Sometimes in the solitude, comparison finds its way into my thoughts. It’s an impression left from my time scrolling on social media. I noticed that other artist are more productive, or further ahead. They seem to have their lives together and created in such a beautiful way. Social media makes the thoughts loud, especially when we are encourage by others to make the same things and share them in the same way in order to be noticed.

Of course not everyone works this way. Some people are so unique in their art and presence that they distinctively stand apart. However, there is still pressure to keep up and be more visible. I am learning though, about myself, that I would rather go slow and create a living in a way that feels right for me.

This past year after losing my father and my healing journey from MCAS, I have learned to stop apologizing, and stop feeling guilty for going at my own pace, making small work, having family responsibilities, producing inconsistently, or stepping away when I feel I need to. Most importantly, I don’t need to apologize for taking up space online in a way that reflects how I want my creative life to be. It is okay that I want it to feel restorative and nurturing, even if I grow slowly.

Taking time away from creating isn’t necessarily lost time, it’s time that has allowed me to integrate my learned experiences and emotions so that I can come back creating from my heart instead of the pressure of needing to have an online presence that is acceptable to the social media “gods” (that word feels too good for them).

This has all changed my thoughts on belonging. I honestly didn’t know what belonging was suppose to look like. But now I don’t believe that the idea of sameness makes us feel connected.

Teaching my art workshops has shown me that sitting with people willing to try even when they are uncomfortable makes me feel less solitary in my creative life. Writing on Substack has helped me feel less alone too. This platform has been so welcoming and encouraging. When someone tells me that my experience is familiar to them I feel less solitary. Maybe feeling seen makes us feel less alone rather than the idea of sameness.

Maybe those are the quiet gifts we can give other creatives, the gift of being seen. Instead of a formula, another roadmap to success, or masterclass. Perhaps just the recognition that we once stood in their shoes wondering the same questions they have running through their minds now.

We are all trying to survive, to find our place, to create something that is ours, to navigate through this terrain on different paths, but on a similar journey. Some people are moving quickly, some are currently on pause, others are building businesses, while some are creating quietly on a kitchen table.

I think witnessing each other plays another role in belonging. Sometimes, another person’s work or place in their creative life gives us something to aspire to. Sometimes, their words help us understand that our place in life has been someone else’s place too. We don’t need to walk hand in hand to understand we are traveling on the same terrain. We can leave breadcrumbs for each other like classes, paintings, a few honest words or reminders that they’re not alone.

If you have felt lonely in your creative life know that you are not. You don’t have to look like anyone else to belong here. You can move in your own unique pace. There is more than one way to build a creative life. You can incorporate rest, breaks, pivots, create small, or even disappear for periods of time. Create because it makes you feel good, not because have to prove anything to anyone else.

We are all traveling with our own compasses, but hopefully we can look up once in a while and see each other across the terrain and know we aren’t the only ones trying to find out way.

Warmly,
Chulynda

I stood at the front of that room and felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time, at home.

I want to tell you why that moment mattered so much and what it’s taught me about trust.

The months before

For a while now, I’ve been in it. Deep in it. My health took center stage in a way I didn’t choose and couldn’t ignore, Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, though I didn’t have that name for it at first. For a long stretch, I just had symptoms without a story to explain them. It’s been on and off for ten years, but this year it was the worst. A body that reacted to things it shouldn’t, that seemed to be speaking a language I couldn’t translate no matter how hard I listened. That kind of not-knowing has its own particular exhaustion, the constant self-monitoring, the guessing, the bracing for a flare with no clear cause. Finding a functional health doctor who could finally help me name what was happening didn’t fix everything overnight, but it gave me something I’d been starving for, an explanation. Relief, even in the middle of an ongoing process, can be its own kind of medicine.

My father died in October. He was a strong, stubborn man, the kind of stubborn that, frustrating as it could be, also shaped me. He taught me independence, whether he meant to or not. Watching him move through the world on his own terms taught me to trust my own footing. But our relationship was never simple. He struggled for much of his life, and that struggle left marks on our family long before his death did. So when he died, the grief that came wasn’t clean. It wasn’t just loss, it was loss tangled together with old wounds, unresolved history, and a complicated tenderness for a man who was both my father and someone I’d had to protect myself from at times. His death was traumatic, and it didn’t just ask me to grieve him. It asked me to grieve everything underneath him too. The childhood, the years of hoping he’d change, the parts of the story that never got resolved before he was gone, the woman I had to become to advocate for his final days.

Grief like that doesn’t announce itself politely. It moved into my body, into my business, into the quiet corners of my days, uninvited and immovable. And because stress and MCAS are so tightly tangled together, the grief made the illness harder to manage, and the illness made the grief harder to carry. Some mornings I couldn’t tell which one I was fighting. It felt like everything, the body, the loss, the past I thought I’d already made peace with, was compounding at once, all of it demanding my attention in a season when I had the least capacity to give it.

I stayed home more than I wanted to. I stepped back from teaching, which is one of the things that makes me feel most like myself. My art felt smaller. Tighter. Careful, in the way you get careful when you’re not sure your body will cooperate with your plans.

I got tired of it. Tired of watching life happen just outside my reach.

The turn

So I started putting myself back out there, slowly. Trust rarely asks for grand gestures, it asks for small, repeated yeses. I said yes to teaching again. I said yes to trying new things in my business, doing them differently than I had before, stepping just outside what felt safe and familiar, but listening to my body without pushing it beyond its capacity as I had done for so many years before. And somewhere in that stretching, my art started to loosen up too. I stopped gripping the brush so tightly. I started having fun with it again remembering that fun was always the point.

Then came the workshop.

I designed it to be a restorative space for women. It was candlelit, quiet, and peaceful. Because I know what it is to carry everyone else’s needs before your own. To be the one who remembers the details, holds the family together, keeps the household running, while your own soul waits patiently at the back of the line. I wanted to give a room full of women something that was only theirs. No agenda but their own hands, their own paper, their own breath.

When the classes ended and they all offered to help clean up, the face they gave me when I said, “Nope, just leave it all there,” let me know that this is exactly what they needed. It showed me that in fact they were always taking care of others.

Watching them paint that evening, watching myself teach again, easy and unguarded, I understood something I couldn’t have understood back in October, or in the hardest weeks with my health. All of it had been leading here. The waiting. The grief. The slow answers from doctors. The stepping back so I could learn how to step forward differently.

It felt like coming full circle.

What I’m learning about trust

I don’t think trusting life’s direction means believing everything happens for a tidy reason. I don’t think it means the hard seasons were “worth it” in some neat, redemptive way. My father is still gone. My body still needs tending I didn’t ask to need. Those things are simply true, and they don’t require a silver lining to be honored.

But I am learning that direction reveals itself in retrospect far more often than it announces itself in advance. I couldn’t see, in the thick of the grief and the symptoms and the staying home, that I was being pointed somewhere. I could only feel stuck. It was only from the other side of it, candlelight, flowers, women painting freely, that the shape of the path became visible at all.

Trust, then, isn’t a feeling I generate on command. It’s something I’m building in arrears, one full-circle moment at a time. Each time life makes sense a little later than I wanted it to, I trust the next unclear season a little more easily.

I’m still practicing this. I imagine I’ll be practicing it for the rest of my life. But I wanted you to know where I am with it right now, loosening my grip on the brush, saying yes to the room full of candlelight, letting the picture come into focus after the fact instead of demanding to see it in advance.

With you on the path,

Chulynda

P.S. — I’d love to know: is there a season in your own life that only made sense once you were standing on the other side of it? Hit reply and tell me, I read every one.

When I started the 100 Day Project in mid February, I was so excited. The energy that filled me was the same when you enter the new year, full of optimism and hope. The smell of a new journal, and its crisp new pages begging to be (marked). I made plans, I had big goals, even though I made them simple so tha…

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I wasn’t expecting it to teach me anything about my work. But the city had other ideas.

There was so much chaos there. It was beautiful, unashamed, unapologetic chaos. People moving through their lives without checking to see if anyone was watching. Street vendors, painters, performers, strangers mid-argument, strangers mid-laughter. Nobody was waiting for permission. Nobody seemed worried about doing it the right way. They were each just being themselves. It was so beautiful.

I stood on a corner somewhere in the middle of all of it and thought: I want to paint like this.

Not messier. Not louder. But freer. Unbothered by the audience in my own head.

When I came home, I started simplifying.

Fewer expectations. Fewer comparisons. Fewer tabs open in the browser and in my mind. I thought: how can I capture the energy I felt in New York? How can I infuse this energy into my life?

I’d been carrying so much noise: what my work should look like to succeed, what other artists were doing, whether I was producing enough, sharing enough, showing up enough.

Simplicity isn’t about doing less for the sake of it. It’s about removing what distracts from what matters. When things feel overwhelming, it’s rarely because the work is too complex. It’s because there’s too much noise around it.

The noise in your head about what you should be doing.

It makes me forget the whole reason why I create art.

I create art because it makes me feel free. It silences the noise in my head. It connects me to the deepest part within myself that I can’t express in words. It’s something I do for me.

We often add more to our lives thinking that it will make things better, but often I have noticed that going deeper is the true answer.

There is so much medicine in connection.

And simplicity is how we get there.

Less.

But deeper.

Rooted.

Grounded.

If you’re feeling scattered right now, I want to offer you this: simplicity can be a form of direction.

A realignment.

You don’t have to start over. You just have to quiet the room enough to hear what’s already there.

How can we quiet the noise, and connect deeper with ourselves, our family, our community, and our art?

With clarity,

Chulynda

Salt Hippy · The Artist’s Compass

I use to believe that a good creative practice meant always being in motion. Always producing. Always doing something with your hands.

Then I lost my father this past October and creating was impossible. Just trying to get through the day was the only thing I could do.

I finlly had a moment when I reached for a brush. No master piece came through, just colors and lines. When I finished I cried so hard. The image I drew reflected how my father had past, a stroke, the color of blood. I know, it’s not a pretty story, but art isn’t always pretty, but art is HEALING.

After that, I was able to start creating slowly again.

I started paying attention to something I’d been moving too fast to notice before October.

That’s when I realized, the practice isn’t just about output. It’s about listening.

It’s not about creative momentum. It’s about creative reception.

We talk a lot in artist spaces about keeping the momentum going. Show up every day. Fill the sketchbook. Don’t lose the habit. And that discipline matters, I’m not dismissing it. But there’s a cost nobody talks about: you can keep moving and still miss what your work is actually trying to tell you.

I also noticed it somewhere toward the end of my 100-day sketching project.

I flipped back through the pages and there it was the ocean, over and over. Water lines. Shells. Pelicans. Memories of the Pacific water. Seafoam. Movement. I hadn’t planned any of it. It just kept returning, the way certain things do when something in you is trying to get your attention.

And underneath it was a feeling I recognized: missing home. Oceanside, California. The specific freedom of wind coming through the window of my old 1964 Dodge Dart, Nirvana on the stereo, and that particular sense that things were wide open, that color was possible, play was possible, everything was possible.

My hand had been drawing its way back there before my mind even knew it.

The artists whose work feels most inevitable, most deeply, unmistakably theirs don’t force the next idea.

I think of Flora Bowley, whose whole practice is built on surrender and trust. She doesn’t grip the outcome. She stays in conversation with the canvas, letting it respond, letting it lead. There’s an attunement in that kind of work that you can feel when you look at it, like the painting wanted to exist.

That’s not magic. That’s listening.

We’re all navigating a creative moment that’s noisier than ever. More content, more comparison, more pressure to be prolific. And I think a lot of artists are burning out not from overwork, but from overcrowding too many external voices drowning out the internal one.

The artists who find their way through aren’t necessarily the most productive. They’re the most attuned. They know how to come back to themselves.

For me, that meant following the ocean back to a feeling of freedom I’d almost forgotten. More color. More play. More of whatever that wind-through-the-window feeling is, that sense that things are still free and possible.

That’s what I’m practicing. That’s what I want for you, too.

If you’re unsure what to create next, try listening before deciding. Flip back through what you’ve made. Notice what keeps returning without force. The answers are often already forming quieter than the noise, but steadier.

Your compass sharpens when you let yourself hear what’s already there.

With warmth,

Chulynda

Not the kind that waits politely in waiting rooms or tolerates minor inconveniences. The kind that stays present when nothing visible is happening. When the work feels glacial. When ideas circle without landing. When you know something is shifting beneath the surface, but you can’t point to it, can’t photograph it, can’t prove it to anyone, including yourself.

Patience is uncomfortable because it refuses the metrics we’ve been taught to trust. It asks us to stay with a process that offers no receipts, no progress bars, no reassuring milestones. It asks us to believe in the work when the work itself has gone quiet.

For me, that quiet was not a metaphor. The past few weeks, my health has kept me away from the studio for. No brush in hand. No color on paper. Just the particular ache of someone who creates for a living, sitting still, wondering if the thread had been lost. Chronic health challenges have followed me since returning from Guam twelve years ago after living in a home with mold for six months. My body has its own rhythms now, its own demands, and sometimes it simply asks me to stop. Learning to honor that, without calling it failure, has been its own kind of practice.

Patience, I’ve learned, looks like continuing anyway, but gently. Showing up to the studio without demands. Letting pieces remain unfinished longer than my ego would prefer. Allowing the work to ripen in its own time, on its own terms, following a rhythm I didn’t set and can’t rush.

Some days this feels like discipline. Other days it feels like trust. Most days it’s both.

If you’re in a season where progress feels invisible, where you’re showing up but can’t see what you’re building, or where life has pulled you away entirely, this is not evidence of wrong turns or wasted time. The weeks you didn’t paint, didn’t write, didn’t create? They are part of the work too. Something was still moving, still integrating, still preparing.

The roots grow before the bloom. The foundation gets poured before the walls go up. Not every essential transformation announces itself.

You haven’t lost the thread. You’re not behind. Your compass still points true, even when the landscape doesn’t change.

Especially then.

With warmth from the studio,
Chulynda

Not empty. Just still.

The paints are scattered across the tables in my studio, (the corner of my bedroom). The palettes dry and untouched. The jars full of brushes and the notebooks closed. It’s the kind of quiet that makes you wonder if something is wrong, until you sit with it long enough to understand nothing is broken. It’s just resting.

This quiet has been my companion on and off for a couple of months now. So many sparks to create new projects, but not enough energy to move forward with any of them. That’s how I know I am in a season of rest.

Here’s what I used to believe about rest: that it was something you earned. Something you got after the to-do list were finished, after the momentum was built and sustained and proven worthy of a break. After the caffeine had lost its affects, and exhaustion took hold of you. Something that needed to be justified, with lists of what had been accomplished.

But that’s not what rest is. Rest isn’t the reward at the end of productivity. It’s not the prize you claim after you’ve outrun yourself. Rest is a season. And like every season, it doesn’t ask permission before it arrives, it just becomes.

We’ve been taught to treat stillness like a failure of discipline, like something to push through, or even apologize for. But what if the stillness isn’t the problem? What if the pushing is?

I first started to understand this when my uncle passed away a few years ago.

I spent several weeks with him before he died. And when I came home, when the grief settled in and the exhaustion made even picking up a brush feel impossible, something shifted in me. Not dramatically, but very quietly.

I realized I was too heavy to paint, and instead of fighting it, I let myself be heavy. I gave myself permission to make zero sales. To not perform the version of myself that had a business to run and a shop to tend to.

That permission felt radical then. It still does now.

Because for most of my life, I believed that rest was the enemy of momentum. That if I stopped, something would be lost, an audience, an opportunity, a version of myself I’d worked hard to build. I didn’t feel worthy of rest, because if I rested and I wasn’t working, that would mean I was failing. The rest of the world was going to move on and leave me behind.

What I’ve learned instead is this: the world really doesn’t care what you do. I don’t mean your friends and family (they care in a good way), but this idea in our head of “the world”. It keeps turning, and it keeps functioning outside of our home, our business, or even the thoughts in our head. Does anyone in the world really care what work we haven’t done? Many don’t unless you have a deadline to meet. But most of the deadlines we have are self-implemented in our minds as “I need to”.

When I push through rest, my work tells on me anyway. It becomes messy inconsistent, and joyless. The kind of output that costs more than it creates, the kind of work I have to go back and repair. The joy suffers. The creativity suffers. And eventually, so does everything else.

The artists and creatives I admire most, the ones whose longevity seems almost effortless, don’t grind through every season.

They expand and contract. They speak, and then they go quiet long enough to have something worth saying again.

They treat their creativity like a living thing, not a machine to be optimized, but a relationship to be tended to. And tending sometimes looks like output, and sometimes it looks like rest, and we need to make peace with both.

And they don’t apologize for the quiet.

The dominant advice in creative entrepreneurship sounds something like: stay consistent, show up every day, your audience wants to hear from you, post, publish, produce. Build the momentum and don’t break the chain.

And I understand why that advice exists. Consistency does build things. Visibility matters a lot in the social media world.

But here’s the cost nobody talks about: what happens to the work when the person making it is running on empty? When their soul is being disconnected by exhaustion?

When I’ve pushed through rest because I was afraid of losing ground, my work became a performance of creativity rather than the real thing. I was filling space instead of making meaning. Going through the motions of being a working artist while quietly hollowing out the part of myself that makes the work worth making.

This past two years I’ve chosen instead is to let the seasons lead. Expansion when I feel the pull toward making. Contraction when I need to grieve, and to listen. It’s not as a strategy, but a creative living practice of being alive inside my work.

It’s slower. It doesn’t always look impressive from the outside. But it’s mine. It’s not guided by an algorithm, but rather a natural creative rhythm of life.

But things are changing and for those of us building creative lives, I think for the better. The era of constant output is starting to show its cracks. Audiences are exhausted by volume and constant noise. The internet is full of content made by people who stopped feeling it, but kept going anyway. And I think we’re moving toward something different.

I hope it’s toward creative work that’s slower and more intentional. Toward voices that go quiet sometimes, and come back with something that actually matters. Toward creators who trust that depth outlasts frequency. Something more meaningful and real.

Right now, rest looks like listening to myself and to my body. It looks like listening to the feelings I’ve been carrying and the grief I’m still moving through.

I lost my dad. And in the weeks and months since, I’ve been sitting with what that means, not just the loss itself, but the multitude of layers beneath it. The childhood I’m still making sense of. The trauma I didn’t have space to feel when I was just trying to survive it. The child in me who is learning, finally, to grieve, and to feel safe.

Rest right now looks like writing. Learning to embroider. Picking up my dad’s 35mm camera and learning to see through his lens. Lifting weights, not because it’s restful in the conventional sense, but because it shuts my mind off and makes me present again connecting me to my body.

It looks like not filling every open space with output. Not performing productivity. Trusting that nothing meaningful disappears just because I pause.

When I rest, everything is better. My ideas are clearer. My heart softens. I notice the texture of the paper, the color folding into itself, and the colors blending into each other. I come back to the work with wonder instead of obligation.

If you’ve been pushing, striving, and holding yourself to impossible standards, I hope this letter finds you and gives you something to lean on:

Rest does not erase your identity as a creative. It protects it.

Sometimes the most aligned direction is standing still long enough to feel your footing again. To notice the magic. To let your heart soften. To remember that you are not a machine built for constant output, you are a person who deserves to flow with the rhythm of life, not fight against it.

The studio will be ready when I am. And so will yours.

With warmth,

Chulynda

Salt Hippy

It’s been quieter here than usual. We just returned from Tokyo, a trip my daughters had been dreaming about for years, and one I said yes to without letting myself overthink it. As someone who lives with anxiety, I’ve learned that sometimes the best way forward is to not give my mind too much runway. Don’t project. Don’t catastrophize. Just go.

But here’s what I didn’t expect: how much the trip would teach me about myself. Not through inspiration or wonder, though there was plenty of that, but through sheer, bone-deep exhaustion.

I used to believe that inspiration required immersion.

That to grow as an artist, I needed to seek out intensity. Big experiences. Overstimulating environments. Places that jolt you awake and flood your senses until something shifts inside you.

Tokyo delivered all of that. The craftsmanship was breathtaking. Every meal, even from a convenience store, was plated with care, wrapped with precision, made with a devotion to excellence that felt almost spiritual. The dedication to beauty in the smallest details moved me. We wandered through blooming sakura trees, visited the Sakura Shrine, stood inside the Studio Ghibli Museum surrounded by reproductions of original sketches and movie stills of films that have shaped my creative life since young adulthood. I even got a tattoo of three kodamas from the movie Princess Mononoke, my favorite, because if you’re going to mark a moment, that was the one.

It was magical. It was also one of the most draining things I’ve ever done.

Then I realized: I’m not a city person. And that’s not a flaw, it’s information.

The videos you see online of Tokyo’s train stations packed shoulder-to-shoulder? That’s not exaggeration. That’s daily reality. Millions of people moving through a density I’ve never experienced. The only moments of true silence I found were in hotel rooms or—no joke—bathroom stalls (which, by the way, are incredible, hello warm seats).

I came home inspired, yes. But I also came home knowing something about myself I hadn’t fully named before: I don’t create from overstimulation. I create from spaciousness.

The artists and makers who thrive in cities, who draw energy from crowds, from movement, from the hum of constant input, they’re not better or more serious than me. They’re just wired differently. And for years, I think I quietly believed that my preference for slowness, for silence, for working in a studio where I can hear myself think, was somehow… less adventurous. Less brave. Less committed to growth.

But that’s not true.

Here’s what I’m learning: the artists who sustain their practice over decades don’t chase every kind of inspiration.

They know what refills them and what depletes them. They don’t apologize for needing quiet. They don’t force themselves into environments that drain more than they give, just because those environments look impressive from the outside.

They protect their energy like it’s sacred. Because it is.

Tokyo gave me beauty. It gave me new watercolor paints from Itoya (which, yes, is heaven). It gave me the memory of standing in front of Hayao Miyazaki’s sketches, seeing the hand behind the magic. It gave me time with my daughters, who glowed the entire trip.

But it also reminded me that I do my best work when I come home. When I return to my studio. When the world gets quiet again and I can hear what wants to come through.

So this is me, resting.

Not because I’m lazy or uninspired, but because my body said no, just rest when I tried to jump back in too soon. Because jet lag is real. Because the 100-day project I’m working on doesn’t need me to white-knuckle my way through it. It needs me present, not depleted.

I’m painting fish right now, simple, repetitive, meditative. Using those new Japanese watercolors and letting the work be soft while I recover.

And I’m letting go of the idea that the “right” kind of creative is always seeking the next big experience, the next jolt, the next immersion. Maybe the real work is knowing when to go and when to come home. When to say yes to your daughters’ dream trip, and when to say yes to your own need for silence.

Your creative life doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. It just has to feel true.

For me, that truth is quiet. It’s slow. It’s rooted in a studio where I can breathe.

Before I’ve even picked up a brush, I feel it, that low-grade heaviness sitting in my stomach. It doesn’t announce itself. It just settles in and starts whispering things like, why are you wasting expensive paper on something that might not work out? It used to tell me that the next thing I created needed to be so good that it would go viral on social media, so I could finally “get there”, wherever “there” was supposed to be.

That’s not how I create anymore. Now I make things for me.

For a long time I treated doubt like a warning signal, something telling me to stop or recalibrate. But it hasn’t gone away with experience, it’s just changed shape. After my dad died, I was in California handling his estate and found myself in Blick, my favorite art supply store. It was the one moment that whole trip where the sadness lifted. I was genuinely excited, certain about the colors I was choosing. But when I got home and unwrapped those tubes of paint that I’d wrapped so carefully, I just sat there staring at them. Like I’d completely forgotten what to do with my own hands.

Earlier in my creative life, doubt was mostly about being seen. Was I even a real artist? At some point I decided realism was the thing that would prove it, so I learned realism. And when I got good at it, I thought maybe I’d arrived. Except realism was never actually what I wanted. So I had to unlearn the idea that mistakes were evidence of failure and start letting them become part of the work instead.

What shifted things was just continuing to show up. The more consistently I did that, the less power doubt had over whether I created at all.

What I’ve noticed now is that doubt tends to appear at specific moments when I’m reaching past what feels familiar, when I’m standing at the edge of something that hasn’t taken shape yet. Right now it’s showing up around art licensing. Is my work good enough to license? Is my style cohesive? Would anyone actually want my art in their home? Doubt interrogates decisions I felt solid about yesterday. It asks whether the work matters, whether I’m growing fast enough, whether I should be further along by now.

Staying oriented while it’s loud, that’s what steadies me, not getting rid of it.

When doubt gets noisy, I play. Loose sketches in a journal nobody will see. Color experiments just to see what happens. And I use the expensive paper for play, because play is the work. Creating for myself, not for an algorithm, not for approval, that’s what actually matters now. These playful sessions connect me to why I love art. They connect me to those sacred moments where my heart flutters in excitement as I allow the artwork to lead me on a journey of undisturbed flow with creation.

I’ve learned to follow quieter signals. Joy. That childlike spark in my chest. The way music plays and somehow weaves itself into what I’m making without thinking, rather in flow. When confidence goes quiet, those are the things my compass points toward.

Fear isn’t tangible. It can’t actually hurt you. It’s more like an invisible bully and on the other side of it, there’s always something worth the fight.

So if doubt is with you right now, you’re not behind. You haven’t missed something. You’re in the place where something meaningful is being asked of you, and your compass is still there, it’s just speaking quietly. Listen for joy. Listen for wonder. Keep showing up to the work, even when you don’t know where it’s going yet.

With warmth,

Chulynda

Today is my birthday. We didn’t do much today. There weren’t balloons or cake, partly because I didn’t want either since I had indulged a lot this past weekend, but also because my husband is working nights and is completely exhausted. As I drove home from taking the kids to practice on our 20-minute drive, I watched him fall asleep in 10 minutes, not something he can normally do in the car. I know he’s exhausted. We’re on opposite schedules, and I don’t want to make too much trouble for him. Plus, I am tired all the time now thanks to perimenopause, and I lack the desire to do much. My allergies are so bad where I live that I deal with constant symptoms, making going out almost unbearable at times, and food is hard to eat without exacerbating them.

As I glanced over at my husband, I started to feel sorry for myself because my birthdays are often boring. Last year, we had to go look at last-minute rentals because our cross-country job fell through right after our house sold and all of our belongings were in boxes.

Then, as I was cooking dinner, I realized that maybe instead of looking at what I didn’t have happen on my birthday, I should look at what I do have.

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Lately, something has been shifting in the studio, not loudly, just a subtle forward pull, like the tide turning without asking for permission.

Momentum used to feel frantic to me, something to catch before it disappeared. But I’m learning that real momentum doesn’t rush. It steadies, showing up quietly.

The shift started after my dad died. For a while, I couldn’t paint. Couldn’t do much of anything. My nervous system was wrecked, and the only option was to move slowly, so slowly it felt like barely moving at all. I squeezed art sessions in between everything else: cleaning, cooking, homeschool, processing emotions I didn’t have names for yet, dealing with my father’s estate and accounts. I was trying to catch momentum in the cracks of my life, and it felt impossible.

But something changed when I stopped chasing it. I started finding little sparks of color that felt like glimmers of joy through the grief. They kept me steady.

Right now, momentum looks like moving into paint sessions with less resistance. It looks like trusting my instincts sooner instead of second-guessing them into silence.

I’m noticing things again. The texture of the paper. The sound of the brush swirling in the jar. The way the paper absorbs the pigment, drinking it in. The smell of wet paper. These small sensory moments feel like coming home to myself.

I’m also noticing what I’m letting go of. The fear of hurting people’s feelings when I say no. The pressure to make my art look a realistic and controlled. I’ve been so strict with myself for so long, and honestly? I don’t even want that kind of work. I prefer the playful pieces. The ones that breathe.

Lately, I’ve been letting mistakes be okay. Letting them be part of the process instead of evidence that I’m failing. It’s a small shift, but it changes everything and feels so liberating.

I’ve noticed that when momentum is real, it doesn’t demand everything at once, it slowly builds.

So I’m letting myself move at the speed that feels sustainable, and I’m paying attention to what wants to continue instead of forcing what feels heavy. Surface design is calling me forward. So is the courage to actually email licensors and put myself out in the world. I’ve even started using my father’s 35mm camera, something that helps me feel contact to what I have lost as I move forward.

And I’m learning to rest and to listen to what my body needs: to be okay in a calm feeling in life rather than living in urgency and deadlines.

The momentum I feel most is in the quiet morning hours, as the sun flickers through the branches into my window casting shadows as I write. There’s something about that early light that makes the work feel possible again.

If you’re feeling movement in your own creative life, however subtle, this is your permission to honor it without exhausting it. You don’t have to sprint just because something finally feels possible.

Momentum isn’t something to conquer. It’s something to accompany.

With warmth,
Chulynda

This morning, my studio is quiet in that soft, expectant way.

The light is coming in sideways. There’s a half-cleaned brush in a jar. A sketch I’m not sure about is taped to the wall, slightly crooked. Nothing here feels finished, and strangely, that feels right.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about direction.

Not goals or plans or five-year visions. Just direction.
The gentle question of where am I facing right now?

I think we put too much pressure on knowing exactly where we’re going. As artists, creatives, humans, it can feel like we’re supposed to have a map. A clear route. A confident answer when someone asks, “So what’s next for you?”

But most days, my compass doesn’t point toward a destination.
It points toward what feels honest.

Some months, that looks like momentum.
Other months, it looks like slowing down.
And sometimes, it looks like sitting with work that feels unfinished and trusting that it’s still doing something important inside me.

I’ve learned that creative living isn’t about always moving forward.
It’s about staying oriented to yourself.

When I’ve lost my sense of direction, and I do, often, it’s usually because I’ve started measuring my work by someone else’s timeline. Or comparing my quiet seasons to someone else’s highlight reel. Or trying to make decisions from fear instead of curiosity.

So this month, I’m returning to a simpler question in the studio:

What feels like true north today?

Not what’s impressive.
Not what’s efficient.
Just what feels steady and aligned.

Sometimes that answer is picking up the brush.
Sometimes it’s stepping away from it.
Both count.

If you’re reading this and feeling a little untethered, I want you to know this: you don’t need to overhaul your life or reinvent your work to be “on track.” Often, the smallest adjustment, one honest choice, one quiet yes, is enough to reorient everything.

Your compass is still working.
Even if the needle feels shaky.
Even if the path ahead is foggy.

Especially then.

Thank you for being here, for sitting in this space with me. We’ll keep checking our direction together, one month, one letter, one honest moment at a time.

With warmth from the studio,
Chulynda

I’m an artist, surface designer, and lifelong observer of the quiet moments that make life feel whole again.

This space was created as a place to slow down, to notice color, grief, and beauty, especially when it shows up unexpectedly.

Over the past decade, my life has been shaped by loss. I’ve lost people I loved deeply, and with each loss, the world shifted. Art became the place where I could sit with that change, breathe through it, and gently piece myself back together.

I didn’t create through grief. I created after it. Again and again.

Here, I’ll be sharing reflections from my studio and my life, about creativity as a way of living, not producing. About art as a companion through change. About nature, ritual, memory, and the quiet courage it takes to keep making things when life feels uncertain.

You can expect:

∙ Studio notes and behind-the-scenes thoughts

∙ Reflections on creativity, resilience, and creative living

∙ Occasional sketches, patterns, or works in progress

∙ Stories about finding beauty after loss

This isn’t a place for perfection or productivity. It’s a place for honesty, softness, and curiosity.

If you’re someone who creates, collects, notices, or simply wants to live a little more intentionally, you’re in the right place.

I’m really glad you’re here.

With warmth,

Chulynda

photo by Tiffani Danielle, Panama City Beach

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