I’ve been slow to write this final essay.

Some part of me doesn’t want the performance to end, like I don’t want to hand back this container I built out of an old, strange, beautiful piece of music — because as long as I’m still writing inside it, some part of that day is still happening.

But a marriage, unlike a requiem, is supposed to keep going. So let me start where all of this actually started, long before the vows, long before the grove.

Parenting is a lifetime assignment. We (hopefully) sign up voluntarily with great expectation and eagerness, and are quickly thrown into the ‘between the lines’ of baby books and parent teacher conferences.

These ‘between the lines’ pieces are the ones we’re hesitant to talk about. They are the silent wonderings, the up-at-night questions, the worries most every parent has — the furrows in our brows, the palpitations we hold inside, the tight fists we keep to ourselves.

These are questions like, “Is my child struggling?” “Will they fit in?” “Is that normal?” “Do they seem happy?” And unlike a hard and fast grade, a sports tournament, or a quick crush, these are the kinds of questions about our kids that linger, come back, and just hang over our heads at times.

Then they move out, maybe go to college, find friends, a relationship, and maybe get married.

This last one, the wedding, often is the culmination of those child-raising commercials, vignettes, cartoons about stages of life, storybooks. Baby grows up, gets schooled, finds love, moves on, parents are relieved and move into old age with anticipatory grandparent smiles on their faces. We’ve all seen those little stories.

And yet.

A few weeks ago, when my husband and I handed off this child, we were both delighted beyond belief, and overwhelmed with the acquisition of the new, other person in our life. Sure, we knew him, loved him, treated him like he was one of us. But when the moment came, when the vows were read, when her eyes stared into his with a calm we’d never seen, we simply weren’t prepared.

It wasn’t her. It was us.

Then came the moment itself: watching two people we thought we knew — our kid and her guy — stand up there in front of everyone. And then came the vows. Commitments they’d written themselves, serious and hilarious and vulnerable all at once, so heartbreakingly beautiful they took us all aback. He cried so hard at times he could barely get his words out; she simply held his gaze and steadied his voice. She bared her vulnerabilities with comic timing, as she does, and laid bare her devotion to him — something we’d never seen her do, never mind out loud in front of hundreds.

It was at this moment we realized we were no longer looking at two people we thought we knew. Something else hovered over us in that late-afternoon sun — call it alchemy, though that undersells it, as alchemy still implies a formula, a known reaction.

During those vows, whatever passed between them didn’t stay contained to the two of them — it moved through two hundred people sitting before them in a grove of trees facing the ocean. Their magic, the reaction it had, made friends and family, many strangers to each other, weep in unison, and created something bigger after they’d gone quiet. Much audible sniffling from the crowd.

The Agnus Dei asks for the same thing three times, each repetition softer than the last — grant them rest — as if peace were something you had to ask for more than once before it actually arrived.

That’s what I felt watching them: not the fireworks that so many people promise you a wedding will have, but a settling, a calm, an exhale. Two lives resolving into something that would now hold weight for everyone standing near them, long after the two of them kissed, smiled in the applause, and skipped back down the aisle.

When did she become this person, I wondered, as did my husband next to me. One minute we thought we were handing her off, as parents do. The next, we realized she was also lifting him up, and together they were exuding a sort of love-alchemy over the crowd.

It could have been called magic, mystical, or simply otherworldly, in a movie or a fairytale. Instead, seconds later, they were off, the grove was empty, and I found myself standing there sure that time had stopped.

It is a gift I have been revisiting ever since — that peace, that light.

The Requiem’s last movement is called Lux aeterna: let eternal light shine upon them. After all that weeping, after asking for mercy again and again, the whole Mass, or in this, the ceremony outside, under the trees and facing the ocean, doesn’t resolve into silence. It resolves into light. That’s what I keep coming back to, and maybe why we summon these old, strange, beautiful pieces of music up for moments like this — because grief and joy, it turns out, are asking for the exact same thing.

All we can do is be present, and trust that other forces — friends, family, spirit if you believe in it, or just the weather — will hold you. I never imagined a wedding ceremony, that simple thing where the bride walks down the aisle toward the groom waiting for her, could be a transcendent experience.

I’m still re-living it in my head, weeks later.

The day started as she’d dreamed it — a brisk walk on the cliff walk after coffee in bright sun, friends and family trailing, ocean as far as we could see, sparkling light, heat and humidity setting in with the smell of rosehips, goldenrod, and Queen Anne’s lace off the cliff’s scruffy, gorgeous wildflowers.

After throwing our bodies into the ocean for the twentieth time that week, we rushed back in bare feet — I had a bride’s bouquet to make, hair flowers to fashion into a comb, a hat brim of my own to affix with flowers, all from the farmer who’d supplied the wedding flowers.

We were, as usual, behind schedule.

Hours passed like minutes. I got lost in the concentration of flower-making, and then, all at once, no one could find their shoes, jewelry was tangled, and lunch hadn’t been gathered or eaten. We’d be leaving on the trolley soon, stopping for pictures along the way. I remember sprinting barefoot in my gown between rooms, scouring bags for things that weren’t where I thought they’d be. Then, before I knew it, we were off.

It was all fine. How many hours had we wasted these past months on obsessing over shoes?

We found the shoes, untangled the jewelry, even managed to drink water in the steaming heat before pictures on a back road along a stone wall — and then we arrived at our spot, where the expanse of ocean and the brisk wind off the water simply took our breath away. Whatever worry we’d been carrying for months evaporated like the August humidity.

The wind was at our back. It felt glorious.

One of my best memories is being tucked away in a little cabin just before the ceremony, where friends, family, the bride and groom could drink water, nibble snacks, and fix their hair — useless, given the wind off the water was enough to dry a clothesline in under an hour.

I looked over at my daughter when it was just us, and she gave me that wide-eyed, shocking smile, as if to say: can you believe I’m doing this? I could. I just beamed back. A few seconds passed — long, glorious seconds staring into her face — and then we were lining up for the walk down a soft grassy aisle, past everyone she knew, loved, and was loved by.

Just before we stepped forward, she ditched her shoes. She’d always wanted to go barefoot, and decided this was the time. Off she went, toes in the soft grass. We have yet to find those shoes again. They may or may not show up.

The walk down the aisle was the kind of moment where, if we could stop time, we would have — just to look around and take it all in. The expressions, the light, the general splendor: the blue of the ocean, the whitecaps, the wildflower colors, everyone looking so damn gorgeous, every eye on my daughter as my husband and I did our best to hold her up. Really, she held us.

That moment I’ll never forget. But it was their vows that brought the Lacrimosa to mind.

It’s worth knowing, if you don’t already, what that word actually means: lacrimosa is simply Latin for weeping. It’s the movement in the Requiem Mass that asks for mercy on the day of judgment — sorrow and a plea for grace, in the same breath. Mozart was writing his own Requiem when he died, and the Lacrimosa is the last thing his hand touched. He got about eight bars in — written steady, untroubled, no sign yet of what was coming — and then he was gone. The page just stops, mid-phrase, and someone else had to finish it for him.

I thought of that unfinished page during the vows. The quiet that precedes a crescendo. The anticipation that lets you lean in, be present, watch your child step into a new chapter. The undulating strings, the building toward something we couldn’t yet name, and then the crescendo — weeping that took us all by surprise.

It wasn’t just us. All two hundred guests echoed it, audible sobs and visible tears in every row. A circle of love I never expected to see, hear, or feel. I was told later that most of the guests hadn’t expected to be so overcome either. As the bride and groom read their vows from a small book, microphones in hand, they professed their promises with the heart and soul of two people we knew — and hadn’t quite witnessed until then. They’d grown more together than any of us realized, and now we were overcome by this new union.

The Lacrimosa isn’t meant to be tears of joy. It’s weeping, and a fear of God’s wrath. But all I knew, standing there, was that this presentation of love in front of all of us could only call up a plea for mercy.

It came in the form of a rainbow.

I mean, a requiem? Really?

What even is that, and why can’t I just sit down like most normal people, with my post wedding insights and musings and put them into a form that is both useful and interesting for my substack readership?

Well, because writing is art, and art is about the creative inside us that makes its way outside of us, to be read by us writers, other, or no one. The expression is what matters.

So, I wanted, mid-requiem - to try to explain why I’ve been narrating the experience of my daughter’s wedding using nine-hundred-year-old Latin funeral music. If I don’t, I fear this whole series either just sounds like I’m sad or pretentious, and I promise I’m mostly neither.

Here’s the thing about a requiem nobody tells you up front: the word itself just means rest. It’s not death, not doom, nor some scary religious icon bearing down on you. It’s rest, asked for on someone’s behalf. “Requiem aeternam dona eis.” Grant them eternal rest. That’s it. That’s the whole ominous reputation, built on a word that’s actually just asking for someone to finally get some sleep, what most of us consider sacred these days.

I get, though, why it feels other-worldly and hard to relate to, because it is.

A requiem was built to hold something too big for regular language: birth, death - moments that change us, and capture the emotion surrounding that change.

Weddings are already halfway to religious even when nobody in the room is particularly religious — the vows, the witnesses, the promise made out loud in front of everyone so it can’t be quietly taken back later. They make us laugh, cry and in general, feel like there is a moment outside of our crazy lives that deserves a bit of reverence.

.Then there is the desire to get away from church - the music, the boredom as kids, the rituals we don’t believe in - all of it.

I didn’t reach for a requiem because Hannah’s wedding felt like some morbid mass or a remembrance of my Catholic childhood. I reached for it because when loads of people asked me, ‘how was the wedding?’ -I realized I didn’t have words that could accurately describe what I felt. But I had music in my head. Listen to the Lacrimosa movement of Mozart’s requiem, and you might get the picture.

Maybe it’s because my daughter was trained in classical voice, maybe it’s because I am a lover of classical music and feel like music can communicate for me, often better than words can. Maybe it’s because I needed some adjectives that came in the form of a chorale of voices that could adequately explain the emotion of what I was feeling.

Whatever the reason, laying out a requiem’s movements, and explaining them from start to finish, felt like a useful and cathartic exercise. So, if you have followed along, thank you. If you bailed at the first words of Latin, I get it and don’t hold it against you. And if you are willing to get to the finish line, here’s a recap - a requiem for dummies kind of glossary - that lays it out so we can all get on with and through it, finally. Amen.

Introitus

The opening plea. Grant them rest. Basically: please let this be okay. For every parent ushering your child towards something big - here we go.

Kyrie

Lord have mercy, three times, back to back. The liturgical equivalent of saying “oh god, oh god, oh god” under your breath while doing something that terrifies and thrills you in equal measure. Getting dressed, getting sick, getting through it - whatever.

Dies irae

The famous one — the one that shows up in horror movie trailers. Day of wrath, trumpets, the sky splitting open. In requiem-for-a-wedding terms: every logistics catastrophe we didn’t see coming. A birth certificate in the wrong hemisphere, the bride’s father gone quiet the night before, for reasons no one can name. The universe reminding you it is never fully under our control to begin with.

Recordare

Remember. The music stops shouting and just asks you to hold onto why you came in the first place. Mine showed up in a mall parking lot where my sister was picking up wedding flowers from a farmer, which is about as unglamorous as remembering gets, and also exactly where an unexpected act of grace means the world.

Confutatis

“I kneel with a contrite heart.” Extremely on brand for the part of the weekend where I was crouched over a folding chair, digging through a row of identical linen blazers looking for my toast, while two hundred people waited politely for me to locate it in my husband’s jacket pocket.

That’s where we left off. These remaining are what’s coming up.

Lacrimosa

The weeping one. Traditionally the most tender movement in the whole Mass, and I’m not going to pretend I know exactly what I’ll say about it yet, because that’s the ceremony itself, and I have been thinking about it and dreaming about it for weeks.

Offertorium

An offering. What you hand over, on purpose, knowing you don’t get it back the same way.

Sanctus and Benedictus

Holy, holy, holy — blessed is the one who comes. The part of the Mass that finally stops asking for anything and just says: this is good. Arrival. The room is exhaling.

Agnus Dei

Lamb of God, grant us peace. A plea, at the very end, for the thing everyone actually wants underneath all of it.

Lux aeterna

Let eternal light shine on them. The closing movement — not resolution exactly, more like the moment after a big exhale where everything’s just a little quieter than before.

That’s the whole thing.

It is essentially one weekend in my hometown, made into nine movements over the rough timeline of the actual weekend.

Before I go any further, I should probably say who I’m actually writing this for, because I don’t think it’s obvious, and I don’t think I fully knew it myself when I started.

First, embarrassingly, it’s me. This is the part where I stop being coy about it. I am writing this because something happened to me that was so enormous — so much love, arriving all at once, for a daughter I already loved completely and now a son I somehow love more than I thought there was room for — that ordinary sentences kept collapsing under the weight of it. “It was a beautiful wedding” is true and also insulting to what actually happened that weekend.

I needed a structure built for something that size, and it turns out the only one I had lying around was the one my mother handed me — a painter of liturgical art, a woman who filled churches with meaning for a living. Classical music, ceremony, remembrance — that’s just the language I have.

This series is me using it to make sense of my own heart, out loud, on the page, because I couldn’t do it any other way.

And maybe it’s not just for my daughter’s wedding, but rather for the weddings (yes, plural)that my husband and I are deep into this year. Hers in August, his in November. Yes, three months from now our son is getting married. Hence the momentous feeling, the emotion, the reminder to myself that what is playing in my head is indeed a requiem.

Second, this essay series is for women like me — women in a new chapter, sensing that life is supposed to get more expansive from here, without a clear map for what that even means. If that’s you: this is me going first, honestly, as a writer and painter, so you have permission to feel whatever this next phase actually brings you, instead of whatever you assumed you were supposed to feel.

And third — this one might matter most — it’s for anyone who has delivered a child into their next life and found themselves ambushed by the strange, unnamed thing that happens when you are, simultaneously, the luckiest person alive and completely undone. Nobody hands you language for that particular weather.

“Bittersweet” is too small a word for it, so is “momentous”.

This series is my attempt at a bigger one — a kind of post-mortem, in the most literal sense, for an event that didn’t involve a death at all, and somehow still asked me to grieve.

And here’s where I’ll cop to the part that’s less Catholic than it is just true: I don’t think you need to believe in anything in particular for this structure to work on you. A requiem, underneath the Latin, is just a very old, very beautiful way of saying that things end, that endings deserve ceremony, and that impermanence is not the opposite of sacredness — it’s the whole reason something gets to be sacred in the first place.

My daughter is not gone. She got married on the ocean under a sky that produced an actual rainbow with no rain in it, surrounded by people who love her, and something about our life together as it existed before that day is over regardless. Both are true. That tension is the whole series.

I’m not asking you to know Latin. I certainly have forgotten all those early masses, thank God. I’m asking you to sit with me for a few more of these, because I think grief and joy showing up in the same room, on the same weekend, wearing the same dress, is worth slowing down for. May we all will have moments like these in our lives and the ability to feel them so intensely.

Stay tuned for the upcoming movements.

I opened my eyes Friday morning and looked over at Dan before I looked at anything else. Still asleep. I crept out, made coffee, tiptoed down the stairs carrying both the excitement and the sheer weight of the day ahead in the same body.

The trumpets from the night before hadn’t fully stopped — they were still sounding, quieter now, less “day of judgment” and more a kind of hushed, communal “feel better, rest up, we’ve got a big weekend ahead.” I could feel them less in my ears and more in the center of my chest.

It was another perfect day — blue sky, sun, birds, the whole New England postcard doing its job. I checked the clock and thought about my sister, already driving north to meet our flower farmer in a parking lot somewhere between her farm and the coast, picking up what would become Hannah’s bouquet and hairpieces the next day, one of maybe twelve things still on my list. Recordare, right there in an unglamorous mall parking lot exchange of flowers between women — remembering, plainly, why any of us were doing any of this.

Then Dan came downstairs and said, “Feeling good,” and just like that we were allowed to get back to the actual business of the weekend — summer, the ocean, my daughter’s wedding — instead of the private contingency planning I’d been running since Thursday.

The house turned into a hive almost instantly. We were packing with a frenzy - groceries, garment backs, beach towels and chairs and wedding paraphernalia everywhere. We had an hour to pack up, move out, and get to the wharf where the kids had planned a sail around the harbor before anything official began. It was a genuinely sweet idea and generous gesture for all of the family and their closest friends on the water together before the noise of the weekend really started. We loaded onto the boat three grandmothers, two of them in their nineties, one seven-month-old, and the rest of the gang, and pushed off.

The wind picked up almost like it had read the movement title — reminding us of the beauty and the joy we were there for. Then, a few minutes later, the sails just luffed, went slack in the thick, humid air, and reminded us of something else entirely: that none of this was up to us. Not the wind, not the weather, not really any of it. The group’s mood buoyed us, but the wind humbled us. Both, somehow, in the same twenty minutes on the same boat.

By the time we’d checked into the Inn and changed into our Friday night finery, making our way to the mansion — the beech trees, a hundred and fifty years old, moving in the evening air — were somehow calling to us. Hannah and Ty were already rounding up the early arrivals after a cursory wedding rehearsal that took a few minutes, and the family and close friends who’d been on the boat with us hours earlier, were attentive and alert for an entirely different kind of evening. The jazz trio was warming up, and something about that sound — live, human, imperfect in the best way — pulled the whole group in close, into one collective group circle that said ‘here we go’ without any words.

We all just looked at each other across the circle. It was enough to take your breath away on its own, never mind that I was still an hour away from from standing up in front of two hundred people to say the words that had already wrecked me in private, in the shower, on the beach, to a very patient dog — and now had to somehow find them again, out loud, in front of everyone, and let the room feel even a fraction of what I’d been feeling about these two for months.

When it was time to kick off the toasting, I looked for Dan in the crowd as he had my printed copy. In the heat, all the men ditched their blazers. My toast was in the breast pocket of his where he had tucked it earlier for safekeeping. He’s dependable like this, always, and one of the things I love about him. However, as lovely as that gesture sounds, that would have been great if either of us could identify to innumerable jackets that hung over chairs all looking identical.

By the time the crowd had gathered and the mic was being handed my way, we were both moving jacket to jacket along a row of chairs — ruffling through identical linen jackets, give or take, none of them apparently his — patting down breast pockets like we were trying to find a hidden treasure on a game show. This is the part of Confutatis nobody tells you about. I kneel with a contrite heart. Mine wasn’t kneeling, it was crouched over a folding chair, whispering something unrepeatable to my husband while two hundred people waited politely.

We found it. Mic in hand, hands a little shaky, I jumped in: “Every little girl dreams of being a princess. Hannah wanted to be the horse. She has been rewriting fairy tales ever since.” The opening landed exactly the way I’d hoped it would, a wave of laughter rolling across that cavernous patio, and just like that I was off to a good start. The rest came easier than I expected. I found myself looking out at actual faces — friends, family, people who’d known her since she was small — and every single one of them was rooting for me with their eyes before I’d even finished a sentence. By the end they were fully mine, whooping, crying, and clapping like they’d been waiting all night for permission to feel exactly that much, filled the space.

I was done. I reached for the champagne like it was medically necessary. It had never tasted so good.

And in that exhale — the toast behind me, the relief flooding in — I felt the whole point of Recordare arrive in my body, not just my head. Remember why you’re here. We were there to celebrate two people we all adored finding each other, in a setting grander than any of us had quite reckoned with — the old beech trees, the stars actually visible overhead, the jazz trio deep in their own rhythm like they had nowhere else to be. It was enough to tip the whole evening into something sublime. The dizzying, almost unbearable reminder that if you are lucky enough to find real love, and lucky enough to be surrounded by a community that shows up for it this fully, this genuinely — you already have every riches the world has to offer. You don’t need to go looking for more.

This is the loud, the big one, the moment. In every setting I’ve ever heard, it’s the movement where the choir stops being polite — strings vibrate, the trumpets sound, and everyone sings as if to intentionally see if the roof will actually be raised by music and voice alone. It’s not restrained grief. It’s the sound of something that might just crack us wide open.

Thursday was hot, properly hot, the kind of thick, humid August day in New England that makes everyone a little slower and a little more grateful for fall. Dan came in from the backyard after a workout looking wiped — not himself, just done — and said, calmly, that he didn’t feel great, that he was going to lie down. Hmm, I thought. OK. Maybe he should come to the beach with us instead; I could already hear my mother’s voice in my head, the way she said it every single summer of my childhood — the ocean heals everything. But he pulled the shades, turned on the AC, and stayed behind to rest. So off we went without him, to my favorite place in the world.

The rest of us went out into waves that were probably a little too big but tempted us anyway, knowing what the ocean looks like after a crazy summer storm. With a rehearsal dinner in six hours, I was just hoping we wouldn’t get flattened and could just have the kindest part of the waves wash us over and cleanse us with some calming ritual. Lifeguards insisted that no one go higher than their thighs, so we dipped and dived in the crashing way that was both exhilarating and terrifying - you know, in that specific way where you can feel your own adrenaline deciding things for you. At one point, I looked over at Hannah and think I proclaimed that this was the best day of my life. We returned to the house lit up, salt-crusted, and ready for anything.

Dan was still in bed. He was not better, not worse, just there, quiet in a way I couldn’t quite place. Hannah and Ty had both gone down with something the week before, and my first thought was the least helpful one available: what if it’s that, and what if it doesn’t pass, and what if I’m doing this entire weekend solo. I didn’t say any of that out loud. I just watched him not get up and also not be able to tell me what it felt like. Was it exhaustion? The Flu? A cold? A stomach bug? I had no idea, and he was offering any additional insights.

That night was the first big dinner in Newport, all of us with the new in-laws for the first time as one full group, toasting to Hannah and Ty. And Dan — who is a great dinner party host, who is never the quiet one at a table — barely said a word. I sat there smiling, being pleasant and present and doing math in my head the entire time: if he’s sick tomorrow, if he’s sick Saturday, if I have to carry this by myself, can I? Would I give my toast Friday and his Saturday? Would I step in for the Father/Daughter dance and start a new tradition with mothers? I didn’t know the answer. I just kept smiling and passing the wine.

My daughter had already moved ahead of the rest of us that day, from my hometown to the inn in Newport where we’d all be staying starting Friday. She knows me. She knows I don’t angst, so when I climbed into bed that night after a dinner that had been delicious, scary, perplexing and, underneath it, still somehow wonderful, my phone lit up. Not a call — texts, the three dots appearing and disappearing in the dark while Dan slept beside me, unaware. I hope he’s better by tomorrow — nap between sailboat and party. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just too much pressure and he crashed a little. Then, when I told her I’d never seen him that quiet, she offered me a gift in the dark - Don’t worry — he’s saving his energy. I know his ways. It’s exactly how I am.

Exactly how she is.

I lay there in the dark reading it twice. That’s the trumpet, if you ask me — not the apocalyptic kind, not graves opening. The other kind. Small, insistent, arriving exactly when it’s needed, summoning you not to judgment but back to yourself. My daughter, two days from her own wedding, using whatever she had left over to calm her mother down. I don’t know how she had anything left over. But she did, and she gave it to me, and I fell asleep believing her.

Nothing was resolved yet. Dan still lay there quiet. Friday was still unknown. But I’d been handed something to hold onto in the dark, which, it turns out, is exactly what a trumpet is for.

I have always loved trumpets - now I know why.

Grant them rest, and let light shine on them.

That’s the opening line of a Requiem, and it turns out to be, weirdly, a request for the dead to please get some sleep. I love that. I love sleeping and, based on my survey of friends in their 60s, no one is getting enough. So may we all get more rest, especially my newlywed daughter and my new son in law (who, like me, is great at sleeping).

Every Sunday of my childhood taught me that God was less of a thunder and judgment kind of presence, and more of a kind voice to ask things of when and if we needed him/her. While that might sound relaxed for an Irish Catholic girl that grew up in the 70s and 80s, I did have to go to church until I went to college - then all bets were off.

It was the music that kept me going back.

To me, there is nothing like a thunderous organ opening that goes right through you, or the gentleness of church music which, to me, feels like essentially tucking someone into bed. Classical music is how I start my day, and a requiem’s movements are food for my soul.

The week of the wedding, we drove up to my hometown on the Monday beforehand and rented a house to fit everyone that just happened to be on the same street on which I grew up. That’s right, our house of 25 years where we grew food for 12, played baseball, had fights, went to school, and shared everything from secrets to clothes to bikes and both the fear and exhilaration of leaving our childhood, was a stone’s throw from my week preparing our daughter’s wedding.

She loves that town and every small town thing about it - the beach, Main St. the chowder, ice cream and frozen lemonade of her childhood and the picturesque New England scenery that takes your breath away no matter how many times we come home. Now her soon to be husband shares the love of that place, and they, like my husband and I, they too now can reminisce about getting married and starting their life there. It’s a full circle moment for sure.

I’d spent most of the last year painting and designing all 14 pieces of the wedding stationery to reflect that place - lobsters, lighthouses, shells, the ocean and all of the glorious images that remind me, and now them, why we love this place. Having it displayed for all of our friends and family simply felt like an extension of my childhood - drawing at the playroom table while my mother painted, did woodcuts, or prepared for summer art festivals.

Though she died in my daughter’s early life, she too would have approved of the designed pieces of my art, the flowers I turned into my daughter’s bouquet and for her hair, and the ocean setting which was the grandest decision of all. Any artist might dream about a first show, but for me, it was the greatest background scenery to two people falling in love. Nobody claps for the place cards. I clapped for myself, quietly, in the car, then was overcome with the guests, the vows, the scenery and the love. The whole scene felt like the same joke the universe kept telling me all year: you keep ending up exactly where you’re from, right when you need it most, whether you’re ready or not. I wasn’t ready, even though I thought I was. But there we were anyway.

Kyrie

Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

Three times, no elaboration, which is the whole appeal of it. There’s no argument built into Kyrie. You don’t have to justify why you need help, or prove you’ve earned it, or explain yourself to anyone with a clipboard. You just say the same four words until someone, somewhere, answers.

The second day after we arrived, we took to the ocean like it was medicine, because it was. We ate corn and tomatoes from the stand like we were doing penance for a sin we hadn’t committed yet — the sin, it turned out, was thinking any of this was going to be relaxing.

The house had five bedrooms and every single one of them was already bursting with garment bags, materials for the reception, boxes from Amazon which included various tape, clips, and other supplies that all looked like the specific chaos of a family reassembling itself under one roof for the first time in years for something ominous. I remember standing in the hallway at one point just breathing it in, thinking, this is either going to be the best week of my life or I am going to lose my mind in this particular hallway, and honestly it was both. (especially when the toilet kept running all night).

Wednesday was the plot twist nobody puts in the wedding program: a Hong Kong birth certificate that we painstakingly procured from a UK agent who fetched it in Hong Kong, some prayers and DHL, that was presented to a Town Hall clerk who was issuing marriage licenses from laws that seemed to be roughly from 1776.

I said a version of Kyrie eleison about four hundred times that day, though at the time it sounded more like “please, PLEASE, just let them accept the document,” said to no one in particular, possibly out loud (by accident) to a woman in the coffee shop. The kids called from the license office having somehow pulled it off anyway, and I cried right into my coffee and into the arms of my oldest college friend and my daughter’s godmother. It was a great moment

.And underneath all of it — the swimming, the corn, the phone calls — I was rehearsing the toast. On the beach, in the shower, to the dog, who by day three had developed the long-suffering expression of an animal who has heard “she wanted to be the horse” one too many times. Butterflies the whole time. Not nerves exactly. More like my body already knew something enormous was coming and hadn’t bothered to tell my brain yet.

Mercy came, eventually, in the most unglamorous form possible: a small Town Hall clerk’s office, doing its job on time. I’ll take it. I’ve asked for less and gotten worse.

So to give it the due that it deserves, I stole a structure instead that I think will help me get it out with the right emphasis — the Requiem, nine movements sung at a Mass for the dead — because I come from a long line of people who, when something is too big to say plainly, we create something more momentous, add it to music, in Latin.

I grew up Catholic, Irish-Catholic, which is its own specific flavor of drama — nuns who could make you feel spiritually accountable for a math test and ask you to profess your sins, all before hitting the boys with rulers. (seems like a double standard to me). My mother was a liturgical artist so devoted to her ten kids, her art and her teaching that I’m fairly sure sainthood was on the table, had she wanted it. ( I would have nominated her). And this Substack is named Hail Mary for her, and for the fact that I started to paint in my sixties after she taught me at 12 and I never did it again. The name felt exactly like what it suggests — a hope, and a prayer, thrown up toward something I can’t really see the end of.

So no, this isn’t me borrowing some patriarchal church’s language to sound serious. This is the language I actually grew up with and the music that transports me to other places, times and states of being, whether or not I’ve been to Mass lately. And if you didn’t grow up with any of it — no Latin, no nuns, no fear of a particular pew or the smell of incense, — that’s fine, come anyway. I’ll translate everything as we go. You just need to have loved someone enough to be terrified of losing them into their own life, which, near as I can tell, is a fully ecumenical experience.

Nine movements, three parts, and I’ll post them as they come — not weekly, not tidy, and with no promises I can get what’s in my head and heart onto the page. These musings will show up the way my daughter used to start warming up her soprano voice while doing the dishes, because she needed to express with her voice and those exercises needed to go somewhere. They might come in the way the sun comes over the hill whether you’re awake for it or not, or — and this one actually happened, no metaphor required — the way a rainbow showed up over the wedding, facing a grove of trees, with the ocean all around, and in the middle of their vows, with no rain. None. Everyone exclaimed it afterwards, as if they couldn’t believe it themselves, and they were checking with me as if I had a straight line to Mary herself. I didn’t, and don’t. But it was magical, even spiritual.

So if you wonder what the ‘after’ feels like (not the after life, don’t panic), come along. It’s not worth refreshing your inbox, just trust it’s coming, the way that rainbow did — entirely uninvited, and completely on time.

Instead, this time, I am the mother. I am the matriarch of this household, however temporary, the one everyone looks to for the next chore, the next errand, the next thing that needs doing before Saturday.

There’s a particular vertigo in that — being every age you’ve ever been on a street, while also being the adult everyone is looking to for answers and direction.

The house has been a big, happy chaos for days. Packages arrive faster than we can open them. Beach towels are drying on every railing we have. Runs to the grocery store where I totated fruit as a teenager, buying lemons and more salad greens like it’s the most ordinary errand in the world, when it is anything but.

My sisters have come bearing wine and homemade cookies, scones and flowers, the way sisters do when they know words won’t be enough. Phones buzz constantly. Cars pull in and out. And then, every so often, the church bell rings in town or a stretch of morning silence before the house wakes invites me to pause — and I find myself standing very still in it, trying to make time behave, trying to hold the day open a little longer than it wants to be held.

It doesn’t listen. It never does.

The best part of these days has been the ocean.

Hannah and I have swum together the last few days, and she goes under the waves looking so joyful, so entirely unburdened, that you’d never guess — but I know. I know because I feel it too, that same flutter just beneath the surface of things. The water doesn’t ask us to explain it. It just holds us, cold and constant, and lets us come out the other side a little more collected than we went in. I don’t know what we’d do without it this week.

In a few days, this will all be memory instead of anticipation. That’s the strange trade life keeps making with us — the excitement of what’s coming turns, almost overnight, into the exhale of what happened. Both are real. Both are, in their own way, kind. And still we so rarely let ourselves stay in either one — we rush the anticipating to get to the doing, and then rush past the doing, already grieving it before it’s even over.

So this is me, trying not to do that. Trying to actually be here, on this street, in this body that remembers being young here, watching my daughter dive into the same water I dived into fifty summers ago as a young child, days before she becomes someone’s wife.

This is where the magic actually lives — not in the remembering, not in the anticipating, but in the strange, humid, bell-interrupted middle we’re standing in right now.

Here we go.

It was Brian Eno, being interviewed by Ezra Klein about art. I was never a huge Eno fan, but just ask, ‘what is art?’, and I’m right there.

If you don’t know who Brian Eno is, he’s a musician, producer, and artist often called the father of ambient music, and he’s spent decades thinking out loud about where creativity actually comes from.

On the podcast, he’d said this:

“We are being told — probably about 10,000 or 12,000 times a day — what we ought to like, what other people like, what some people would prefer that we liked.

We’re told that in the form of advertising, in the form of political messages, in the form of all of the things that try to persuade us to think or believe one thing rather than another.

Persuasion is the biggest industry in the Western world, actually. And it’s very easy — in that flood, that tsunami of suggestions about what we ought to like — to forget what we actually do like.”

For anyone not hiding in a cave in Montana, you know what I mean. You can still consider yourself relatively analog or unplugged and still be bombarded twelve thousand times a day.

What to wear, what to eat, how to eat, what to buy, what to want, how to age, how to think, what my kitchen should look like, what my body should look like, what a woman my age should be doing with her one wild afternoon or why her hair is apparently falling out of her head.

Twelve thousand little instructions — and somewhere underneath all of them, apparently, is a person who used to know what she actually liked.

I mean, I am a decisive person. I am unambiguous (very opinionated) about most things, and many times a day, I find myself mindlessly wondering when these messages surround me. Internet ads, billboards, radio, podcast ads, newsfeeds, YouTube instructions, direct mail - it’s endless.

Do I believe that? Like those? Am I worried about that?

I stopped on the street while walking back with my two heavy bags because I created a branding strategy for companies and non-profits who didn’t like external agencies telling them about their work. The distillations and sweeping reveals of new logos, tag lines, mission and vision statements all felt ‘off’ somehow, like they didn’t really ‘get ‘who they were’.

The time seemed ripe to build on the idea of truth (and this was a long time ago). It (obviously) still resonates today - more than ever.

I started my clients with what I knew was not a softball kind of question - Who Are You? In fact, if we couldn’t answer this as a team, I knew we had bigger problems. The process itself was rich with learning, engagement, team building and little discoveries about everyone on the team. From that question, we built out identity beyond the organization to a sense of place, vision, ambition, goals, risks and all kinds of things that stem from who we are.

As I walked home, pondering Brian Eno’s statement about how culture is being determined for us, rather than coming from us, I wanted to re-visit a simple, but not easy question to ask - who are you?

As a brand strategist. My whole job was helping my clients to cut through the noise and find the true thing underneath — the real identity that was theirs and no one else’s. As a human being - a mother, wife, artist, friend, mentor and creative, I wanted to remind myself, and others, that sitting with this question and revisiting the things you used to be moved by, passionate about or interested in, is worth reminding yourself - before someone else decides what you should like.

The thing is: brands are made up by people. Same problem, same solution.

Companies come to you convinced their identity is a marketing problem — a logo, a tagline, a color palette. It almost never is. Underneath, they have simply lost track of who they are, because they’ve spent years responding to the market’s twelve thousand daily signals instead of listening to themselves - how did they get started? What was the catalyst? Why did it matter? What has changed in the marketplace? What’s new, old, the same? My job was never to invent an identity for them. It was to help them recover the one they already had and had buried.

For a question asking, Who are you?, you would not believe how long accomplished people sit in silence in front of that question. Founders who could quote their revenue to the dollar would go as quiet as church-goers. They had answers for everything except themselves.

It took me until my sixties to turn the question around and aim it at myself. And the honest first answer was: I thought I was pretty sure, but I am learning some things, so let me get back to you.

I could have told you instantly what everyone around me needed. I still can, but I do hesitate more now. That is a different skill, and I had honed it to a fine point over a lifetime.

What scares me about our ubiquitous cultural noise these days, is that we can so easily fall into autopilot - buy the homogeneous thing, eat what she’s eating, listen to the created playlist. But there’s a danger to it - letting what makes you, well, you - your likes, loves, loathes - all of it, to just atrophy, runs the risk of losing the essence of who you are.

So when I started working the questions on myself, I started noticing how I feel. What moves me, what gives me goosebumps, what drives me to want to learn more, what inspires me?

My key to unlocking everything I am is through creativity. It’s how I discover new recipes, new flower species, new artists and media to try, new music to listen to, new anything.

In the interview, Eno talks about how to make sure we stay connected to what we like:

“One of the things that happens when you are looking at art or listening to art, something connects to you, and you think: That’s what I really like. That’s what really moves me.

I think when that happens, you should pay attention to that. You should think: Why do I really like that? What does that mean that I like that thing? What does that connect me to that’s so important to me?”

That is the whole method, said better than I could have ever said to a client. You cannot always think your way to who you are. But you can notice your way there. Something moves you — a painting, a song, a color, a taste, a sound,— and that reaction is the truest, least persuadable thing about you, because no one else told you to feel that way. The flood tells you what you should like. Your own feelings tell you who you actually are.

Pay attention. .

When I finally started making art a few years ago, I tapped into a whole new set of likes and dislikes that are simply building on who I am. I like unfussy things. I art that I can finish in a session. I like a loose, interpretive style over a precise one.. A few years ago I could not have told you any of that. Now I could go on for an hour. Nothing new was installed in me. Creativity just unlocked a whole new part of me around which I apparently have more strong feelings. (no surprise).

I ask the question. Who are you, especially for the women reading — the ones who have spent thirty or forty or fifty years exquisitely attuned to what everyone else likes, needs, and prefers. You are so fluent in other people’s taste that you may have genuinely forgotten you were ever a person with your own. You still are. She is not gone. She is buried under twelve thousand daily instructions and several decades of being needed.

I am here to tell you that she is entirely recoverable.

You do not have to overhaul your life to find her. You do not need a new skill or a permission slip from anyone. You only have to start noticing — and then ask Eno’s beautiful follow-up. The next time something stops you, don’t scroll past it. Stop. Ask: why do I like that? What does it connect me to that’s so important to me?

In a world running a twelve-thousand-message-a-day persuasion industry aimed straight at your desire, knowing what you actually like — for no reason, for no one, just because it moves you — may be one of the last truly free things you can do.

It is not too late to find out who you are.

Most of us are only just getting started.

— MJ

Not because there was never a chance to. I grew up in a house that was full of art supplies — my mother taught art, and that meant there was always paper, always paint, always some material to make a mess with and the time to do it. She never sat us down and instructed us. She just made sure the makings were there, and that nobody told you to stop.

So I made things, the way kids do.

I also played music and ran around, climbed trees, did sports everything else a childhood has in it. Then, when I was twelve, my mother asked me to join a special art class she was teaching — for the gifted-and-talented kids, though I have always suspected I got in on a mother’s proxy. It didn’t matter to me why. What I remember is learning to oil paint (so grown up!), and loving it, and loving the palette knife most of all — that thick, decisive, forgiving swipe of color.

That was it.

And then I moved up to middle school, and then high school, and then college, and then a whole life. I did not pick up a brush or palette knife again for fifty years.

That is the part I want you to sit with, because I know some version of it is true for you too. There was a thing you loved once, early, before the world (and possibly you), got serious. And then you set it down — not dramatically, not with any decision at all — and the years simply closed over it.

Sometimes you think about it, and maybe you feel a little bad, but then you are onto another thing.

Here is the fear underneath every midlife pivot, and I suspect you know it as intimately as I do. It is the fear that there was a right time to become who you actually are, and that it has quietly passed you by.

That the window was open once, back when you had the energy or the nerve or the free afternoons, and you were busy being useful, and now you have missed it. Now, if you are lucky, you tell yourself, the most you can hope for is a hobby (‘you should be grateful!’, you even whisper to yourself at night). You have a good life, you remind yourself, you can leave it to the young people to have a go at that now.

I didn’t really think about art all those decades, but I did admire art, design, and wonder what my life might have been like had I followed that path.

What finally happened in my case, was not a pep talk or an intervention of friends telling me I should quit my job and do that thing. Instead, it was a series of small, unplanned things that showed up at my door — one of them literally.

A beautiful artist’s box of paints - watercolors, acrylics and oils - arrived at our house as a Christmas gift. A gift from a colleague of my husband’s to encourage creativity to employees of the whole organization, so more or less by accident. This is the kind of thing that lands on your porch when you have started, even quietly, to lean in a certain direction. A few years earlier I would have set it in a closet with a vague someday. This time I opened it and used it.

And then, not long after, my daughter asked me to paint her wedding stationary.

All of it — the save the dates, the invitations, the menus, the place cards, the whole paper world of a summer wedding. She asked as though it were the most obvious thing on earth, as though of course her mother the painter would do this. Of course I said yes. I was thrilled.

I did not hesitate. Not for a second. And because I am a person who very infrequently examines things, I have wondered as we near the event, why did this decision - - to lay it all out, for hundreds of our friends and family members to see, produce no fear in me at all, when the mere question of someone wanting to buy my art, terrifies me.

Here is what I landed on.

I did not hesitate because I was not thinking about myself.

If my daughter had asked me to mount a show of my own paintings — my name on the wall, my work under the lights, strangers with wine deciding whether I was any good — I would have found nine reasons to wait until I was ready, which is to say forever.

But she did not ask me for that. She asked me to make something for her, and for the man she loves. And the instant the work was for someone else, the fear had nowhere to stand.

So I am kind of thinking to myself that this is my first show. Not a gallery. A wedding. And I get to have it without the usual run-up — no years of building a portfolio, no waiting to be a pro, no proving I was an expert first. I am simply turning down the channel in my head that has been playing the same four songs my whole life: be perfect. Be the best. Be an authority. Wait for the right time. I am turning it down, and turning up the idea that making for others is simply what I want to do. Cards for sick friends, paintings for every season’s gifts, little notes of inspiration and affirmation when friends and family are feeling down - what better motivation for the brush, the knife or my time?

Time is the most precious thing we have in the third third of our lives.

Here is what I have come to believe.

When you open yourself up to do something for someone else, all kinds of things start showing up to help you do it. A free box of paints. An invitation you’d never have had the nerve to ask for. A reason to begin that is bigger than your fear of beginning. The opportunities were probably always there. It’s the opening-up that makes you able to see them.

And as we have only a few weeks to go before the wedding, I am pondering with my husband these days:

What sits at the heart of a marriage? Unconditional love. Commitment. Joy. And imperfection — always imperfection, because two whole people cannot fold two lives together without wrinkles, and the couples who last are the ones who stop trying to iron them all flat.

Which is also, it turns out, what sits at the heart of a vocation. Of any true thing you hand your life to, late or early. You commit before you know how it ends. You love it on the days it does not love you back. You accept it will never be perfect and you show up anyway, because showing up is the marriage. These wedding pieces are imperfect. So was the union of my own hands to this work — late, a little clumsy, and completely real.

If you are circling something right now — a pivot, a practice, a version of yourself you keep almost starting — you are probably waiting to feel ready. To be good enough first. To find the right time. I am here, fifty years and one palette knife and one free box of paints later, to tell you the right time is a myth invented by the part of you that is scared. You will not feel ready. You commit, and the readiness turns up later, somewhere in the middle of the work, usually while you’re busy making something for someone you love.

In a few weeks, I will be at my daughter’s wedding — on a coast in the state where I grew up, with everyone who loves her in one place, and as I look around, I will see tiny touches made with paints that more or less arrived on their own, out of a thing my mother put in my hands so long ago that I am only now understanding it was seed, not accident.

I did not earn my way back to this through discipline or a plan. I got here by staying a little open — open enough to use the paints when they came, open enough to say yes when my daughter asked, open enough to let the work be for someone other than me.

So let me be the one to say it to you, the way I finally said it to myself. It is not too late. It was never a window — windows close. This is a door, and doors do not check what time you arrive.

It is later than you planned. That is a different thing, and a kinder one, and very possibly the best thing that could have happened to you.

— MJ

I always loved art, and watching her make it, but never practiced it much, not like now anyway, when I can’t stop painting. These days, I am spending time painting wedding invitations, watercoloring menus, fashioning wire and twine as a way of exploring the best display for guests to find their seat. There is always a sketch, maybe some glue, and usually watercolor for quick sketches. I know that these programs, postcards, and menus will be swept away at the end of the night or folded into purses and forgotten by the band’s first song. But I am very clear, the joy I get in doing this, far outweighs any compliment that someone might give.

For both of my kids’ impending weddings this year, I got to paint Save-the-Dates - first haphazardly, then with a bit more intention and success. There were many we loved by the end, and by the time I painted an oil for Hannah’s shower gift, I could almost think it was decent, and that my mother would actually like it. That’s how it is as artists - we are never quite good enough, always learning, always improving, and always self critical. That painting I made for her deserves a partner, and I have been mulling the subject and light for weeks now. Luckily, no one will know how much time I am spending thinking about it.

It is the same process my mother had, it simply has shifted from her own oil, watercolor or woodcut process, to my post consumer content pieces of paper that are serving as a guideline for an event. Both are examples of art we made, for people we love. And what a joy it is when I make a swift and confident mark to see my mother’s stroke in my own. I know she is there in the art.

My mother died when my children were toddlers. They don’t really remember her, but they grew up with me and my sisters referring to this creative force their whole lives. Sure, her art work has always been around our house, but she is more a mythical character to them - like some ancient grandmother known for feeding armies of children and enduring the public school system with constant art cuts, and making frequent miracles happen as if she were a central figure in the loaves and fishes story.

They know I am who I am because of her, and they, in part, are who they are because of us. They are young enough that what they remember of her isn’t memory really, it’s more like inheritance. She never got to see who they became - Hannah, the writer, actor, producer, and a soprano good enough to make a room go quiet. She is a creative force the way some people are simply, unmistakably a certain height. Her brother, Will, is a different form of creative. He is entrepreneurial, can get bored easily and can be impulsive and impatient, also like me. He is confident, passionate, a self-starter, and self learner. Luckily, my husband’s humility and diplomacy covers all of us like a table cloth just back from the cleaners. We all know the tropes about creatives being scattered and messy. We’re that and more.

I am grateful that both of my kids have the creative daring that reminds me of my grandparents parents coming through Ellis Island during the Great Famine in Ireland. Leaving one’s home country is one of the biggest acts of courage and creativity I can imagine. Picturing what it will be like, imagining new family, friends, jobs and livelihoods. Starting over with nothing but the shirt on your back. Creativity, it turns out, is all around us - in our kitchens, our gardens, our sewing machines and in our church basements. When the early immigrants came, it was true survivor - tribes and all, in real life, surviving, and thriving - without reality TV.

This is what we do with generational inheritance - grandparents to parents to children and grandchildren. We hand down the ritual, not the résumé. My mother handed me a window into her woodcut process on the weekends when I watched her for hours, afraid her hand would slip and ruin both the piece and her own skin. I have handed down to my own children, something less holy and, I’d argue, no less sacred: cooking fast and a little messy, hosting large gatherings for friends and family, displaying our art all over the house, even in frames that don’t match, and the conviction that imperfect and joyful are better than careful and correct every time. I have never been much of a tidy cook, gardener, hostess, or seamstress. I am definitely not a tidy artist. I am not a planner, to be generous, and definitely would say my life falls into spontaneous living, if that even is a category. My kids, for better or worse, have followed in my footsteps.

They are both, this year, mildly frantic about a hundred details most people never think about until they’re the one holding all the threads. Hannah has strong opinions about colors, Will likes a modern aesthetic. Hannah hates the idea of anything matching, while Will and his fiance’s palette is finely throughout wedding decor. The thing that matters, as we all know, is that they are mad for their partners as I was for mine 33 years ago. Lucky for me, they are not heading off to Asia right after their wedding, as I did, not to come home for five years with them as babies in tow.

What mattered then is what matters now. Dan and I set off a few weeks after our wedding to live in Macau, Hong and China with great enthusiasm. Just like us, our kids are stepping into a life with their person - everything else is set dressing, and set dressing is exactly the kind of thing our family has always been willing to get a little wrong in service of getting the real thing right.

I don’t know what Will and Hannah will pass down to their kids. Maybe it won’t be anything that looks like art at all — maybe it’ll be a way of directing a room, running a campaign, hitting a note, or creating a national program that will be remembered 40 years from now. Either way, they know their crafts well enough to know which detail to let go of at eleven o’clock the night before a thing launches. But I’d bet money they will live lives rich in ritual, not résumés. That’s the only inheritance that survives being put down for thirty years and picked back up again. That’s the only inheritance that skips a generation and lands anyway, with two grandchildren who never got to really know the artist they came from.

My mother built things out of light and glass so that people would look up at the stained glass windows. I’m building things out of watercolor and card stock so that my kids will look back, someday, and know exactly what was being said, underneath all of it, the whole time.

Making art for others is the thing that says, “I love you. I made this with my hands. Now go into the world and take the memory with you.”

MJ

The tent, the flowers, the whole enormous production of putting hundreds of people in one place to watch two of them promise something to each other. How much there is to do. How exhausting this season must be. And then, because I am the luckiest of the lucky, there’s a second one right behind it — Will’s wedding, coming up almost as soon as I’ve caught my breath from Hannah’s. I nod when people say this to me, because it isn’t wrong, exactly. But it isn’t the whole of what’s true, either.

Sure it’s work. But it’s so much more.

It reminds me of my high school track coach, who used to run us through interval workouts that I hated with my whole body while I was in them. The first 400. The second. The third, when your legs stop being legs and become some kind of argument you’re losing. You would have paid money, in the moment, to stop. And then the whole set would be over, and the joy — I mean actual joy, chemical and undeniable, legs shaking, lungs on fire — was indescribable. Nobody warns you that the thing you’re dreading and the thing that will make you feel most alive are, very often, exactly the same thing wearing a different jacket.

Hundreds of people for Hannah, hundreds for Will — two weddings within a few months this year is my current interval workout, and the second lap is the bigger one. Which is maybe why my actual workouts have become the closest thing I have to company lately. My Peloton girls. A weightlifting app that yells at me kindly. A yoga video I’ve done so many times I could teach it badly myself. I’ve never leaned on them or craved them quite like this — it turns out the fastest way to take the chill off all that excitement and nerves is to physically burn through some of it, endorphins doing what my nervous system can’t do on its own. I already suspect I’ll be the fittest, most depleted, happiest woman in Rhode Island by Thanksgiving.

What’s actually true, underneath the lists and the tasks is that I am vibrating. Not from stress, though there’s some of that. It sits right alongside me like a roommate I’ve learned to live with. I mean the other thing — the constant hum.

I know this feeling from somewhere real: thirty years of standing in front of rooms as a brand builder, writing speeches for CEOs, drafting press releases during big announcments, hosting galas, events and working to sell some of these companies - there were high stress moments.

These were challenges I liked, where I rose to the occasion, where the adrenaline surged, where I practiced, and where it went well. It mattered to me. I became good at it.

I have felt my heart do something slightly too fast before a client presentation the exact same way it’s doing something slightly too fast now, practicing my toast out loud with Dan in the kitchen. My voice trembling is good practice — the wrong note before a piano recital, the false start at a track meet, the moment before you have to talk off the cuff to a reporter who wants an answer you haven’t finished thinking through yet. I got very good, over thirty years, at winging it. It became a kind of quiet confidence, knowing how to do your job really well.

This is the one time in my life it is absolutely not the moment to wing anything, and I can feel my whole nervous system reminding me that this is not what I have done for 30 years. Celebrating the love of your child and their new spouse-to-be is not something we practice much. Sure, we did it ourselves, and some of us with more abandon than others. (that’s me).

Nobody prices any of this into the work of a wedding. Nobody puts “5 weeks of walking around mildly electrified” on the to-do list, though it might be the most valuable thing anyone gets out of the whole season, including the people getting married.

We all know Carly Simon’s song, “Anticipation , is making me late, is keeping me waiting.” Then there is Jane Austin referring to such anticipation as ‘the sanguine expectation of happiness which is happiness itself.” Both of these women touch on the highs, lows, unknowns and joy of thinking about such exciting times ahead. And then there is John Green, whose books, podcast and way of thinking I just love, says, “the pleasure isn’t in doing the thing, it’s in planning it.”

Both Austin and Green ran straight through Hannah’s childhood — Pride &Prejudice on one shelf, which we watch endlessly still, and The Fault in Our Stars, a book we devoured and still think about. Both women craved certainty and the ache of wanting something before you’re allowed to have it. These stories fed us the kind of romance we craved - hard won, honest and with devastating consequences.

I know how this ends. It will actually be over the weekend of Thanksgiving, just after Will’s wedding — which feels like the universe having a small joke at my expense, handing me a holiday built entirely around gratitude at the exact moment when I get mine in spades.

I know that once the last guest leaves, I will feel the particular flatness that comes after any enormous, long-anticipated thing — the same flatness I’ve felt after every event ended, every trip we came home from, every finish line I crossed. The weddings will be over not once this year, but twice. The flowers will be taken by late dancers, the band will wrap up, and everyone will go back to their regular lives. I will sit down at a Thanksgiving table amid the wreckage of ribbon and seating cards I haven’t yet put away, and feel, for a day or two, strangely empty-handed, and also — I suspect — more thankful than I have ever been at that table in my life. That part is coming. I can’t stop it and I’m not going to pretend I can.

But I can do something about it right now. I can notice that I am, this week, in the part where everything is still ahead of us — where the dress still hangs unworn, where the vows are still being drafted and deleted and drafted again, and where the whole shape of the day exists only as possibility, which is the shape a thing is in right before it becomes a memory. That in-between state has its own weather. Its own particular light. And most of us spend it apologizing for how much work there is, instead of noticing that we are, for a few precious weeks, allowed to want something this much. What a privilege, actually, to have two.

So here is what I am trying to do, badly, the way I try to do most things: I am trying to stop time on purpose. Not the whole day — just small pieces of it.

Sitting at my dining room table this week, as the AC went out on the floor where my studio is, I noticed that I was painting one last piece for the wedding. I practiced my toast one more time with a shorter, tightened version, voice catching less, imagining the friends and family smiling.

I make myself notice that this time is ours to have. It doesn’t stop the season from being a lot of work, or stop the countdown from counting down. It just means that when I’m watching my daughter marry the love of her life in a few weeks— and then, not long after, watch my son do the same — I won’t feel like I skipped the best part trying to survive it.

The best part for me might be right now. And I am loving being here for it.

MJ

Not the boat kind. I never get sick on boats. I thrive on them, in fact. Give me a boat deck in bare feet, an expanse of ocean, a good stiff breeze and an inviting horizon, and I am happy. This is a different kind of vertigo. The internal kind. The kind you have deep within you.

Let me set the stage.

A couple of weeks ago, we were on a boat in the Adriatic with five other couples. My husband has known most of these people since college, I have known some since our kids were born and the others from our last decade in DC.

This group pretty much knows everything about our lives - our careers, our kids, sicknesses, caring for our aging parents, funerals, and the kinds of delights and disasters that life serves us all. They are an amazing group of friends.

Conversations and travel with a group such as this makes walking up to castles, riding bikes around lakes and treading water in deep blue oceans morning and afternoon, easy. We move in and out of light and hard topics, laugh easily, and share deeply. These friends know me as a wife, a mother, a brand strategist, a hostess, a hiker, and a person who paints experiences with more flourish than most.

They have a pretty accurate picture of who I am and where I came from, but the ‘where am I going?’ or ‘what am I willing to risk to get there?’ – questions that I used in my brand work over decades to get teams to focus on what is critically important to them, are not quite filled in.

The new part of who I am becoming after a life of working for others, likes it that way. I have started, quietly, to evolve into someone and something else — someone who paints. (Dare I even say, an artist?)

I’m not being that loud about it yet, not really.

I have a Substack with a name that gestures at it. I have a pochade box I have been learning to set up without dropping the panel sideways into the dirt. I have watercolors, oils, gouache and pastels spread around my studio, the room I used to call an office, and I am running out of display room fast. My brushes are imperfectly clean. I am unsure about what surfaces I prefer, and I spend far too much time looking at art and art videos to try and discern what I think my “style” is shaping up to be.

One might say, I am obsessed. (though there is nothing in the work to say that there is greatness or even much talent there, but that’s the part I love.)

I love making art, and, (so far), it loves me too.

In my adult career as a brand strategist, I never really spent every waking moment thinking about, practicing, and failing at a vocation such as this. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my work.

But this stage of life and my focus on art, for some reason, is all-encompassing.

And one thing I love is that it is still my secret. A secret I am carrying around the dinner table every night, while we laugh about old stories and order more wine. It’s a secret I am carrying ashore in every village, when I stop a half-step longer than the others at a doorway, at a wall, at the light on a roof. I have more pictures of these 16th century towns mostly for value studies - and I am staring at them, morning, noon and night. And I have no idea where this came from or why.

The closest thing I can think about that reminds me of this obsession was my son’s love affair with video games as a small child, or my daughter’s need to ride horses - even if just a hobby horse. It’s that kind of unbridled activity where you are just lost, hours passing without a sense of what time it is or that there is time at all. The next thing I know, five hours have passed.

On our trip sailing the Dalmatian Coast, we threw ourselves off the side of the boat into aquamarine water that was crystal clear, warm and refreshing. We would kayak, paddle board or just tread water in the deep, talking, laughing and watching little fish swim below us.

The Adriatic is saltier than the Atlantic of my childhood. You feel it the moment you go in. The water holds you up the way the water in dreams holds you up — without asking, without effort, as if buoyancy were the natural condition of being a body and the rest of life were the strange exception.

The sea has always been my favorite place. It is where I feel most at home, floating with my eyes up at the sky, and back stroking to feel my arms and legs in unison with the water lapping over me. As I swim away from the group, I can hear the others talking, laughing, squealing as they jump in from above - and we are all kids again, splashing, playing and realizing our great fortune.

This is a particular kind of buoyancy, it turns out, that comes from trying on a new self in front of people who have known you for most of your life — and discovering that the water is salty enough to hold you anyway.

And while some places lend themselves more to painting — a field, a porch in the west of Ireland, a beach or even a dining room table — the boat and its vistas of 13th-16th century towns, churches, monasteries and blue-green waters, have me thinking about something else entirely.

It is not asking me to paint. It is asking me to see. I am seeing myself not defined as who I have been since I was in my 20s and striving, but rather in a new stage of life, content to learn something new, to not have the answers, and to really see myself and this possibility.

This is the part I did not know about when I started down this path - that being an artist is, first and mostly, about observing. It’s about letting yourself notice, be moved as you always have, but to imagine what being moved can turn into.

The painting comes later — often much later, sometimes never, sometimes only in memory, in the studio, in the dark of February when you look at the millions of photos on your phone and see the corner of a plaza in Korčula and try to find the value of the wall at four in the afternoon. The painting is the back end. Seeing is the work.

I no longer see the world as objects. I see it in values. The wall is not a wall. It is a warm middle-light against a cool dark doorway. The roof is not just a red tile roof on a 16th century monastery. It is burnt siena in the light, paynes grey under the tree. There is a cast shadow over a band of earthen red-orange that sits between a dark sky-value and a shadow-value, and the painting will live or die on whether those three values are right.

The water is not water. It is six different greens layered on top of three different blues, and a band of nearly-white where it meets the bright June reflection of the sun. I cannot un-see this now. It has rewired me. I look at my friends’ faces over dinner and I am, half the time, noticing the value of the shadow under a jaw, the warm light bouncing off a glass of wine onto a cheek. I do not say this out loud. It would bore them to death and sound ridiculous - even as I write it.

There are three muses on this trip, I am realizing. The sea is one. The ancient is the second. The third is the one I cannot quite name yet, and it is the one doing the most work on me.

The sea I knew already. I grew up near it — that cold dark Atlantic that smelled of pine and brine — and I did not know, until this week, how much of me has been homesick for water for the last thirty years inland. The Adriatic is not the Atlantic. It is warmer, softer, more theatrical in its colors. But it is salt, and it is horizon, and it is the same wide blue patience that watched over my childhood and invites my memory to settle in, to let myself feel the unbridled joy inside me when I see and smell the sea.

I sit on the deck in the morning and watch the light come across the water and I feel what I feel when I am on the water - at home. The sea knows me. She always did. I still do not have the language for her.

The ancient is the second muse. These towns have been continuously inhabited for thousands of years. The stones in the streets have been walked smooth to a brilliant shine by centuries of feet. The fields behind one of these towns have been farmed in the same low-walled patterns since the Greeks laid them out four hundred years before Christ.

The whole place teaches you, just by standing in it, that beauty takes a long time, and that the things worth making get made slowly, by people who will never see them finished. This is good news for a woman starting to paint at sixty-something. The ancient is gentle with latecomers.

And then the third muse. The one for which I am still trying to find words.

This is not my country. It is not my language. It is not my culture. And yet, when I walk into one of these old churches — into the cool of the stone, into the smell of wax, incense and images — something in me recognizes the place. This is not the way a tourist recognizes a famous building or the way a child recognizes a grandmother’s house. Instead, there is a current running under this whole coast — an old, quiet, devotional current — and I can feel it the moment we step off the boat in each new town. The old women cross themselves as they walk into the church, just as the fisherman do before they cast off or the shop keeper chanted the rosary while I admired his paintings. (the cat followed me around instead).

The bells ring on the hour, on the half-hour and at noon. There are candles burning in every church and cathedral, lit by women I will never meet, for intentions I will never know. My intentions too are side by side with theirs, and yet we will never say a thing or know. The whole place is held by something it does not have to name. Some call it faith, some call it religion, some call it God. I don’t have words for any of it - just appreciation - even awe.

This is a calm that brings me great comfort. That is the thing I am trying to listen to, let out - even nurture. Why does a country that is not mine, a faith expressed in a language I do not speak, a culture I did not grow up in — why does it connect me, instantly, to a very deep part of myself? Why do I feel more at home in a Croatian fishing village than I do at half the dinner parties in Washington?

I think it is this: that under the surface of the world there is a deep human thing — a longing, a reverence, a quiet — and when you find a place where that thing has not been paved over, where it is still being practiced by ordinary people every day, you recognize it the way you would recognize your own breath. It is not about doctrine. It is not even, exactly, about religion. It is about people who have agreed, for two thousand years, to keep the candles lit. To ring the bells. To climb the hill to the chapel. To smile at each other, to help, to be kind, and to appreciate.

I think this is what I have been looking for, without knowing it, since I started painting - a way to participate in the reverence, the keeping, the remembering. It’s also a way to add my small mark to the long line of people who have stopped to notice the light on a wall, who have tried to hold the world still for a moment, who have agreed that beauty is worth the trouble of recording. The painters were the candle-lighters of their own time.

The painters are still candle-lighters now. To paint is to say: this mattered. This light at four o’clock on this wall in this town in this hour of this life — this mattered, and I am going to mark it.

It is the quiet places that are doing the most work on me.

When the tourists from cruise ships flood into the bigger cities for the famous views, I am looking foor the back streets, the corners, the angles and the clothes lines. The stone bench in shadow where an old woman has been sitting since before lunch or the monastery courtyard at the top of a hill where the only sound is a single bell are the things I will take away, and if I don’t remember, they are on my phone to remind me. The babies, the kids running in the shadows or the way the cypress trees stand against the stone structures when we drop anchor - these are the things I will be trying to paint for the rest of my life.

I climbed a bell tower a few days ago in one of the towns. Narrow stone stairs, worn into curves by six hundred years of feet. At the top, suddenly, the whole world: terracotta roofs laid out below like a perfect image - the sea going on and on in every direction in colors I had not known were available to water. I stood up there longer than I should have. I took so many photos realizing they weren’t beginning to capture what I was seeing. It took my breath away. I tried to memorize the light. I tried to memorize the way the shadows of the chimneys fell across the tiles. I tried to memorize the smell of the warm stone and the sound of the bells from the church below, ringing the hour while I was inside the tower — the bells under me as if they were ringing for me instead of above me, which is a thing I had never experienced before and which felt, briefly, like flying.

This is what I mean by the muse of the quiet. The muse of being awe-struck. The painting is downstream of that. The painting is what happens when this gets under your skin enough to have the seeing and the doing become second nature. The practice you miss when you are on a ship for a week.

I am now just back, and vibrating about where to even start - what medium, what image, what takeaway? I know one thing that I have been learning. Just begin. Then begin again.

And again.

MJ

That’s the honest truth of how I came to Croatia. Friends of ours planned the whole thing — the boat, the route, the anchorages — and all I had to do was show up with a swimsuit and a sense of humor.

I knew the broad strokes. We would sail the Dalmatian coast. We would swim in the Adriatic. We would eat too much and laugh too late and watch the light go down over the water. That was the experience with the lovely group of friends from a few years ago on the Turkish coast. So here we were, diving in again, along with our promise to ourselves to keep saying yes in our 60s, and to lean in. I expected sun, salt and old friends, and I got all three.

What I did not expect was everything else.

Here is a thing about me you might not know. Before my career in brand building and communications, I spent the early part of my career in study abroad, sending American high school and college students off to places they’d never been, and the whole job — the entire job — came down to three words that we used in a phrase like it was something they would be tested on - expect the unexpected. Don’t go chasing the trip you think you have some idea about, don’t focus on the destination, but rather lean into the journey. These were phrases we would use to excite teenagers and young adults, and to assuage parents’ fears.I gave this advice so many times over so many years that it became part of my study abroad leadership brand.

Thirty years later, on a boat in the Adriatic, I finally took my own advice.

Because here is what I hadn’t prepared myself for in this part of the word. I had braced for beauty — everyone tells you the Dalmatian coast is beautiful, and it is, almost aggressively so. What I had not braced for was how ancient it all is, and how gently that oldness takes hold of you.

There are towns here that were laid out by Greeks four hundred years before Christ, where the same fields have been worked in the same low-walled patterns for twenty-four centuries. There are cathedrals standing on the footprints of older cathedrals standing on the footprints of older ones still. There are monasteries on nearly every island — brothers in brown robes who have lived on the same stone, rung the same bells, ground the same herbs into the same salves for seven hundred years, and whose medicinal cures are still being sold in open air stalls. The bells ring on the hour and the half-hour reminding you of where you are and to stop - if just for a second - to look up, breathe in and be grateful. Nothing here was built last year. Nothing here will be torn down next year.

And the whole place — every limestone square, every shadowed side street, every bell-tower stair worn into a curve by six centuries of feet, every vista that opens without warning onto an endless blue going on and on — seems to be asking the same thing of you. Get quiet. Get contemplative. Stop talking and listen.

I am not, by trade, a quiet person. I make dinner for sixteen easily. I fill rooms. But this coast does not want your noise. It wants your attention. And about halfway through the week, somewhere between a peaceful tiny harbor and a cool dark church I ducked in to get out of the sun, I stopped resisting and gave it my attention.

And when I got quiet, she was there.

My mother. Also Mary. Her early training was in liturgical art, back before she had ten children and set her own brushes and woodcutting tools down to cook, clean, teach and raise a family and earn a living. Before she married my father she took commissions for stained glass windows in churches in the midwest, but when I think of her art, it is her woodcuts I see -— saints and apostles, animals and parables, every one of them pared back to simplest forms - hands, feet, expressions of humility, and story-telling.

Her art was not fussy. Her lines got simpler the longer she worked, until a single curve could carry a whole figure, and that plainness she took straight from the saint she loved best: Francis. The one who stripped off his fine clothes for a simple robe and the care of animals and the earth. She loved him and taught us to love him too. Most of my siblings and I have statues in our gardens to remind us. I am jealous of my brother having Francis as his middle name.

And Francis, as it turns out, was all over these Croatian islands. His is the order that planted itself the length of this coast — the brown-robed brothers, the quiet cloisters, the small plain churches — and you cannot sail these islands for a week without hearing his name, again and again.

When I was small she would cut hard blocks of wood at our table with me watching over her shoulder. She was careful, but not cautious. She was teaching me to see, though neither of us ever called it that. I started my art journey later in practice, but I was always expressing art. Now that I am painting, I would love to ask her what she thinks of this sketch or that small study, but she has been gone more than 25 years, and to be honest, I know what she would say. I also know that she is still teaching me.

She was there in the light on the old walls — that pale-honey, dry-bone, four-o’clock limestone light you cannot mix on a palette, you can only chase. She was there in the saltiness of the ocean, saltier than the Atlantic of our New England childhood, holding me up while I floated with my eyes to the sky. She was there in the care of every fish dish set in front of us, in the clotheslines strung bright between shuttered windows, in the candles we lit in the cathedrals with the other women who also lit candles for their own intentions. The dead, it turns out, are not nearly as quiet as advertised.

It took me most of the week to take in the sheer beauty and sacredness of the place. The cathedrals here are dedicated, over and over, to the story of a girl from Nazareth — a teenager, really — who was asked an impossible thing and said yes long before she could have known what it would cost her. That yes is everywhere on this coast; people have been turning it over like a stone in the hand for two thousand years or wearing medallions around their necks. And somewhere mid-week it dawned on me that I come from a very long line of women who have said the same kind of yes — to children, to marriages, to meals, to nurturing future generations and whole lives they couldn’t see the end of. My mother, who set her paints down. Her mother before her. The named and the unnamed.

The Hail Mary is, in the strictest sense, a prayer to a woman who was asked to do something impossible and did it anyway. Hail Mary, full of grace. I have been calling myself and this blog the Hail Mary Artist half as a joke about long shots, half as a quiet tribute to my mother’s name. After a week of this old, salt-washed, bell-ringing coast — a week I came to expect nothing and left having been handed everything — I’m starting to think it might not be that far fetched. What I mean is that, for me, saying yes to this crazy habit called painting is a love that she gave me. Whether I am very good at it is not the point.

In any case, I know she will be with me all the way. She has been here the whole time.

MJ

You know the one. You don’t talk about it much, because saying it out loud feels presumptuous, silly, late or slightly embarrassing. But it’s there. It takes the form of a voice in your head, the thing that wakes you up at night, the thing you mention walking with your best friend on the weekend. It has been there a while. It tugs.

It doesn’t pull, but it tugs - just enough.

I have now reframed the tug as more of a sixth sense. It’s not the scary kind, but rather a quieter kind — a low and steady knowing that runs underneath the louder senses, underneath the noise of what you are supposed to want, to do or to be.

The other five senses we have report on the outside world - what we see, hear, smell, how it feels and tastes. But the sixth sense reports to the inside you. It tells you, in a voice you have spent years learning to talk over, this. Over here. This is the thing. Remember me?

My sixth sense is painting, or making art more broadly. It took me about thirty years and a whole career to admit that, and I am sixty-something, so do the math on how long that voice was talking before I finally tuned in enough to listen.

Yours might be something else entirely.

Maybe you want to make stuff like the little crochet circles my friend makes as brooches. Or, you love singing so you keep saying you will take a class finally in your 50s, like someone else I know. Maybe you want to actually make a dish that remotely resembles something from the NYTimes cooking app, something that would impress your friends and be more than the assembled Trader Jos’s ingredients that save you every night.

But somehow, you don’t do it. You don’t take the singing class, you don’t pick up the knitting needles, get the tattoo, lean into the break up, or move to the dream town (my favorite sport). It does not have to be grand, it does not have to be broadcast, it can even be your secret.

But because you don’t do it, It just keeps tugging.

The trouble is that it is so easy to ignore.

The sixth sense doesn’t shout. It annoys you, it whispers to you quietly at night.

It is not the voice that reminds you about the dentist or the deadline or the thing you said you would bring to the potluck. Those voices are loud because the world makes them loud. The sixth sense is quieter than all of them, on purpose, because it is the only one that is actually yours.

So it gets clever. If you will not listen, it starts tugging.

It is the friend in your ear who keeps bringing up the same subject, gently, every time you talk, until you finally say why do you keep mentioning that and she says because you keep mentioning it.

The thing about the tug is that I ignored mine for decades. I was good at ignoring it. I was good at a great many things, which is part of how the ignoring works — competence is an excellent place to hide. And the inside voice never got angry. It never gave up either. It just kept its hand on my sleeve, patient as anything, while I went and was highly productive, competent and even happy in my career of 30 years.

And then one day I stopped, turned, and looked at it, and said fine. Show me. And it did.

Here is what I want to tell you, and it is not a method, because I do not have one, and by the way, you would not trust me if I did. It is just this: the tugging is simply information. It is not a nuisance. It is not a judgement or midlife indulgence. It is not something to get to later, once the more reasonable things are handled, because the more reasonable things are never finished being handled — that is what makes them reasonable.

The tugging is the most honest thing in your life. It is yours, and likely, left alone, it is not going away.

You do not have to obey it today. You do not have to quit anything or announce anything or buy anything. You only have to stop pretending you cannot feel it.

And once you do not only acknowledge that you are feeling it, listening to it, communicating with and about it everyday, the feeling is transcendent. It’s your truest you.

That’s it. Now you know.

But then again, you have known for a while.

I can’t wait until you stop to listen.

xo

— MJ

I had the new pochade box (a thing artists buy to set up their palette and easel for painting outside). I had the tripod. I had my backpack with brushes, paints, paper and various tools I would need.

I had no real idea what I was doing.

Neither, by the way, did the sky, which threatened to rain more than a few times, but instead, just made the sky less blue than I had hoped on my first day out there.

I set up anyway.

The first wash was less than inspiring and I wracked my brain trying to remember the best way to layer, how much water to add, or what, in the end, makes a good painting.

My fingers were starting to get a bit numb as I held a cold paper towel, turned in the wind, and was out there with far too few layers of clothing. The tripod wobbled. A gust came up and took the painting sideways, and I caught it like it was fine china.

What am I doing, I thought. Why am I even out here?

I never was a painter.

For my entire adult life I threw all my eggs into the career basket. Communications. Progressive companies. Social impact. Purpose branding. This was the life I knew and built from my late 20s. I loved my work.

And then I got interrupted.

During covid, like the rest of humanity, I found a paint box on a shelf that someone had gifted us. I opened it, played around, and now I can’t stop. It’s as though I am possessed by a force saying, keeping going, it’s inside you.

And I love it, every single day. Good, bad, frustrating, exhilarating - I love making art.

Forty years ago this would have stopped me. Even ten. The internal voice — the polished, capable, get-it-right voice of a woman who has spent fifty years making things land — would have said go inside, do this from a photo, take some lessons first, paint it from a studio with an instructor looking over your shoulder.

That voice has been very good to me. It built a business. It ran start ups. It grew amazing gardens, it sewed, knitted, threw dinner parties with flair, decorated houses, traveled the world, and raised two children. It met every deadline. It is not a voice I want to argue with.

But it is not the only voice anymore.

There is another one now, quieter, that says, you are not here to get it right. You are here to just explore, be outside, be on the water and see what happens.

So I stayed.

I painted a bunch of things that morning that I do not love. I painted one that I do. The wind did not let up. My hands did not warm. I packed up at noon shaking, walked back to the house remembering the bridal shower that my sisters gave the day before when we walked this path to the water for a toast. The feelings of warmth, generosity and joy were enough to thaw my whole self.

The shower that they held this past weekend was the kind of afternoon I will carry for the rest of my life. Not just for the cake, the flowers or even the gifts, though all of it was beautiful — but for what happens in a room full of women who love a girl into the next chapter of her life. My sisters showed up the way sisters do. They told the stories that we re-tell all the time, they played silly games, poured the prosecco and cried at the toasts. They laughed about the things you only laugh about with women who have known you and your daughter both since the beginning.

Nobody asked permission to do any of that.

This is what I keep coming back to.

Nobody asked if it was their place to lift Hannah up. They just did. Nobody waited for the official designation of the one in charge of loving this bride. They walked in carrying it.

I have spent a lot of my life waiting for the Permission Fairy.

You know her. The little one with the wand who is supposed to fly in at the appointed moments — you are old enough now, you are qualified now, you have suffered enough now, you have earned it now — and grant the right to do the thing. This is the one who would give you the right to call yourself an artist, the right to start the business, the right to begin again, the right to be loud, quiet, ridiculous, or wholly yourself. The right to take up the space.

She is supposed to come at twelve, eighteen, twenty-five. She is supposed to be there at your graduation, your wedding(s) - (yup, I had more than one), your graduate degree (I never finished - oh well), at the corner office (I got that instead of finishing the master’s.)

The point is, she does not come, and we mess up and find our way without her.

It took me until somewhere in my fifties to understand that she was never coming because she did not exist. There is no fairy. There is only the room you are already standing in, and the brush in your hand, and the ocean that does not check credentials, and the sisters who do not ask if they may love your daughter — they simply do.

This is the value, I believe, of getting older. I won’t call it wisdom, because that comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s not really an accumulated certainty either. It’s something smaller and more useful. Something like - I’m not waiting anymore. I have stopped checking my work against an imagined approval that was never going to arrive in the form I thought it would. At this stage of life, I am not asking. The women I love most are not asking either. They are doing the thing. They are unleashed.

For me right now, the thing is art.

On the last morning of the trip I went back to the beach. It was warmer. The wind was kinder. I set up — the pochade, tripod, umbrella all behaved — and started again. The water, the rosehops, the shells, the harbor.

Then, a ladybug landed on my brush.

Let me tell you about ladybugs. When my mother died — my daughter was three — and they started showing up - everywhere. On the panes of all the windows, in the garden, on our legs, arms, on the dashboard of the car and on things at strange and meaningful moments.

Hannah and I started calling them the Marias. Maria is here, one of us would say. Another Maria, and another. It became our language for my mother, and it has been our language ever since. The small red thing that arrives unannounced. The way grief eventually becomes a kind of company.

My sisters and I have countless ladybugs in ceramic forms, garden sculptures, cards. It’s a thing.

So there I was, in the sun, on the water and in the flow, painting after a bridal shower where my mother’s daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters gathered on the dock to toast to my daughter. And there she was, a ladybug on the brush.

I took the picture. I texted Hannah. Maria came.

She wrote back almost immediately. Of course she did. She has always known.

I have been telling myself the Permission Fairy was not real, and that is true. The one I was waiting for — the institutional one, the official one, the now you may call yourself an artist one — never came, will not come, was never coming.

But somebody else did.

The one who taught me to see color. The one who put the first brush in my hand. The one whose absence has been the loudest presence in my studio for twenty-five years. She did not come to grant permission. She came because she was already inside the work. She has been inside the work the whole time.

You don’t need permission. You have it.

— xo, MJ

A small thing, in theory. A summer wedding in Newport. My daughter and her fiance had decided they wanted something whimsical — watercolors, fun, playful. A lighthouse, maybe. Something coastal. Something that said come to the sea with us this summer.

I said yes immediately. I love them. I love RI as it’s where I grew up. I love Newport, and of course, I am having so much fun with watercolor. I had time. How hard could it be?

I painted a lighthouse.

Then I painted another lighthouse, because the first one was a little stiff. Then I painted a sailboat, because what if it was a sailboat instead of a lighthouse. Then I painted a seascape, because what if it was the water itself. Then a beach, then hydrangeas, because Newport in summer is full of hydrangeas, and I thought, nothing says New England coastal wedding more than hydrangeas, right?

I painted, over the course of several weeks, easily three dozen small watercolors. Sailboats. Lighthouses. Seascapes. Beaches. Hydrangeas. Roses. The dining room table was covered with scraps, paints, brushes everywhere, and I kept the march from downstairs to my studio on the 3rd floor, a well worn path. Different paper, brighter colors, different brushes. I asked my husband, How about this? Should the sky be more pink or more grey? What if there is no sky at all, and we just focus on the lighthouse?

Hannah loved all of them. She showed them to Tyler who generously said, ‘you pick’.

Here is what I started to notice, somewhere around lighthouse number eight.

I was not doing a task. I had been telling myself it was a task, because I am a woman of my generation and I have spent fifty years approaching everything as a task — clear brief, deadline, deliverable, sign-off. But this was not behaving like a task. There was no right answer. There were dozens of right answers, all sitting next to each other on the dining room table, in my studio, and even in the recycling bin. I kept morphing one into the next as if the paintings were having a conversation among themselves while I watched.

I was, it turns out, playing.

I was also learning — but the kind of learning that does not have a syllabus or a ‘how-to manual’, though sometimes, I wish it did.

Learning watercolor is a learn by doing exercise. How much water, how much pigment, the quality of the paper, all matter - a great deal, actually. And the strokes, splashes, washes and marks got better, the more I played. It’s like a positive feedback loop. One minute there is a lighthouse that is looking quite right, but when the ocean starts bleeding into the rocks at the bottom, it becomes magical. (not to anyone but me, but that’s the point).

I was learning which brushes I loved, which paper I couldn’t waste an inch of, and which colors made my heart sing (can we talk about Payne’s Grey?) I learned that being less afraid and less cautious makes for better outcomes, and I learned that what I thought looked terrible yesterday, is pretty good today.

Right around this time, my son Will, getting married a few months after Hannah, also asked me to paint a Save the Date. Lucky for him and his fiance, I was getting better, had more confidence, and they wanted an abstract piece which came together in minutes.

With both of these Save The Dates, here is the biggest thing I learned and can safely say that I think it is true of any creative process, and possibly true of any life:

The end product is not planned.

It reveals itself.

For my daughter, I am in the midst of painting a suite of wedding stationary that include everything from invitations to a menu, a program, posters, place cards and many other pieces. I could not possibly know what any of these pieces would look like until I painted, and they chose, a Save the Date. I had to make the first mark to find out what the second mark wanted to be. Once the Save the Date said we are doing a watercolor lighthouse with splashes that is playful and whimsical, then I could start the invitation. Once the invitation existed, the other pieces could follow, then the next and the next.

For my son, a meditative few minutes thinking about what they wanted, and a few strokes and just enough water revealed itself to me almost right away.

For someone who prides herself on checking boxes of lists and to-do’s, this is not an easily embodied process. I had to exhale more than a few times and just accept that initially I had no idea what I would paint or what we would get.

Each piece is a mark on a canvas — or, in this case, a splash on paper — and the next mark only exists in relation to the one you have already made.

What color compliments this? What hue? What value? I cannot answer those questions in the abstract. I can only answer them in front of what I have already done.

This is, it occurred to me the other day as my husband and I just got back from walking the in Ireland.

There is a trail each day. And each day we would get dropped at the trailhead knowing our next inn was roughly 10 miles away. We walked the Mauméan Pilgrim Path because walking was the thing, not because anyone was waiting for us at the end of it. We were not in search of anything. The path showed us what we were looking at as we went, and we let it. (mostly sheep, stone walls and gorgeous sweeping landscapes).

I painted a few sketches at the end of the day to try to remember the light, the beauty and the calm, but not even those sketches or Dan’s photos can do the place justice. It’s about doing it.

Like the painting.

The painting is it’s own kind of path, the wedding stationery is another. With every creative project I dream about and wake up imagining (thinking about collages these days), I have to actually get out the materials and dive in. Only then, do I start to even have an idea.

You make a mark.

You see what it asks of you.

You make the next mark.

It’s been raining for about five days. I am craving light to fall on the roses in the garden so I can get out there again and looking forward to being on the ocean at the end of the week to paint. The wedding stationary will be done in the next month, and then into print to be shared with so many family and friends. For someone who considers herself too much a beginner for public work, I have had a wonderful re-framing about the whole thing as I learn this new craft.

I get to do this.

I get to be the one whose hands make the small painted things for my daughter’s wedding. I get to infuse my creative energy and my eye and my best guesses into objects that will sit in the hands of every person who comes to celebrate her. I get to be a piece of the day — present in pigment and paper, in every place card, program and poster — alongside everyone else who shows up to love them.

What an honor.

What a gift.

To do this for my children and their partners who I love beyond reason. While my hands still work. While the light is still in the studio. While there is still time.

I get to.

— MJ

But a house with eleven other individuals does something when you are becoming. It’s like eleven tutors 24/7. There were tutors for every opinion, habit, talent and subject. I simply had to just take it in, like osmosis, and decide what suited me, then discard the rest (a little bit like the hand-me-downs, of which there were plenty.) With that many siblings, I could be schooled by the best in everything from trumpet, skipping school, track and field, ironing, attracting boys and dating, cheerleading, sneaking out of the house, avoiding church, sewing, baking cakes, the Beatles, hot-wiring cars, or becoming prom queen. My siblings were and are, multi-talented.

And because we were 10 in 12 years, there was always someone’s clothes, car, or album to borrow, as well as someone to laugh with, fight with or share that last bite of dessert. But with that many people, there are also opinions in every corner. The music is playing whether you like it or not. The politics are determined in advance, and you are expected to get to church. Like all anchor legs of the relay, I got the baton last, I was carefully watching the first three legs of the race.

Once I grabbed the baton, though, it was mine to bring across the line - and I am now just pulling out in front, in my 60s.

Of course, by all visible standards, I may have felt I was always pulling ahead, leading and doing great. But when there is a quiet craving deep inside like there has been for me, leaning into it fully, can feel exhilarating.

If any of this resonates with you, dear reader, has there always been something circling throughout your life that you cannot name?

—

For most of my life, being last was a gift. The youngest of ten doesn’t have to figure out the world from scratch. She absorbs it. I inhaled the world around me, watching my sisters sew beautiful clothes out of fabric they bought themselves, and watching my brothers play trumpet, fix cars, and run track like I was the president of their fan club. I learned what to wear, what to read, what to want, what to laugh at, by watching the people I loved and copying their cues. By the time I was twelve I had opinions about Vatican II, knew the Clancy Brothers music and could name Red Sox players, but these weren’t my passions nor interests. I was a mile high and an inch deep in what I could pick up around me. Like a party trick, I could recite, share, tell or recount something funny on command for the entertainment of others. (my father once bought a Citroen, the French car brand, and would parade me out to pronounce it with a trilling flourish for laughs.) Thank goodness those days are over. Amen.

I am also an extravert, which speeds the whole process up considerably. I tried things on quickly. I was a person early. By 15, I had a personality and a growing bank account from my many jobs. By 20, a gap semester to Europe opened my eyes and my mind. By 30 I had a career, and by 40, a methodology for brands to find their true purpose. By 50 I had a business with a list of admirable clients, a beautiful house, family and way of being in the world that felt seamless. I was traveling the world and pinching myself much of the time.

What I had not done — what it took sixty-some years to do — was to ask, what is truly you?

—

Here is the other thing about being a woman born when I was born. We were the first ones told we could be anything. Be President. Be a CEO. Be a doctor. Be a partner at the firm. Also: be pleasing, be available, be talented, pretty, nice, and while you are at it, make the cake, remember the birthdays, run the home, keep the peace, be smart, and look nice while you do it. We were given the assignment of becoming everything, and in my house, without many resources, and without anything resembling a map.

A lot of us became, as a survival strategy, the CEOs of our own lives. We had to. Who else was going to do it? We learned to run the operation - the household, the career, the relationships, the calendar, the in-laws, the school applications, the boards of directors, the PTA, the laundry, the family memory — like a small enterprise, on grit and competence and the persistent low-grade dread of dropping a ball.

A lot of us are very, very good at this.

Which brings me back to now. When we stop. What is it we are still dying to do or be?

What are you circling that you cannot name?

—

For thirty years, I made a living helping other people figure out who they were and how to say it. Brand strategist, the title says. Purpose-driven companies, the good kind — Stonyfield Farm, The Body Shop, Honest Tea, Lindblad. I named a methodology. I built a board game out of it. I worked with the Dalai Lama’s compassion curriculum, which is the kind of sentence that startles me even now when I type it. I was good at my work. I was paid well. I was, in the language of women of my generation, successful.

I was also, it turned out, still the youngest of ten. Still watching. Still absorbing. Still defining myself by what the room needed. I had built a thirty-year career on the very skill that had been my survival strategy since childhood: I noticed what other people were trying to say, and I helped them say it. I learned by doing. Then I tried it, iterated, and improved.

I was succeeding by all accounts, even my own.

And then, trying on the questions that I use in my client workshops, I had a bit of an epiphany:

What if I answer these questions about me, what might I learn?

Who am I?

Where do I come from?

Where am I going?

What for?

What am I willing to risk to get there?

For three decades I sat in conference rooms with founders and CEOs and helped them work through these. Companies discovered themselves through these questions. Brands found their voice. Mission statements stopped being meaningless. I watched it happen, over and over, and never once, in thirty years, thought to ask the questions of myself.

And then I sat with these questions myself. I knew why I had created them in my framework and what they revealed. I knew how powerful they could be. I watched team members become emotional in answering them. I knew that when answered honestly, they might be able to help me understand the unsettled feeling I had been having. One I couldn’t really name.

I felt myself having inner cravings around creativity. I couldn’t stop looking at art, doodling, drawing on scraps of paper and imagining whole collages, re-done rooms in vibrant colors or making greeting cards for friends in need. A colleague sent a painting set as a random holiday gift, and when my husband asked who we might re-gift it to, I felt possessive, like I had to open it immediately and start expressing myself.

So I did.

I remember the day I started to paint quite vividly. It was a poor attempt, but I felt thrilled.

That very mediocre painting was one of the ways that I answered the very questions I use with clients about getting to one’s why. And that answer, in watercolor, was about as true as it can get. It was an answer that spoke, for the first time, in my longing voice.

It said, I am this.

For me, the answer turned out to be paint.

Not because painting is precious, or noble, or what I am supposed to be doing at this age — which is also, by the way, a thing women of my generation are now being told. Find your passion. Find your creative practice. Do something with the second half.

For me, I started painting with my mother when I was 12, in oil and with a palette knife. But like many childhood crafts and hobbies, it went by the wayside when I was eager to grow up and go into the world. But it didn’t go away. It just lay dormant until that paint kit reawakened its voice. It turns out that the answer to who am I had been sitting in a random holiday gift box until I decided to open it up a few years ago.

For you, it will be something else. I cannot tell you what. I have a guess, though, which is that you already know, and that you have been not-quite-looking at it for a long time.

For you it might be a career you walked away from and have been quietly missing. Or a career you never let yourself have because someone needed something more reasonable from you. It might be a passion you abandoned at twenty-two when life got serious. It might be a grief you have been performing around instead of through. It might be a friendship you let lapse, a language you started learning, a city you keep looking up flights to without ever booking one. It might be a name you stopped saying out loud — your own, in some private version.

The point is not the answer.

The point is whether you are willing to ask.

What are you circling that you cannot name?

—

I do not have a method to give you. I do not have a five-step framework this time. (nor would I give it to you even if I did). Those days are over. Amen again.

What I have is one woman in her sixties who has decided, after a lifetime of going second, third, fourth, tenth — who has decided, in the time she has left, to go first.

Not because I have arrived. Because somebody has to walk out into the field and tell you what is out there. The water is fine. The painting is getting better. The light at dawn and dusk is the best. The questions, when you finally ask them of yourself, will not destroy you, although they may rearrange you.

Born last is what I was. Going first is what I am.

I invite you to come with me, and I am so glad you are here.

— MJ

Today, there are more than three hundred and seventy of you. Almost none of you know me.

You arrived from Substack Notes — lines I wrote at six in the morning, at 3 with my tea, at 8 after dinner when I had an idea and had to get it down. I have looked at every name. Many of you write Substacks of your own. They are called things like Still Becoming. Where I Break Open. A Quiet Saga. Wrong Wife. The Self She Chose. Reversing Regret. Authentically Kelly. Half Feral, Fully Literate. I read the titles and something in marvel at a community of women I have wondered about. I knew you were all out there. I am so happy to meet you.

I want to say something here that is going to sound obvious to you and strange to me, but here goes - I am truly a beginner at this.

Not at writing. I have written for a living for thirty years, helping companies like Stonyfield Farm, The Body Shop and Lindblad Expeditions find words for what they were already doing. I ran my own firm twice, each time for more than five years. I know how to see the real mission through the copy. I know the right partners, not the popular ones. And I know the initiatives, campaigns and ideas that would draw customers, guests and consumers to us for real reasons, not the discounted ones. By most professional measures I was very good at what I did.

Where the novice comes in is in being the beginner as the subject of the writing, at not having a client or searching for one, and at not having a mirror to hold up to anyone but myself. Most days, I am barefoot, in my studio or garden, staring at my easel, a flower, a photo, and trying to decide what to do next. What medium? What surface? How about this cool material? This odd tool, what kind of marks would that make?

This is what it means to be a beginner at saying I am an artist in a room where plenty of people might disagree.

As a new painter, I am discovering that watercolor runs where I did not want it to, pastels are smudging into mud or gouache is drying a different shade than I intended. I am self-taught, which means that I have one million bad habits that only I created.

It also means the wins are small - I am a tad less messy with oils (though there are breadcrumbs all over my house to prove me wrong here), I pause less and do more, and occasionally, a painting really pleases me. It is honestly still pretty terrifying that I am being possessed by something I can’t name that keeps me excited, hungry to keep learning, and insatiable when it comes to time.

It is also the happiest I have ever been in my working life. Incandescently. Embarrassingly. I keep checking to see if it is a phase, the way one checks the milk for spoilage. So far the milk is fine.

But what I truly did not expect was you - the growing, joyful, kind, generous group of women I have wondered about for so long, sharing many of the same struggles, finding permission to do the ‘dream’, and worrying less and believing more. Sigh. It’s such a good feeling.

This whole experiment was supposed to be the door I opened so a few people could watch me figure it out. I thought I would write quietly and share with a small group. Then the room filled up with three hundred women I have never met, most of you carrying some version of the same question I am carrying. Is it too late? Am I allowed? Did I miss the window? What if I am terrible at it?What if I am good at it and it changes everything? What if no one notices?

I am learning that the answer to all of those questions is mostly the same answer, and it is not a tidy one. The answer is, just find out. Drag the easel onto the beach, into the field, get a smaller set up, take less, do more. Share the ups as well as the downs. Sign up for classes that inspire you. Ask the question out loud. Share your work, good or bad. The window is wherever you decide to climb through.

I am also learning — and this one I did not see coming — that the work of being vulnerable in public is not actually harder than the work of being competent in private. I am a vulnerable person anyway. I wear my heart not just on my sleeve, but all over myself, head to toe. Waves of emotion rise, they are there, then they move on. Doing this with people I don’t know feels less familiar, but possible. And my experience and age has taught me that sharing is the greatest gift we have - giving and receiving. It’s what we animals are meant to do - connect. It’s nourishing.

Thirty years of professional life trained me to be the one who had the answer. Showing up here without one feels a little awkward, like I didn’t do my homework, but that’s the point. We are doing the homework together. There is no authority here (except you painters and other artists who have tips - by all means, send along!)

While I am not big on confessions, here is one that has come to me. I waited forty-five years to pick up a palette knife again after my mother put one in my hand at twelve and touched something deep inside me. I waited forty-five years for permission that was never coming. There was no one who was going to walk over to my kitchen and say Mary Jo, it is time, the moment has arrived, the artist in you is waiting to come out.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t ever hear that conversation or wonder about palette knives. But I also didn’t listen - it was coming to me in lots of other ways - my art directing for brand clients, my love of great design, my creative endeavors in a gifting start up, as a floral designer, maker of things, and overall creative. Finally, at 60, I had to give over to it fully, which is the least romantic and most useful thing I have ever done.

So I am going to do something here that I would never have presumed to do six months ago.

If you have been waiting a long time for permission — to paint, to write, to leave, to begin, to call yourself the thing — I grant it to you. I do not actually have the authority to grant permission to anyone, and you might even say I don’t know you. You are right. But letting others grant you permission for things when they may not know what’s deep inside you is really just the same.

So, listen deeply to your cravings, and take it. It’s yours.

As for this growing little community of creatives, come along. Bring whatever you are quietly carrying. Bring the medium you have been afraid to try or the sentence you have been afraid to write, the version of you you have been afraid to be seen as. Creatives come in all sizes and shapes - bring whatever your container has. I cannot promise you anything except that I will keep showing up, perfectly confused, likely with smudges on my face, and that I will be me, learning as I go, sharing honestly about what I am learning. This includes the part where the art goes wrong, the weather doesn’t agree, the time goes too fast or I wonder what I am actually doing.

This may be the greatest arts and crafts experiment the world has yet to see. It may also be a bit chaotic. I am betting on both.

I am so glad you are here.

— MJ

The kind of inheritance I am talking about are the patterns of mind. These are instincts about how women have been subtly trained - for millennia - about how to take up space. Without even knowing or trying, our mothers and grandmothers passed down these instincts, which became habits, without ever sitting us down to teach us, because they didn’t have to. We absorbed them at the level of weather. Of course we know where we belong, what to say, how to act.

One of those inheritances, I have come to believe, is a particular relationship with fear.

We have been, on the whole, taught to manage fear by becoming smaller — quieter, more agreeable, less visible — rather than by listening to what it is actually telling us. To smile through the meeting, even when the hair on the back of our neck is standing up. The fear I am talking about is the kind where we make ourselves the supporting cast in someone else’s play, movie, painting or story - even when we see ourselves as the heroine.

Women of my mother’s generation did this with extraordinary courage and at extraordinary cost. My mother was one of the bravest people I knew — she raised a million kids, taught public school full-time, ran a household flawlessly — and she did it without an iphone, a digital checklist, or a wellness kit (unless you consider Ivory Soap some kind of quiet luxury).

And even though I did my fair share of domestic housework and chores as a young child, my mother was adamant that women of my generation could be and do what we dreamed about. (she would remind me when my sisters and I were scrubbing toilets or pulling weeds on Saturday mornings.)

We wouldn’t have to make trades that society expected of us, she tried to convince us, because we would somehow be equal. (alas, by putting ourselves through college, but hey.) But eventually, we were quietly trained to make newer, more sophisticated versions of those trades anyway. My fear of following my heart into the arts was traded away in the 1980s as society’s focus on business, all things international, and women rising to the top (suits and sneakers!) was all the rage. I double majored in international relations and Latin American Studies imagining changing the world for the better. Good for me.

Becoming an artist, I would have convinced myself so no one else needed to, was not going to fit society’s goals for women, enable me to support myself, or be what my parents envisioned for me. Done.

So at sixty, to find the inner artist now, is not simply a fun quirk. It is an inheritance. And it’s mine to both keep and to better understand so my own daughter’s inheritance is more clear. (she too is a creative - singer, actor, writer, constantly at odds with the world of ‘jobs’.)

The trouble is that fear, when treated as a subtle hand-me-down, doesn’t go away. It goes underground. It stays where it has always been, only now we no longer trust it as a signal. We have decided in advance that what it is telling us is simple - be smaller.

And the work, I am learning, is not to be unafraid.

It is to befriend the fear.

It is to pull up a chair across from fear and listen, to let her talk. It is also to notice that every time I imagine spending a day in the studio, exploring every medium for hours, wiping paint off my face and forgetting to eat, I can find myself thinking about spending time on that more credentialed version of myself. Working on that other thing, not to mention the domestic list.

Until I can’t bear it one second longer, and notice that the fear is not warning me away from the cliff -it is pointing me toward the studio.

I cannot give back what I inherited. But I can refuse to hand it down to my daughter.

That, more than anything, is what I am painting toward and (hopefully) whispering into her ear - keep singing, writing, making and creating. It’s who you are.

— MJ