One Year

A year ago this week I did something that made very little sense on paper.

I stepped away from gallery representation. From a situation most artists would have held onto with both hands — a year-long waitlist, a sold-out solo exhibition, a gallery that believed in the work and handled it beautifully. By every measure I had arrived somewhere I had worked a very long time to reach.

And yet.

There were the three a.m. mornings. The journal open in the half dark. The particular quality of silence that only arrives at that hour, when the house is sleeping and something in you refuses to be. I kept writing the same things over and over, circling something I could not quite name but could feel the way you feel weather before it arrives.

I had been reading Martha Beck's The Way of Integrity and it reframed something I thought I already understood. Integrity, she writes, is not simply honesty with others. It is the deep alignment between who you are and how you are living. Sometimes following your own integrity looks like stepping backwards — frightening and illogical and very much like loss. But the soul knows the difference between a closed door and an open gate. She writes: "Peace is your home. Integrity is the way to it, and everything you long for will meet you there." I returned to that line again and again in the dark. It was the only thing that made sense of what I was feeling.

I kept seeing one word in my mind.

Everything.

And alongside it, quiet and certain as a thing that has always been true: a whole new world.

So I walked through.

I had a year's worth of commissions and no real plan beyond that. This is not like me. I am someone who likes to know where she is headed, especially with a family and a career that had only just found its footing. But I set to work and trusted the not-knowing as best I could.

Then in October our house caught fire.

Total loss. Fire, smoke and water. October 5th. My home and my studio, gone.

In the ash, still visible on top of my journal, was a sticky note I had written the week before. A Madeleine L'Engle quote placed there as if I had known I would need to find it:

"In the creative act I can experience the same freedom I have in dreams — to be bound by neither time nor space. But this freedom comes only when, as in a dream, I do not feel that I must dictate or control what happens."

I had thought I was trusting the process when I left the gallery. This was another level entirely.

There are things we are asked to release. And then there are things taken from us so that we will finally understand what release truly means. But I had climbed too high to look away from the horizon. If everything was the word my soul had spoken to me in the dark, then this was certainly folded inside its meaning. All of it. Even this.

I put a quiet feeler out on Instagram. What opened in response was something I could not have imagined or arranged. Dilworth Artisan Station had a top floor corner — two studios opened into one, with extraordinary windows looking out over the city. I moved in on January first.

***

When I began The Blue Hour: Sovereign I kept seeing ethereal expanses. Clouds. Flora. A landscape existing just at the edge of dreaming, the kind of place you recognize without ever having been there. The images came before the logic of them, the way all true things arrive — quietly, and ahead of everything else.

The first image that came to me was a boat in still waters. Above it, a cloud. And moving toward that cloud, unhurried and certain, a gathering of bees.

I had been writing about bees — their industry, yes, but also something older. Something about collective knowing. About finding what is needed without being told where to look.

In that first image there was an immense quiet. And the quiet made me think about sound. How it travels slower than light. How we see the flash cross the sky before the thunder finds us. How the light arrives first and we stand in it for a moment — already changed — before we understand what has happened.

The painting idea had come to me before the fire. I did not yet have deep meaning for it. That came later — and that is the whole point of walking into the unknown. You step through without the meaning. The meaning finds you on the other side.

An idea comes. A feeling. A single word in the dark at three in the morning. The practicalities have not caught up. The circumstances have not yet arranged themselves. But the light has already arrived. It is in that stillness — between the light and the sound — that I believe we hear most clearly. Call it God. Call it the higher self. Call it the universe drawing a breath before it speaks. It is the place before the place. And I want to learn to live there, to trust it as the true reality rather than something to rush past to reach the part that makes sense.

The anchor piece of this four-part opening to the series holds all of this. The boat. The stillness. The bees moving toward something luminous and not yet fully understood.

It is titled The Light Before Sound.

***

The work I have been making in that corner space, in that particular city light, is some of the most honest work I have ever done. The Blue Hour: Sovereign holds threads of what came before but walks deliberately into new territory. I feel my mind opening in ways I don't yet have language for. This series is a threshold — toward something I can sense but not yet fully see.

And that is precisely where I want to be.

A whole new world. Everything. The two phrases my soul kept whispering in the dark have taken on a weight and a truth I am still growing into. A whole new world is by definition something I have never seen. The way it is transforming not only the current work but the ideas forming for the future is, in the most tender and serious sense of the word, unimaginable.

I cannot wait to share it with you.