December and January's winter/holiday months can be difficult for many. I write a general statement phrase like this to console myself by imagining a collectivity that can support my feelings, which are about the beginning of a new year and the new commitments we try to start in our lives. Yet, there is no definite way to measure when things truly start and when they've amounted to such a consistent repetition that they can be perceived as truth.

I'm grappling with this: when have we done enough to know that something is part of our lives? When have we poured enough into the world that the world will respond back to us by acknowledging the reality of what we've created? When will we have walked a path long enough that the path is undoubtedly behind us and not a series of false starts?

In graduate school, it looked like getting my Ph.D. was the end of a line. The degree was the certificate that would make me look back and say: "I've walked this path. Look at the path there; you can see my steps." Yet, that's not how I feel now. Once I got my Ph.D., I looked back and said: "this was not the right path; it was a false start." The true path is the one I've been walking alongside, the one in which I've been building my life as an artist. And those with me in my academic career knew little about that path, the one I was walking mostly in my personal life and with dear friends.

Now, I try to go to my studio every day, and my biggest difficulty is that painting feels so easy. When I paint, I love it so much; time passes so easily, things feel so productive and come into being so much easier than I had imagined. Can a path be created out of ease and pleasure? I truly want to believe so; I want to see it happening. And yet, after so many years of feeling like work must be difficult, I pause myself. Hard work. The glorified one. Saturnian. Plutocratic.

I started my new podcast, Flower Constellation, in December. One episode. It wasn't a false start, but it certainly was a slow one. Now, I'm just jotting down my thoughts. It's because it's been so long since I have written, and I have many texts to put here. They are all lining up in my head, screaming to make the page. Asking for my commitment to write more often and to become more consistent. I'll return to this. This is one of our New Moon intentions in our family this cycle: to recommit to our intellectual projects. As I've learned with parenting, this is the linearity of our lives: consistency comes from our capacity to recommit to what matters most amidst all the unimportant and fear-mongering demands of life in capitalism.

Okay. Here is what I MUST write today:
Every-Body is an Artist.
Every Soul is a Lover.
Every Spirit is an Angel.

If you read this, know that I love you too.