the kind of momentum their own Mars can generate and the kind of motion they are trying to force themselves into.

What this looks like in my studio

Another key to gaining momentum in my creative practice again was understanding that my Mars needed permission (or rather, needed to be freed) to create beauty in a way that was a bit abrasive. A bit rough. A bit destructive.

For years I thought I hated charcoal.

But it turned out that I did not hate charcoal.

I hated being taught charcoal in a way that deadened me.

Then I saw a few artists working with it completely differently. They were massing tone onto the paper, erasing whole passages back out, sanding through layers, pushing and pulling the image as if they were sculpting rather than drawing. It wasn’t delicate slowly built layers of tone precisely applied into a technical framework that had been drawn previously. It was more like… conjuring a picture from a foggy gestalt, almost like a whirling dervish.

That was the first time any kind of drawing medium felt truly alive in my hands.

Or perhaps more truthfully: it stopped feeling like drawing and started feeling like evocation.

The first time I really let myself work that way, I had had a terrible week and I was furious about something (yes, very Mars). I needed to get the energy out of my body. So I locked myself in a room where no one could see me being strange, put on loud music, taped paper to the wall, and made an unbelievable mess.

I threw charcoal dust at the paper. I ground charcoal into it. I used sandpaper to abrade passages back to light. I moved around like I was doing some combination of painting, dancing, and fighting.

It did not look refined. It did not look “proper”. If anyone had seen me, I suspect they would have thought I was destroying the paper (I kinda was).

And yet by the end of it, I had made the first charcoal landscape in my adult life that I genuinely loved.

That experience taught me something crucial about my own Mars:

My momentum depends on directness. On contact. On sensation. On allowing the body to help solve the image. On embracing mark-making that may look rough or strange in process. On finding beauty through friction rather than trying to eliminate friction entirely. On trusting my body’s inbuilt intelligence to improvise an image, rather than plan it until it’s dead before arriving.

That is Mars in a Venus sign, at least in my life.

Beauty, yes.

But beauty through abrasion. Beauty through pressure. Beauty through contact. Beauty through the willingness to disturb the surface so form can emerge.

And I think many makers have some version of this waiting to be understood and embraced within themselves.

Some Mars need rules, drills, exact repetition, and training. Some need emotional current. Some need privacy and instinct. Some need to glide and slip into a result. Some need challenge, speed, or boldness. Some need pleasure in order to sustain effort. Some need to be allowed to make a mess before they can make anything beautiful.

When Mars is challenged, you may spend years assuming your natural engine is a problem to be corrected.

But in my experience, that is very often where the living force of the work actually is.

You can not keep a making practice alive by becoming less yourself.

You keep it alive by learning how your own momentum works — and refusing to confuse difference with failure.

Ready to understand how best to stoke the fire of your unique motivation?

This is exactly the kind of terrain the Creative Court Report is meant to illuminate.

Each report is a custom written PDF where I look closely at the four immediate Creative Court members most involved in physical making (Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Moon) and the way they cooperate, contradict, compensate, or fall out of rhythm in your chart.

The report is designed to help you understand your process with more precision and more curiosity, so you can stop wasting energy trying to perform someone else’s making process and begin building a practice that is more workable, more sustainable, and more truly your own.

The point of the report is not to tell you whether you are talented enough, serious enough, or destined for fame.

It is to answer the questions that matter in the actual life of a maker:

• Why do I freeze, stall out, or abandon work?

• What kinds of methods genuinely suit me, and which ones quietly kill momentum?

• What does my body need in order to keep creating?

• What part of my process is truly mine, and what part have I borrowed from someone else’s idea of seriousness?

As a reminder, I opened 25 reports at the founding rate of $197, and there are now only 12 left before the price rises to $247.

If you’ve been circling this, I would begin there.

Commission Your Creative Report

I’ll keep writing about the members of the Creative Court in my coming letters, because there is still more to say about the multifaceted inner workings of making, and the strange contradictions that shape a life in materials.

But for now, I wanted to leave you here:

with Mars as the sudden start,
the appetite that breaks hesitation,
the heat that changes the state of things,
the blade that cuts so form can emerge,
the courage to risk the pristine surface,
the hand that does not apologize for contact,
the force that says: enough thinking — move.

From my paint-soaked heart to yours,

Today I’m opening the first round of something new: the Creative Court Report.

It’s a bespoke written astrology reading for people who make things with their hands (painters, drawers, ceramicists, print-makers, textile artists, anyone whose work lives in materials) and for those of you who keep circling that kind of making without quite letting yourself begin.

It exists to answer one question that your astrological chart is unusually good at answering: how does your creative process actually work, so you can stop fighting yourself and build a practice you can actually return to.

If you read my last letter, then you know this work grew out of months of studying the astrology charts of painters and other physical makers, trying to understand not fame or career in the abstract, but practice. The actual mechanics of making. What helps someone keep showing up. What tangles them. What kinds of rhythms, frictions, contradictions, material instincts, and bodily conditions shape the life of the studio.

That is what this report is for.

This report will not answer if you are talented, if you can make this a career, if you will become famous, or if you are a “real” artist (I am suspicious of any framework that tries to separate “real artists” from everyone else for so many reasons).

Instead, it asks the questions that actually matter when the work has gone quiet or life has gotten hard:

• How do I actually make?

• Why do I keep freezing, abandoning, or second-guessing myself?

• What part of my process is truly mine, and what part have I borrowed from someone else’s idea of seriousness?

• What does my body need in order to keep creating?

Commission Your Creative Court Report

Rather than describe the report, let me show you the kind of story that unfolds within it.

Because Mercury is currently retrograde, it feels right to begin with the first member of the Creative Court: Mercury.

Meet Mercury: Every craft in which the Intellect is joined with the Hand

I’ve been thinking about Mercury a great deal lately, in part because Mercury retrograde is often a time of returning. Returning to old methods, old questions, old frustrations, old studies. Going back over what we thought we understood and realizing there is more there. Or noticing, with some humility, that we may have built an entire process on an assumption that was never really true for us in the first place.

Mercury matters quite a lot when we are speaking about physical making.

In modern astrology, Mercury gets flattened so often into intellect, language, communication, analysis. Which is not wrong, exactly. But it is incomplete.

In traditional astrology, Mercury is also deeply involved in craft.

Al-Biruni describes Mercury as the ruler of “every craft in which the intellect is joined with the hand.”

Vettius Valens also described Mercury as governor of “displays of skill” and the fine, intricate movements of the hands.

These phrases have stayed with me because they name something precise about physical making.

Painters, sculptors, printmakers, textile artists, ceramicists, florists—so many forms of making depend upon the hands and arms. Upon the strange and intimate coordination between perception and pressure, between vision and dexterity, between what you sense inwardly and what your body can actually do with the materials in front of it.

In Abu Ma’shar’s philosophy, the soul’s deepest desires and thoughts are invisible, existing in some abstract airy place. Mercury’s sacred task is to take these unformed, silent thoughts and physically actualize them in the material world.

Mercury is the spirit who dances between the threshold of idea and tangible reality.

As Valens put it, Mercury’s role is to make the hands “clever.” The relationship you have with Mercury is the difference between a hand that merely holds a tool and a hand that knows exactly how to make that tool dance.

Mercury is not only the one who learns the craft, but they are the one who helps translate it. They show us something about method, hand-eye coordination, technical intelligence, problem-solving, adaptation, and the little flashes of workaround ingenuity that let a person keep making when the obvious route is blocked.

When the “proper” method feels dead in the hands

I have been thinking about this especially hard because my own method is something I more or less had to pioneer for myself.

And what interests me is not simply that my chart shows that in some abstract way. It is that my chart shows, with uncomfortable precision, the contradiction between what I thought I ought to do and what actually works for me.

They happen when a person is trying to work through methods that do not belong to their own craft-intelligence.

That was certainly true for me.

I have a very strong Saturn, and because it is in Capricorn, there is a part of me that genuinely admires rigor, tradition, seriousness, and the kinds of exacting methods that look beautifully built from the outside. I am impressed by highly disciplined work, meticulous work. The kind of painting that takes hundreds of hours and seems to have passed through an immense gate of technical correctness.

And if I put my mind to it, I can make things that way.

But the truth is that I do not enjoy it enough to build a living practice around it.

That distinction is key in a creative practice.

When I first tried to return to painting as an adult, I assumed I needed to learn the “right” way. I went through vigorous classes. I tried to do things in respectable sequence. I thought that if I could just submit myself to the proper discipline, then perhaps I could become the kind of artist I believed I should be.

What I found instead was frustration.

Could I imitate what was being taught? Yes. Could I get results that looked competent? Yes.

Did I enjoy the process? Not at all. Did it make me want to come back the next day? No.

And for a while that was devastating, because I mistook that deadness for incapacity.

By some grace, the truth was much kinder and more nuanced than that.

Because alongside all of that pressure toward correctness, there was another reality: my body could no longer tolerate the medium I loved most. I had been an oil painter as a teenager, but as an adult I cannot be around solvents, and even “natural alternatives” cause problems for me. And beyond the chemistry of it, oil painting asks for a kind of domestic stability and spatial ease that my life has not had.

So there I was, pulled in several directions at once.

A part of me wanted rigor, tradition, and proper pathways.

My body was saying no to the medium I had originally mastered.

And my Mercury—which is retrograde, in a Saturn sign, and in a catalytic relationship with a rather unruly Mars—was not especially interested in playing by the rules.

That last part turned out to matter quite a lot.

Unable to tolerate oil paints or solvents, I have pioneered a water-based mixed-media method using watercolor, gouache, and thickening mediums to create depth, body, and texture. I work with cloth, knives, and stiff brushes, wiping paint in and out of the surface until the image begins to emerge physically, almost as if I am conjuring the weather onto the surface.

It is completely at odds with the way watercolor is usually taught.

And because Mercury retrograde does have a way of moving backwards, I often discovered things by instinct first and only later turned around to understand them. I would stumble into a process or a tool combination that gave me the result I wanted, and only afterward go back and research what exactly I had done.

It is indirect. Idiosyncratic. Utterly heretical.

It is also the first thing that really worked.

Not just in the sense that the paintings became stronger, though they did. More importantly, I actually wanted to keep doing it. I returned to it because it felt alive.

In fact, it is a bit like child-like play, or being a mad scientist. It felt like something in me and something in the materials had finally stopped arguing long enough to learn how to dance together.

What this looks like in my studio right now

This same pattern is showing up for me again even now.

The past couple of weeks I’ve been a bit in a funk. I haven’t felt well, and I also got too far into my head around painting (a Mercury issue!). Which is usually a sign that I need a bridge back into the work rather than more pressure.

For me, that bridge has often been charcoal.

Not drawing in the conventional sense. I don’t get much life from highly constructed graphite drawing or atelier-style exercises, even though I can do them. Drawing that way feels too rigid and technical in my hands, making me squirm and want to run away.

Painting, for me, is much more… immediate and somatic. More atmospheric. More about shape, tone, and slowly finding the image from a larger field and helping it emerge.

Charcoal lets me work that way.

I can mass in tone first, erase back into it, sand passages down, layer thickly on top… Extremely similar to the way in which I paint, rather than like a precise drawing instrument. Even in charcoal, I am still working in a way that is slightly sideways, building the image through atmosphere and revision rather than through tidy construction.

These sketches from the weekend are a good example of that.

That, to me, is also Mercury.

Not just skill in the abstract, but the hand finding its own route. The hand discovering which tools and methods actually let it think and problem-solve actively, through practice.

This is exactly the kind of pattern the Creative Court Report maps — details and founding pricing below, or commission yours here.

When the problem is not discipline, but fit

I suspect many of you know this feeling, even if you have never named it this way.

You may be someone who can follow the method and still feel dead in your hands.

You may be someone who keeps buying classes or tools or systems that look beautiful from the outside, only to abandon them once you try to live inside them.

You may be someone whose best work appears only after you stop trying to be proper and begin improvising.

You may be someone with a body, schedule, budget, or life situation that does not permit the idealized version of an artist’s process, and so you keep wondering whether that disqualifies you.

I do not think it does.

I think very often what we call inconsistency, lack of discipline, or doing it wrong is actually a mismatch between the method we are trying to use and the way our own craft-intelligence moves.

Within this, Mercury tells us something about how the hand actively problem solves…

• How it adapts to the body’s limits.

• How it negotiates with materials.

• How it finds another route when the obvious one is closed.

• How it carries an image from the inward world into contact with the earth.

And because these contradictions are so specific from chart to chart, this is exactly the kind of thing a bespoke report can clarify in a way generic advice usually cannot.

One person’s Mercury may need order, precision, and slow technical repetition. Another may need mess, experimentation, and room to discover backwards. One person may be fighting a standard that belongs to Saturn. Another may be dealing with a Mars that rushes the hand before the technique is ready. Another may have a beautiful eye and genuine devotion, but need practical support around the body’s rhythms before the work can become consistent.

What the Creative Court Report is meant to clarify

This is the kind of terrain the Creative Court Report is meant to illuminate.

Each report is a custom written PDF where I look closely at the four immediate Creative Court members most involved in physical making (Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Moon) and the way they cooperate, contradict, compensate, or fall out of rhythm in your chart.

The report is designed to help you understand your process with more precision and more curiosity, so you can stop wasting energy trying to perform someone else’s seriousness and begin building a practice that is more workable, more sustainable, and more truly your own.

If you’ve been calling it a discipline problem, it might be a fit problem. That’s what this report is for.

Once you commission a report, I’ll ask for your birth date, time, and place (if your birth time is unknown or fuzzy, there’s still meaningful work we can do!).

You’ll also be sent a short questionnaire about your creative practice. After I receive your questionnaire back, your written report will be sent to you as a PDF within two weeks.

I’m opening 25 reports at a founding rate of $197.

This first round is priced lower because you’re helping me refine the form. After these 25, the report moves to its standard price of $247.

Commission Your Creative Court Report

I’ll be writing more about each of these planets, because there is still so much more to say about the multi-layered reality of being a physical creator, full of contradictions, revelations, and hidden gifts.

But today I wanted to begin here:

with Mercury as the clever hand,
the translator,
the workaround artist,
the clever trickster that figures out how to keep making even when the first road closes.

From my paint-soaked heart to yours,

Back in April, I told you that if I wrote here again, it would not be as a brand.

I said it would be under my own name, as a whole person. I meant that then, and I mean it now.

Which means I have to begin with a truth that is rather humbling, but is true all the same.

My family has done everything they can to carry us while I’ve been sick. They have looked for work, taken what they could get, and tried very hard to build a life where I could step away from earning and simply recover.

It has not been enough.

For the past eight years, I have been the primary breadwinner in my family. That reality did not disappear just because my body needed me to stop. Even if stopping is necessary, my family’s material life has not softened around that necessity. We are back in a financially precarious position, which means I need to come back to work in some way while also tending to my body.

So to be entirely transparent, that is one part of why I am here.

The other part has to do with what has happened to me, artistically, since February.

I think I had a fairly romantic idea of what this period of my life would look like in relation to painting. When we moved to the gorgeous Dingle peninsula, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to live out the ideal version of what I thought my creative process would look like. As a landscape painter, I have always wanted to walk the land, spend long stretches of time with it, and let a place work on me slowly until I understand something of its mood and atmosphere well enough to paint from that encounter.

That had been a real part of my process for years. Before my surgery in 2024 (which put me on bedrest for 6 months) I used to go on two to four hour walks nearly every day. It was one of the core ways I met the world.

But the truth is that I have not been able to do that for some time now. And in this current (now going on 6 months) flare-up, I am lucky if I can get out every couple of weeks for even a short walk, with a great deal of sitting and resting involved. My radius has become very small.

As my fellow chronically-ill friend puts it, I have been rather bed-tethered. I cannot be too far from my bed, or from a place where I can easily lie down, regulate temperature, and try to steady a body that has become absurdly sensitive to the slightest environmental shift.

Also, when I first arrived here, before the flare forced me into bed for weeks at a time, I was painting the ocean. After five years of being haunted by dreams of crashing waves against cliffs, here I was finally living next to crashing waves against cliffs. Naturally I was drawn to painting these experiences that have shaped my dreams and are now the literal world I find myself a part of.

And yet, despite the ocean being only a 30-minute walk away, the time on bedrest has shifted my focus entirely. I’ve spent the last several months in my studio, making art from bed. My primary view of the world comes from the studio skylight.

A beautiful one.

So while so much of my expected life collapsed inward, another world opened above me.

I have spent an almost absurd amount of time watching weather move through that window. Cloudbanks. Sudden brightness. Storm light. The bruised underbellies of evening. And because this illness is so erratic, sleep is often hard to come by, so I have also had a rather unparalleled view of the night sky. The moon. The stars. That vast black distance pricked through with light.

And somewhere in all of that, I became completely captured by the sky, and it changed my practice.

Looking through that skylight, surprisingly, also brought me back to vigorously studying and practicing astrology.

Back to astrology?

I believe I am not alone when I say that especially right now, what I need in my spiritual life are practical tools that help me ground into the moment and navigate the life I find myself in. I need spiritual tools that help me understand what is actually happening and how to respond to it with more honesty, more self-acceptance, and more precision.

What I found myself doing, from bed, was looking at the charts of painters and other physical art-makers.

Because my practice is now largely dictated by illness, and because I react with acute sensitivity to the environment around me, my way of making art has become dissident to the popular picture we are often sold of the artist’s life.

Not just because I am often painting in bed. But because I can’t use my medium of choice. Oil paint and solvents cause my body to have severe reactions. Instead, I have had to build a painting practice out of materials used in radical, rebellious, and occasionally downright heretical ways.

I will write more about that in future emails. For now, what matters is that it left me feeling uncategorizable, and for a while, deeply unsure whether I belonged among the artists I admired.

I had spent enough time looking at what other living contemporary artists were doing, and feeling more than a little lonely and insecure. Where do I belong? Landscape artists, at least the ones I admire, spend significant time in the environments they paint. None of these painters use their materials the way I do. Am I doing this all wrong? Does this make me an imposter or less of a “real” artist?

And yet, the art I’ve been making is the best art I’ve ever made as an adult. The more I am committed to my extremely strange idiosyncrasies, the more art I find myself making… and the more satisfying the process is for me. And for the first time in my adult life, I keep consistently returning to it.

Which is what led me down a rabbit hole of research into the astrological charts of painters.

Discovering an astrological framework for physical art practice

I didn’t start looking at the natal charts of painters because I was interested in the indicators of art being a career (there is no single one!), or the markers of how someone becomes well-known for their art. And not even because I was looking for some tidy signature that would separate “real artists” from everyone else (I am suspicious of any framework that tries to separate “real artists” from everyone else for so many reasons).

I was looking to understand practice. The actual process of physical art-making, and how we find a rhythm that truly empowers our ability to create.

What shows up in the chart when someone is called into a physical relationship with materials over and over again. What kinds of patterns emerge in the lives of people who return to paint, clay, fiber, texture, image, object. What the chart seems to say about rhythm, repetition, friction, appetite, stamina, somatic intelligence, sensory orientation, taste, personal perception, inspiration, and the pursuit to create driven by divine discontent.

Imagine if I had bought into the idea that I’m failing or not a “real” artist because what I do isn’t something I’ve seen in other makers before. Or that whatever artist I might have been under other conditions was not available to me now and I should just stop trying.

Astrology, approached this way, became a corrective to that despair.

Studying the charts of physical art-makers was unexpectedly affirming. Their processes varied enormously, of course. But there were clear and recurring patterns around practice, embodiment, rhythm, friction, taste, sensory life, and the ways a person returns to making. There was far more individual idiosyncrasy than the culture of art instruction seems to allow.

And it helped me look at my own chart with clearer eyes.

It helped me accept, rather than question, my own idiosyncrasies.

In fact, the only differentiation I can find between lifelong artists and those who give up, is that lifelong artists embrace and nurture their idiosyncrasies, rather than fighting them, hiding them, or trying to force themselves into a shape of practice that is not theirs.

I’d even say that what we may label as “wrongness” in our creative lives is often the precise way our creativity actually works.

During my research, this quote from Georgia O’Keeffe kept ringing like a bell:

“I grew up pretty much as everybody else grows up and one day seven years ago found myself saying to myself—I can’t live where I want to—I can’t go where I want to—I can’t do what I want to—I can’t even say what I want to—.

School and things that painters have taught me even keep me from painting as I want to.

I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted as that seemed to be the only thing I could do that didn’t concern anybody but myself that was nobody’s business but my own.”

In my own case, the natal chart only confirmed what hindsight has shown me many times over: I do my best work when I embrace being heretical. When I stop trying to be “proper”. When I stop trying to imitate forms of seriousness that do not belong to me. When I find the live wire in the process and follow it, even if it makes the whole thing look unusual from the outside. When I prioritize somatic desires over what makes logical sense.

These recognitions have been quietly life-giving.

Because what I need from art-making now is not performance, or even some form of escape.

It is comfort. It is sanctuary. It is a way of coming home to my own life while I am still living it.

Astrology has become a tool for helping me continue a physical art-making practice when the world is *waves arms around wildly* more than a bit chaotic and unpredictable.

And after helping friends and family with this framework over the last few months, I think it’s time to share it more broadly.

(To be clear: what this does not mean is a return to the old shape of work that helped drive me into the ground. I’ll be trying on a few new ways of working that allow my sick body to exist without making myself more sick.)

Something new, something old: returning as both an artist and an astrologer

So if it feels fitting that as Mercury retrogrades in my 9th house, bringing old studies and old devotions back across my desk, I find myself returning to astrology too.

More specifically, as an astrologer devoted to helping physical art-makers understand and nurture their creative process.

I’m excited to share more of the framework that I’ve been developing, utilizing astrology as a tool for identifying and honing an art practice. It will be a joy to share this with you next.

So I think that is part of what this space is going to hold now.

Painting and the studio, most certainly. The raw reality of creating, the beauty and warts alike. The weather passing through the skylight, and the enchanting night sky. The strange clarity that enforced stillness can sometimes bring.

And also astrology, in this more practical and grounded form: as a tool of self-recognition, self-acceptance, and understanding our own inner mechanics well enough to free the creative faculties we actually have, rather than wasting our creative lives trying to perform someone else’s process and wondering why it doesn’t work for us.

I’m still operating on chronic-illness time, painting and working from bed. And I will be making some paid offerings out of this work, because I have to feed my family.

That’s how I will show up wholly myself, rather than a polished brand trying to influence you into the image of a life that does not exist.

I hope you’ll continue to walk by my side on this new leg of the journey.

From my paint-soaked heart to yours,

What we are really talking about here is not a minor block or a cute question about whether one is “creative.” It is something many of us have suffered under for years.

And if we really want a creative life, I think we have to give the subject the gravity it deserves.

It asks us to go down into the roots and reconsider what creativity is, why it matters, and what kind of life becomes possible when we stop treating it as decoration and begin treating it as a way of being alive.

We have to go deeper than the surface-level answers and inherited clichés, because creativity is not just a hobby or temperament.

It is a mode of participation, a philosophy of attention, a way of being in relationship with life that many of us have been taught to mistrust.

So with that…

I think a great deal of creative life gets lost in the distance between that phrase and the image many of us carry of what art is supposed to be.

I know it did for me.

For a long time, I was trying to make my way toward a definition of art I had never consciously chosen. I had simply absorbed it. Bits of school. Bits of the internet. Bits of biography and film and cultural atmosphere. The long afterimage of Art (yes, with a capital A).

It all gathered into a sort of invisible atmosphere around me. I absorbed it before I examined it, and by the time I started looking directly at it, it had already organized a great deal of my shame.

What it implied, very quietly and very effectively, was that art was a special kind of event. It needed the right setup, the right materials, the right posture, the right conceptual seriousness, the right degree of visible devotion. It needed to be justifiable. It needed to be worth the trouble. And if what emerged did not look sufficiently refined or moving or important, then perhaps it had never really been art in the first place.

Before I knew how to question it, it had already trained my body. The page felt watched. The brush felt watched. The whole enterprise felt a little overlit and interrogative, and a little punitive, as if anything I made would immediately be brought before some imagined panel and asked to justify itself.

That kind of thing works on us more deeply than we admit.

It is not only an idea in the mind. It enters the muscles. It changes the breath. It narrows the hand. It can make the act itself feel unpleasant before we have even begun.

The body knows when something has turned into a tribunal. It knows when a page is no longer a page but a tiny courtroom.

I think many of us are carrying around some half-formed but tyrannical image of what counts as creativity, what counts as art, what counts as seriousness, what counts as a real artist. We carry it into the room without realizing we are carrying it. And then we wonder why the room feels hostile.

Going back to the roots

At some point I realized I could not get free by trying harder inside the same definition. I had to back up and ask more primitive questions.

What is art, actually?

What is creativity?

And why do I care about this so much in the first place?

The words themselves ended up helping me.

One ancestral root associated with art points toward joining. Bringing into relation. Linking things. Arranging them in contact. I love that. It feels much older and truer than the modern image many of us inherit. A hand joins with a brush. Pigment joins with water. Water joins with paper. A body joins with a room. A cook joins with heat and salt and herbs and timing. A dancer joins with gravity, momentum, floor, music, breath. A writer joins with language, rhythm, memory, the pressure of a sentence trying to arrive. A person joins with an idea, or perhaps rather is joined by one.

And the old root behind create goes back toward growth. To grow. To bring forth. The Latin creare still carries that older biological feeling in it: produce, bring forth, make grow. (This is the root of words like Ceres, goddess of agriculture, or Crescent Moon, the growing moon phase.) Crops. Birth. Increase. Emergence. A kind of nurturing.

Art as joining.

Create as bringing forth.

When I hold those together, creativity starts to feel much less like talent and much more like a quality of participation. A kind of nurturing attention. An attuned way of entering relationship with what is in front of us so that something can begin to emerge.

That is the cleanest definition I have found for myself:

Creativity is the nurturing attention and participation we bring to our relationship with life.

Art is what emerges from that joining.

That may sound abstract when put so compactly, but I do not mean it abstractly at all. I mean it in the most ordinary, tactile, nearby way possible.

Tea ceremony helps me understand this.

A tea master is not making “art” simply because the gestures look graceful from the outside, though they often do. The art is in the relationship. With the leaf. With the water. With the temperature. With timing, vessel, atmosphere, hand, sequence, guest. Even the cup matters, as every surface can change the quality of the tea. Clay is not porcelain. Porcelain is not wood. The thickness of the lip matters. The way the vessel holds heat matters. The weight in the hand matters. The tea itself changes according to all of these things. The moment changes.

And if the tea is bad, no amount of elegant performance saves it.

It makes visible something I think we often forget: artfulness is not a decorative layer laid over the top of life. It is the quality of the relationship brought to the thing itself.

Leaf + water + heat + hand + vessel + time.

Joined with enough patience, care, and attunement that a third thing emerges.

Not merely tea, but this tea. This small atmosphere. This moment that would not have existed in the same way had the relation been different. Something ordinary has been met so fully that it becomes vivid.

When the mundane becomes more alive

I am truly not interested in arguing about whether every such thing should be granted the official category of Art. I do not care much for policing the border.

What interests me is how much artfulness is available in ordinary life when we meet it with enough attention and care.

A meal can be artful. A room can be artful. Gardening can be artful. Mending can be artful. The way someone braids bread, folds cloth, arranges flowers in an old jar, pours tea, chops herbs, lays out three objects on a table so the whole room suddenly feels more alive… all of that matters to me.

Not because I want to dissolve all distinctions into a sweet soup of “everything is art,” but because I think many of us have accepted definitions so narrow and so overprofessionalized that we have exiled ourselves from one of the most direct forms of participation we have.

And participation, more and more, feels like the important word.

We are always already in relationship with something. With weather. With materials. With rooms. With our bodies. With the time of day. With the life we have and the one we imagine we ought to have.

Creativity begins to become palpable when that relationship is met with attuned, nurturing participation; when we do not merely pass by, consume, evaluate, or force, but enter. Stay. Listen. Respond. Help something come into form.

That attunement does not fall from the sky fully formed. It deepens through return.

And that, I think, is where a lot of us get caught.

We talk about practice as if the hard part were discipline in the moral sense. But I have come to suspect the harder and more honest question is much closer to the body: will I want to come back?

Because attunement grows through repeated contact. Through returning to the material, the gesture, the rhythm, the medium, the process. Through staying close long enough for responsiveness to sharpen. What looks like talent from the outside is so often a kind of intimacy. The hand has come back enough times that it begins to know. The eye has looked long enough that it begins to notice more. The body has repeated the movement enough that it no longer has to panic its way through the action.

Practice matters because return matters.

And return matters because that is how attunement is built.

I learned this in a very backward way.

When I first tried to get back into painting as an adult, after many years away from it, I immediately made the whole thing unbearable. I felt I had lost time. I felt embarrassed by how much skill had gone dormant. I felt ashamed that I had not had formal atelier-style training and decided, with the kind of severity that often masquerades as seriousness, that I would correct this by becoming ruthlessly disciplined.

It was, in retrospect, a terrible idea.

I went into it with a clenched body and a very small window of tolerance for uncertainty, failure, or even perceived failure. I wanted to prove that I was serious. I wanted to become excellent quickly. I wanted to live up to my former self, my admired artists, my ambitions, all at once.

I had not yet distinguished between admiring someone and whether I truly wanted and enjoyed doing the same thing myself. I deeply admired hyper-representational painters, specifically botanical painters. People who could render a leaf or a petal with astonishing accuracy and refinement. So I decided, with the strangely strong confidence present in people about to make themselves miserable, that I would train myself toward that.

What it felt like, in the body, was one giant grimace.

That is the truest phrase I have for it.

I sat down tense. I painted tense. I evaluated tense. I was trying so hard to represent what was in front of me correctly that I never once stopped to ask whether I liked the experience of doing it.

I was obsessed with the outcome. I cared only about whether the finished thing measured up to the ideal in my head. The process itself was full of anxiety, frustration, anticipation of failure, and a running current of self-criticism so relentless that it was often physically painful because I found myself bracing for impact.

Of course I started to avoid it.

We usually call this procrastination, but I have come to think that what we are often avoiding is anticipated bad feeling.

If the body expects dread, humiliation, frustration, self-judgment, futility, or the sharp sting of not measuring up, it becomes much harder to approach the thing… even if the thing is, in some deeper sense, genuinely beloved.

That was absolutely true for me.

The strange thing is that what saved me came from what, on the surface, looked like procrastination. I became obsessed with understanding my materials.

I started painting endless swatches of watercolor. Thousands of them, honestly. I wanted to know what each pigment would do. Why this PR101 from one paint maker behaved so differently from the same pigment number in another brand. Why one color granulated and another stained. How water changed everything. How different papers interacted with water and paint. How paint settled and bloomed into texture. How one wash dried lighter, another darker. How colors separated. How the chemistry of it all changed the result.

I loved it.

I loved the fascination of it. I loved the low stakes. I loved the way it felt to put paint to paper without also demanding that the paper prove my worth as an artist. I loved watching water move pigment around like weather. I loved seeing what would bloom, what would settle, what would edge, what would granulate, what would surprise me.

And because I loved it, I came back.

Again and again and again.

By the accidental grace of that return, I started acquiring the very skills I had been trying to bully myself into earlier. My brush handling and water control got better. My understanding of density, layering, paper, timing, and pigment behavior deepened. I was learning the mechanics and science of painting, but from inside fascination and play, rather than fear.

It taught me something I have had to learn over and over ever since: if I enjoy the process enough to return, attunement begins to grow.

If attunement grows, skill grows with it.

If skill grows, the work becomes more fluid, more instinctive, more intimate.

But none of that happens if the whole experience has been loaded with so much pressure that I dread the first step.

Making return possible

In the same vein of thought, another of the most crucial keys to unlocking me from my own self-imposed creative prison was, in a way, a bit of an accident.

Like many creative people trying to figure out how to get back to engaging the creative muscle, I thought that if I could find the perfect routine, everything would be fixed. Enter Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals books.

Yet rather than revealing the perfect pattern of habit I was hoping to find mirrored by several artists and makers as the one true way of creative living, what I discovered was much stranger, more individual, and often much less glamorous. Every time I read those books, I feel something in me unhook. Again and again, I met people whose methods were peculiar, body-led, highly specific to the individual, and often delightfully unreasonable.

What was important is that their lives were not organized around looking like creators. They were organized around making return possible.

Patricia Highsmith is one of the examples I think about most often. Not just because she was odd, though she absolutely was, and I mean that with real admiration. What struck me was the coherence of her oddness.

She hated the deadened moralism, the sterile puritanical virtuousness, around discipline. If writing began to feel like office work, duty, or some grim performance of virtue, the current broke. So she made different conditions. She would stay in bed with her manual typewriter beside her, surrounded by cigarettes, ashtrays, matches, coffee, and a pastry or sweet roll, and she would let herself drift into the work from inside that atmosphere of pleasure, of decadent permission.

She did not want the work to feel punitive. She wanted it to feel inviting enough to enter.

And then, famously, there were the snails. When she had to attend literary parties she loathed, she sometimes brought a handbag filled with lettuce and dozens of pet snails, simply to have something living to tend while enduring the ritual of public literary life. It is bizarre. It is funny. But beneath the comedy is a kind of seriousness I admire very much.

She was willing to shape the conditions under which she could remain herself and continue returning to the work.

That is the lesson I take from her.

Not that we should all imitate her rituals, or turn decadence into another performance standard. The point is much smaller and more useful than that.

If attunement depends on return, and return depends on whether the body can bear the process, then the conditions matter.

Atmosphere matters. Pleasure matters. Permission matters. Weirdness matters.

If something helps us come back honestly and repeatedly to the work, it is not frivolous.

This is a lesson that keeps unfolding for me.

There was a period not long after that where I started doing loose intuitive paintings in a sketchbook, often on paper not meant for that kind of painting at all. (Tomoe River paper! My love!) The paper buckled the moment it got wet. It crinkled, then the paint would pool and misbehave.

It made any attempt at tight realism immediately impossible, which turned out to be a gift. The paint made its own textures, its own blooms, its own atmospheric accidents. I had to work with what was happening instead of forcing the material to submit to some preconceived image.

That freedom was revelatory.

It felt less like shouldering my way into a painting and more like collaborating with something very much alive in front of me.

That distinction has become one of the defining ones in my creative life.

The way the brush feels in my hand matters enormously to me. It feels almost like an extension of my body. Not in some grand mystical sense, just in a direct, sensory way that is right, pleasurable, and true. I love the soft drag of it.

I love the way water media bloom and settle. I love how pigment can move like fog or sea mist or storm weather over a page. Looking back, that makes perfect sense, because I am a landscape painter. I am obsessed with atmosphere and light, distance and horizon. The way water moves. The way clouds gather. The quality of a place more than the individual objects inside it. My family jokes that I am always trying to get people to look up at the sky, at fog, at a distance horizon, at waves in a constant liquid movement of symphony.

Of course I paint the way I see things.

And when painting is going well (really going well) what I love most has almost nothing to do with the finished painting.

It is difficult to describe without sounding slippery, because I still don’t have precise language for it. It is almost like a trance. An out-of-body feeling, but in the most grounding way. Sometimes cooking gives me this. Occasionally a very good run. Often writing a song or a poem can take me here.

But painting is the clearest and most direct doorway to this state, for me. I settle in. The brush touches water. The sound changes. The breathing slows without me deciding to slow it. The jaw releases. The ordinary hard edges of my self-consciousness begin to dissolve. I am no longer standing over myself, monitoring, correcting, narrating. I disappear and come back completely whole.

That is the best language I have.

I disappear and come back completely whole.

That is what I am after every single time.

Which is why I have become so stubborn about process.

Where aliveness actually lives

A finished painting can be lovely, sometimes, when it works out. (Most painters will tell you that’s not as common as it appears to be on Instagram.) I am glad when one works. I am glad when something comes together in a way that feels true.

But the outcome is not what makes me return. The outcome is a kind of… a stopping point.

The process is where life happens. The process is where aliveness is actually felt. It is where the body joins the world closely enough to forget itself for a little while and then remember itself more deeply than before.

Jeff Buckley once said:

“Everybody knows what it’s like to create an artistic moment, a so-called artistic moment, because it’s really just heightened humanism, it’s a heightened human language. If you’ve spent a night making love, you know exactly what it means to strip your ego down, where you are there expressing yourself wordlessly, collaborating on a moment that has an energy about it that is replenishing or completely inspirational in a way you could never imagine. That’s the way art really is.”

I love this quote because it catches something so many definitions miss. The stripping down of ego. The wordless collaboration. The replenishment. The way something emerges through a meeting rather than through a monologue of control. That, to me, is much closer to the truth of art than the solemn images we inherit about correctness and prestige and legitimacy.

Children know this long before they know how to explain it.

A child draws because drawing is delicious. Because color is irresistible. Because mud, glue, crayons, scissors, paint, song, movement, rhythm, piling, shaping, pouring, and pretending are all ways of falling in love with being here.

They are not standing over themselves with a clipboard asking whether the result is sophisticated enough to count. They are absorbed. They are participating. They are in direct contact with the world and with their own response to it.

I think often about my grandmother in this context. She made me a little studio corner in her garage and set up a chalkboard there for me. She would draw something simple on it and I would imitate her, utterly enthralled. It is one of my most precious memories.

There was love in it from every direction. My love for her. Her love in teaching me. My love of looking and trying and making.

Later, when I inherited her oil paints, I would sit for hours in a room smelling of linseed oil and turpentine, convinced it was the most romantic thing in the world. I lost myself in it.

That was the whole reason I ever got any “good” at it at all.

We return to what we love.

That should not be controversial, and yet somehow adulthood makes it easy to forget.

When I follow this (very long) train of thought, this is where everything starts to bend toward love.

The more I sit with creativity, the more I find it impossible to separate from devotion. To give nurturing attention to something is already a kind of care. To stay with it, to study it, to respond to it, to shape conditions in which it can grow… this is love in action, even when it looks very ordinary from the outside.

Love made visible

It helps me, when I feel myself drifting back toward old habits of judgment, to look outside the human world too. We have such a talent for narrating ourselves as exceptional that we sometimes forget how old all this is.

The male benthic pufferfish spends days shaping an immense mandala in the sand on the seafloor. His whole small body is involved. He swims, shivers, carves, adjusts. Ridges and valleys appear and shell fragments are gathered. Current and body and desire work together until this brief, astonishing architecture exists, only to be erased again by the sea after it has served its purpose. He does not seem paralyzed by whether anyone in a graduate seminar would consider it conceptually rigorous enough.

He is busy making a world fit for encounter. He arranges a world to call another being close.

These creatures help me remember that creativity is older than our categories and far more widespread than our prestige systems would suggest.

Life has always been joining with life, bringing forth forms through participatory relations(hips).

And often, it does so lavishly.

The more I look at this in life, the more it coyly reveals itself as love.

Not love as thin surface-level sentiment. Love as active devotion. Love as enacted care.

Love as the force that moves a being toward participation, toward offering.

Toward making a moment or a form in which another being might arrive and recognize something there.

The pufferfish gives his future mate a visible trace of his devotion. She recognizes it and responds to it, moves toward it.

We do this too.

We are moved by care all the time. A lovingly cooked meal lands differently in the body. A room arranged with attention changes the nervous system. Music changes us. Paintings change us. A small bunch of flowers in a chipped jar can alter the air in a kitchen.

We respond to the traces of devotion because some part of us recognizes them immediately.

This is one of the reasons I think art matters so much: art is one of the ways love becomes visible.

And perhaps that is why the whole thing can feel so painful when blocked. We are not merely missing a hobby! We are missing a mode of relationship. A directness. An intimacy. A way of participating in life that makes us feel more fully here.

What we are really after

Which brings me back to the thing I keep circling:

We do any of this because we want to feel alive.

Not accomplished in the abstract. Not arrived. Not merely admired.

Alive.

And aliveness, at least the kind I trust, does not seem to happen at the end of things. It happens in participation, in process, in the doing… In the joining. In those moments when the self-conscious mind grows quiet enough for a more direct conversation with life to take place.

Why, then, do we judge what brings us alive?

I mean that sincerely.

Why do we take one of the deepest forms of participation available to us and bury it under standards so brittle that ordinary life cannot get near it? Why do we measure our moments of vividness against arbitrary definitions of seriousness? Why do we assume that what feels playful, pleasurable, strange, or local cannot also be profound?

What is more serious than what we give our attention and care to with demonstrable acts of devotion?

What is more serious than nurturing the conditions from which aliveness arises?

I think many of us have made creativity inaccessible not because it was ever truly inaccessible, but because we attached too much pain, too much image, too much self-surveillance, too many inherited rules to it. We turned one of the oldest ways of joining life into another arena in which to evaluate ourselves.

No wonder the body hesitates.

No wonder the small painting of something you love (and that’s the plain simple truth of it) gets pushed aside.

No wonder the ten available minutes seem too small to count.

But what if they do count?

What if the fox painting counts because a real encounter took place there?

What if the point is not whether it looked official from the outside, but whether hand and ink and curiosity and time joined closely enough for something to emerge?

What if a creative life is not primarily a life of impressive outputs, but a life in which more and more of our ordinary encounters become places of artful, nurturing participation?

That is the definition I am trying to live inside now.

It gives me somewhere real to stand. It lets me work with the time and energy actually available. It lets me trust the twelve-minute pocket. The swatch. The weird setup. The materials that misbehave.

The process that feels like home. The little acts that do not look important until one notices that they are the very acts that bring a life back online.

This is not, as far as I can tell, one of the sanctioned images of artistic seriousness.

No one makes a gorgeous black-and-white documentary about the painter tucked under a temperature-controlled blanket with a tray balanced over her knees, trying not to hyperextend her wrists while rinsing a brush in a chipped water jar set precariously on the nightstand.

It does not carry the romance of the upright easel in the beautiful studio with northern light slanting over exposed wood floors.

It does not look disciplined. It does not look iconic.

It does not look like the version of being an Artist (yes, with a capital A, so regal, so important) I seem to have absorbed by osmosis over the years—through art school adjacent air, through biographies, through movies, through the internet, through that strange invisible tribunal of imagined onlookers who are always, somehow, watching from just over one’s shoulder.

And yet.

It is how I have been painting.

Because my body has been in a pretty rough flare, and sitting at my drafting table right now asks things of me that my body simply is not interested in giving. Sitting rigidly upright for too long can tip from fine to punishing with very little warning. There is a narrow strip of physical comfort available some days, and I am getting less sentimental about pretending that strip does not exist.

So the painting has moved to the bed.

Not because it *looks* right, but because it lets the work happen.

And, to my annoyance and eventual delight, it has its own kind of beauty. The lamp throws a low pool of gold over the page. The blanket keeps a little cave of warmth around my knees while the Atlantic goes on being theatrical beyond the window (the wind the last 2 days has been biblically intense). A brush handle knocks softly against a mug with a soft clink almost like an instrument. My collection of beach ephemera are within reach, containing a dusty haze from drying out, and the patina makes me stare long at the texture and try to imitate it with brush and medium.

It is not the romance I was sold about creative life, but it is a romance nonetheless—stranger, homelier; more intimate, less performative… a more sincere devotion.

Negotiating with a specter

I have been thinking, with a kind of low-grade embarrassment and increasing fascination, about how much of creative life gets organized around image. Not the image we make, though certainly that too, but the image of the life itself. The posture and staging of it. The visible proof of seriousness.

The writer at the desk before dawn.

The painter at the easel.

The ceramicist in the immaculate apron.

The tidy morning pages beside the handmade mug and the morally superior lemon water.

The studio that looks like a studio, correctly unmade in an aesthetically pleasing kind of way.

The rhythm that can be photographed. The practice that can be narrated.

I know I am not the only one who has taken in some version of this and quietly mistaken it for proof of legitimacy.

It is strange what begins to harden in us without our consent. Strange what starts as admiration and calcifies into obedience.

Somewhere along the line, I picked up the idea that there are ways a real creative person works, and then there are ways a person is merely fooling herself. That seriousness has a posture. That legitimacy has a silhouette. That if someone saw me making work in a way that looked too comfortable, too improvised, too odd, too stitched into the actual conditions of my life, it would somehow count less.

This is absurd, of course.

A creative life is made out of many kinds of making.

An artist is someone who makes art.

A creative person is someone who lives/acts within life, creatively.

And still… I have found myself negotiating with an unseen specter. Some invisible witness in the room who seems deeply invested in whether I am doing it properly enough. Elegantly enough. In a way that would read “correctly” from the outside.

Meanwhile, my body is sitting there saying, in its unglamorous and usually correct way: yes, but can we actually do the thing?

For the last 4 years, that question has been rearranging me, bit by bit.

I think part of what has been especially punctuated for me in the last year or two—through radically accepting my chronic illness and limitations, through deepening adulthood, through the plain old attrition of trying to keep a life together while also wanting very much to make beautiful things—is that I have become less interested in the appearance of a creative life and much more interested in whether it can be lived here.

Here, in this body.

Here, in this season.

Here, in a life that includes laundry and invoices and weather and fatigue and joy and dishes and sudden pockets of energy and equally sudden collapses and a brain that is not always willing to proceed in a neat little line from intention to execution.

I have often mistakenly thought that I would live creatively and make art after my life looked more like the life of an Artist.

For the last 4 years, I have started to suspect that the more important question is whether I am willing to live creatively inside the life I actually have.

My life is the studio

I keep circling back to a sentence that feels embarrassingly obvious and simple: my life is the studio.

And I mean studio in the widest possible sense. Not the fantasy of it. Not the clean little stage set I once imagined I would eventually earn.

This life. This body. This weather. This interruption-prone, laundry-filled, tea-stained, occasionally beautiful, occasionally absurd arrangement of things.

If I want a creative life, it has to be one that can happen here—not somewhere else, not later, not in the imaginary version of adulthood where all the conditions finally line up and the desk is always clear and the body is always compliant.

My life is the studio. Which means the work has to meet me where I am, and I have to be willing to meet it there too.

That feels both smaller and much more radical.

Because the image is always tidy. The image is always finished. The image has no mud on its boots and no heating blanket and no interrupted afternoon and no weird little workaround that would never make it into the tasteful biography.

But real creative life, at least as I am meeting it these days, is full of unphotogenic adaptations.

Maybe that is one of the least glamorous and most important truths about making anything at all: life does not sit politely outside the studio door. It is *the* studio. The work happens inside the weather of a real existence.

It is balancing the palette where it fits. It is painting while on a call because, strangely, the conversation steadies the hand and keeps the inner critic occupied elsewhere. It is scribbling a line while the kettle boils. It is noticing that one chair in the house allows the body to soften and another one turns the whole body into a tightly clenched ball.

It is learning that some days the work arrives through a side door, and if I insist on the front entrance, I will only end up standing outside in the rain, sulking.

But it is not only painting.

It is also gardening with pads, long-handled tools, irrigation hacks, or raised beds because kneeling in the dirt the “normal” way would make the whole thing inaccessible.

It is also cooking with scissors instead of the big beautiful chef’s knife because your hands and nerves have their own opinion about what is possible. It is finding a way to make a meal feel delicious and tender in a kitchen so tiny and stubborn that the oven barely qualifies as a rumor.

It is arranging shells on a windowsill, stitching slowly, humming into a phone recorder, moving furniture until the room breathes better, finding some odd little adaptation that would never make it onto social media and yet quietly gives your life back to you.

And the uncanny and beautiful thing is that once I stop fighting those adaptations, they stop feeling like humiliations and start feeling more like collaborations. The life I actually have begins to answer back.

The bed, the weather, the strange hour, the conversation drifting through the room, the ten-minute pocket before dinner, the way my body wants one chair and refuses another: all of it starts to become material. Texture, rather than interruption. Not the enemy of the work, but part of how the work arrives.

And once I stop treating my actual life as the thing standing in the way of creativity, it begins, quietly, stubbornly, to reveal itself as part of the beauty of it.

None of this is particularly grand. I think that is part of why it has taken me so long to trust it.

We are so used to associating creativity with intensity, with particular high minded ideas and deft skills, with visible aesthetically-pleasing devotion.

But a great deal of real and sustainable making seems to depend on something much humbler than that.

Less performance, more access; less image, more contact.

Less forcing the self into the correct shape, more finding the conditions under which the work can pass through without too much unnecessary friction.

I keep coming back to the body here, not in a grand theory sort of way, but in the stubbornly practical sense. If something hurts badly enough, or asks too much effort before the first mark has even been made, I am simply less likely to return to it. If a setup makes me feel braced, watched, overextended, or subtly ashamed, then some part of me begins to avoid the whole enterprise. Not because I do not love painting. Because the terms of engagement have quietly become hostile.

This is what I mean when I say I am no longer interested in what merely looks like a creative life.

A life can look exquisite from the outside and still be almost impossible to inhabit.

And I think many of us know this, even if we do not say it plainly. We know how much energy can be spent maintaining the appearance of the thing instead of entering it. We know how easy it is to become devoted to a picture of ourselves rather than to the actual, vulnerable, often faintly ridiculous experience that is our continually unfolding becoming.

What lets the work live?

There is something deeply relieving, if also a little mortifying, about admitting that the real goal is not to look like an artist.

The real goal is to make art. Or, rather, the goal is to live creatively so that we can make art.

The real goal is to have a practice that can be returned to, no matter how photogenic (or not) it is.

The real goal is not to impress the invisible witness, silently waiting to judge and score whatever you put on display.

The real goal is to let the hands touch the materials again… or the ingredients… or the soil… or the thread… or the keys… or the objects on the table… and feel that shiver of anticipation and pleasure and the overwhelming impetus to do…

The goal is to let life become shapeable from the inside.

What I have been building for the last 4 years (and will probably be building for the rest of my life)—very imperfectly, very much in the middle of it, with all the usual human backsliding and melodrama—is a creative life I can actually live. One that does not depend on ideal conditions, or the right posture, or a fantasy version of who I might become if only I could finally get my act together and become beautifully, pristinely, photogenically performative of the role we call Artist.

I am more interested in the kind of devotion that prioritizes the substance over the image and can survive contact with reality.

The kind that can happen in bed, in fragments, in a life that is constantly in motion, in a body with opinions. The kind that is willing to be a little strange if strange is what makes the work possible. The kind that stops asking whether it looks legitimate and starts asking whether it lets a life feel inhabited from the inside.

That feels closer to truth. Closer to the prayer mat always beneath our feet, the sacred ground we already occupy.

Closer, honestly, to love.

And maybe that is one of the quiet rebellions available to us now: refusing to build our creative lives for the gaze of an imaginary audience. Refusing the polished image in favor of the awkward, functioning, tender arrangement that actually allows us to begin.

Letting the thing be weird. Letting it be local. Letting it belong to the body we have, the room we have, the hour we have, the materials at hand.

Rather than lowering the standard, I think it is moving the standard back to where it belongs.

Not: does it look right?

But: does it let the work live? Does it let me come back to a experience of, a participation in aliveness?

I have been carrying these questions around with me for months.

Maybe it is worth carrying a little longer.