5 Answers 2025

Folding stories of my life experiences into the patterns and designs of my weaving. It’s never about the end product but the process where I am able to feel the feelings of grief, challenge, appreciate, and accomplishment internal and external.

I am exploring what I chose to capture in my photography that freeze moments of time in a unique lifestyle of working on the land with livestock and people who share the love and commitment to the life way of a modern day shepherd.

I’m making a sometimes futile attempt to understand less, make less meaning, and instead use the materials and skills I’ve developed to work from a playful but focused creative state where inner experience meets the physical world. I’m fascinated by how ordinary materials can hold attention, memory, and moments that are difficult to put into words.

MUSHROOMS & MAIL-ART


I’m still fascinated by mushrooms—whether studying them, cooking with them, or transforming them into characters in my comics.

I’m asking myself – how can letters, sent through the post, become micro art projects, artistic exchanges? My art teacher in high school gave us an assignment to mail something to her house. It could be anything except paper. This became a puzzle to solve, a way to think outside of the basic box.


I recently started hosting the Postal Social meetings in the bookstore beneath my studio, which had been a tradition before the pandemic but came to a halt. This resurgence has me fascinated by the kind of people who are willing to gather to write letters, together, in person, while drinking tea and often using analogue methods involving typewriters and collaged cards.

Being with my donkeys and big personality sheep, goats, and dogs who I share life with. I recharge by being in different qualities of light throughout that days and seasons to see shadows and reflections on things and places I interact with daily. Experiencing the physical sensations of dust, water, and material on my skin is enlivening and adds color to my experience.

Sweating in heat of the sun or sauna sheds stagnancy and becomes a metaphor of digesting the days work.

Journeying to various places I love to see people I love in environments I love always recharges me.

Qigong, walking fast, coffee, cleaning, research, and green tea

Breathwork – I’ve struggled to keep a meditation practice in the past, but this method is finally sticking. It’s a lot of counting numbers, which is boring, but I’ve found it’s a good way to redirect my busy brain. Plus, the holding of inhales and lengthening of exhales really do have a noticeably restorative effect on energy and calmer heart rate.

Laying flat in nature – very different from walking through a natural setting (although that’s important too). I’m looking for collapse, a brief sense of surrender—its called “corpse pose” in yoga for good reason! To lay motionless feels humbling and perhaps more receptive. I’m not orchestrating anything—not even the direction of my feet or my line of sight. I can focus on absorbing the energy of what’s right there.

My path is full of movement. Instead of steps I leap, bound, summersault, cartwheel, climb, swim, crawl and claw on my path. I’ve learned to surrender and to have faith. My steps are not taken with my feet but with my full body.

My path has been anything but linear. The things I’ve hoped for tend to happen not on a timeline, but at unexpected intersections of change. I’ve learned to trust curiosity over certainty, and that paying close attention often reveals I’ve already arrived where I was trying to go.

Advice to my younger self, if I could write a letter backwards in Time:

1. Take your ideas seriously—build containers for your them and label them so they’re easy to find. But don’t confuse it with taking yourself seriously.

2. Don’t worry about how long anything takes or whether reaches a finish line. These involve drawing conclusions, and none of that is your business. Do the work, and follow the winding path of curiosity.

3. Allow boredom in, collaborate with it, plan it into your day if it isn’t naturally popping up. Learn to reframe what’s “uncomfortable” as the adult version of “play.”

It is challenging to prioritize my creative practices but daily life allows me moments to build skills and inspiration to take into the intentional time I have to create.

Recognizing what does not serve me or what is not bringing flow or satisfaction or self-care leading me to accept change of course is challenging but that’s where the juicy stuff resides. In letting go of how I think something ought to be or the path that will lead me to fulfillment, I am able to learn and grow into a fuller being.

Finding the space to feel as much as I do when I am weaving is limited during the year and fits and starts are jarring but a part of the process.

Overthinking, and the remarkable ability to think everything into fifty tidy corners.

1. Getting dressed in the morning. Seriously, I’m starting to collect jumpsuits because it means fewer decisions to make, with a one-piece. Decision-making-fuel is limited. If I save my decision-making energy in the morning by trying to follow a brief routine, I can apply that energy saved to a harder situations, later on. The problem is, I like to rebel against routines.

2. Making myself do all the non-optional unfun small-biz stuff: accounting, invoicing, self promo. It’s like the work behind the work, and it’s hard to section off time to get it done. I have to use timers to tell myself to just get a certain amount done in one sitting, because it makes me want to leap out of my chair.

3. The social media experiment, which is certainly spiraling downwards. I can’t tell when to get off this runaway train, there are still some upsides for me. Meanwhile, I’m investing time in the occasional newsletter and also Substack blog, in order to have alternative ways of reaching people.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s new album Gush and Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sophia Honer’s music in Different Rooms.

Finding the space to feel as much as I do when I am weaving is limited during the year and fits and starts are jarring but a part of the process.

Band: Mexican Institute of Sound / Book: Object-Oriented Ontology by Graham Harman / Inspiration: Coming up with dream-based movements

I recently bought this book about Edward Gorey, which collects his lavishly illustrated envelopes, sent to a penpal across one year. He treated the envelope as a canvas for entire stories and experiments in hand lettering, often covering the front as well as the back. This has me re-thinking this usually-boring aspect of letter writing as something that can perhaps be the main feature.