Whispers Among the Trees reflects something I feel deep in my bones, something written on my soul, something enduring inside of me that I’m giving myself the time and space to express.

Can I start here? Start by accepting that I’m having trouble accepting what I already know is true?

I take my pain and my grief and my anger and I alchemize it into art.

So I pour all of this internal conflict and angst into my art. I let it breathe. I lift the pressure to go all the way in any direction. I can just have these feelings, thoughts, questions. This is how I free myself.

Reflecting on my new artwork, “the girl with many questions” …

It’s annoying, isn’t it? How much moving forward requires us to look back …

I’m trying to build a life that’s about more than survival.

Calling the Earth a floating rock makes it all feel sweeter, but also colder? Like isn’t it sweet that we somehow exist, here? How wonderful and absurd is that?

I’ll leave it there, here? On an opening. A point of uncertainty that’s more like a door, a portal to who knows where?

We’re all puzzle pieces. But I don’t mean like a physical jigsaw puzzle where each piece has fixed edges, a fixed place. I think the universe is both constant and perpetually in flux. A paradox, I know.

I’m realizing (again, yet deeper this time) that justice to me means creation, love, human connection. It means getting to move on, to move forward, to start somewhere, to play, to begin anew, to be honest about my life, to be honest about my past, honest about my present, honest about my hopes and dreams for the future.

I keep catching myself in anxiety spirals only to double back, trace each piece of just barely visible fuzz in the spider web to the source, and find, oh hello it is you again, isn’t? Hello grief.

I don’t know who I am without this pain, without this aching for what is gone, what is broken. I do want to find out.

I realize a lot of the same things over and over again, a little deeper each time, don’t I?

I don’t have to hold onto some static version of myself.

There’s something about how joy strips fear of its power.

There’s hope in uncertainty, isn’t there?

Reflecting on a song by Orla Gartland, how the only way forward is through (not around), and the concept of grief titration.

What would it mean to let myself shine?

Talking to trees, cycles of death and rebirth, and what we can learn from the natural world: This is part one of my heart to heart with fellow artist and writer, Gabrielle Rabinowitz.