A note about what’s changing here

What I’ve learned about creativity, change, and the work that actually feels alive.

Hello Starfish,

It has been quiet here for a while.

Some of that silence was ordinary life. Some of it was transition. Some of it was me standing in a long stretch of uncertain waters, trying to listen and feel into what was actually mine to make next.

And because many of you have been here a long time — through all the molting, the naming, the visible becoming, the false starts, the earnest attempts — I didn’t want to simply appear one day under a new title and act as if nothing had happened.

That never feels good to me.

You have, in some real sense, been in the mess with me.

Which is a little cringe, if I’m honest.

I know there’s a school of thought that says not to announce these things. Just quietly rebrand. Change the sign on the door. Keep moving.

Maybe that works for some people. But this space has never felt purely transactional to me.

Too many of you have been with me for so long (some since 2019!!!). Too many of you have stayed through seasons when I was very obviously in the middle of something and did not yet have clean language for it.

I think that deserves at least one real bridge.

Because the truth is, I have been trying to find my way toward the work that feels most alive, most honest, and most livable for me. And trying to do that publicly, while also needing to pay bills and be a person and keep going, is not elegant. It is awkward. It is vulnerable. It is, at times, deeply embarrassing in the way only creative work can be.

Businesses are supposed to look stable. Decisive. Predictable. Trustworthy in that polished, no-loose-threads sort of way.

But I do not think that is how living things actually work.

I do not think that is how art works.

I do not even think that is how a real life works.

Most things that are alive move through phases of breakdown and re-formation. They shed. They stall. They overgrow. They erode. They try a shape on and then outgrow it. They become by way of weathering through all of life’s ups and downs.

I am certainly not exempt from that.

Another round of shapeshifting

As many of you already know, the spiritual work I used to do is behind me now, and has been for a while. What feels more important to say here is something more specific: Coeurage was not the final form of what I was reaching toward.

It was a real attempt. A sincere one.

I was trying to build a bridge between where I had been and where I sensed I was going. I was trying to translate a change that was still in progress.

I was trying to make sense of my own creative life by reaching back to the beginning of it, as if I could reverse-engineer the conditions that first brought me back to myself.

And I think I reached a little too far back.

I think I tried to build too much structure around something that was, in truth, much simpler and much more alive than that.

Coeurage became dense where I wanted air. It became defended where I wanted play. It became, at times, more academic and more elaborate than the work itself needed to be.

That doesn’t mean it was false. It doesn’t mean nothing good happened there. Some beautiful things did happen there. People came alive in those spaces! Something real was touched and I don’t want to erase that.

But when I got quieter with myself, when I stopped trying to make the bridge do more than a bridge can do, I had to admit that it still wasn’t home.

It was helping me arrive at home.

And what I found, when I finally let myself arrive, was not more theory. It was not a more sophisticated framework. It was not a prettier explanation of who I am or what creativity means.

It was something much closer to the ground.

Closer to the body.

Closer to place.

Closer to the small, almost embarrassingly humble acts that make a life feel inhabited again.

Trusting what works

What I keep coming back to is this: the moments that actually changed me were not the moments when I understood myself the most. They were the moments when I was safe enough to make something.

Safe enough to play.

Safe enough to try badly.

Safe enough to touch materials again.

Safe enough to notice the weather, the room, my own hands.

Safe enough to stop performing a life and begin participating in one.

Safe enough to be cringe and earnest and in clumsily but unabashedly in love.

That feels so much truer to what I am actually interested in now.

I do not think most of us need more abstraction first. I think we need a different quality of experience.

A little more room. A little less pressure. A little more contact with the body, the day, the place we are in. Something low-stakes and real enough to loosen the grip of numbness.

A mark on paper. A few lines in a notebook. Rearranging the objects on a table. Stepping outside and peering deeply at the sky.

Reorienting to fit my real life

I have found, in my own life, that meaning tends to arrive after that, rather than before.

That has become even clearer to me through chronic illness.

Living in a body with fluctuating capacity has changed the terms of the question for me. So has adulthood. So have obligations, work, family, limitation, the plain fact that life does not arrange itself around our ideal creative conditions (much to my agonizing chagrin, why gods why).

When energy comes in knotted crazy loops rather than straight lines… When a body cannot always be pushed without consequence… When there are real constraints that do not disappear because one has a beautiful philosophy about art… something clarifies.

At least it has for me.

I had to stop asking what looks like a creative life.

Instead I started asking: what kind of creative life can actually be lived here?

What can be returned to? What can be sustained?

What makes it easier to come back to the work, instead of standing outside it admiring the (idealized, static, brittle, unalive) image of it?

These questions were profoundly reorienting.

Because I no longer want to build work around performance, or authority, or some polished idea of expertise. I do not want to be a guru. I do not want to be a disembodied voice with a clean thesis and no mud on my boots.

I want to share from inside a life I am actually living.

I want to make work that grows out of my days.

Out of painting when I can. Writing when I can. Looking closely. Noticing color in the bits of sea glass washing up on the wrack line after a storm. Adoringly watching how Atlantic weather moves over the same distant islands in five different moods before noon.

Paying attention to what lets a person come back to herself in small, human ways.

I want to be a companion in that. A little ahead in some places, still learning in others, but not on a pedestal.

That is part of why this space is becoming The Feeder Bluff.

Welcome to The Feeder Bluff

I live beside feeder bluffs now, here on the Dingle Peninsula: those raw edges of coast that crumble and give way and, in doing so, feed the shoreline below.

I love them for what they reveal.

From a distance, they can look unstable. Like failure. Like a thing not holding itself together properly.

But that is nowhere close to the whole story.

A feeder bluff is not simply collapsing. It is, crucially, participating. It is part of how the coastline keeps making itself. Its erosion is not meaningless. It feeds what comes after. It nourishes what lies downstream.

If you stop the erosion of the feeder bluff, you starve the beaches downstream. If you stop the genuine process of becoming, you lose the treasures and wonders that emerge from that process.

That metaphor has felt truer to me than anything else I’ve found.

I think so many of us have been taught to live like fortified cliffs—hardened, useful, efficient, coherent, held together at all costs. We are praised for being stable in ways that often ask us to become less alive. Less porous. Less changeable. Less human.

But I do not want to live like that anymore.

I do not want to make work from that place either.

I want to live in a way that honors the fact that we are always in a creative, dynamic, ever-fluctuating state of becoming.

That creativity is not some extra decorative hobby for people who have already solved themselves, but one of the ways we remain in participatory, reciprocal relationship with life. One of the ways we remember we are not merely ghostly spectators or manic productivity machines.

When I am creating, really creating, not performing creativity or thinking about it from a tasteful distance… I feel acutely, deeply, wildly, ecstatically alive.

And from that aliveness, meaning follows. Purpose follows. Connection follows. But they follow. They do not lead.

That is the order that feels true to me now.

Who is The Feeder Bluff for?

So this is what The Feeder Bluff is for.

It is for people who miss feeling alive in their own lives, and suspect that making something—however small, however imperfect, however private—might be one of the ways back.

It is for people who are tired of living as brains on sticks. Tired of overthinking themselves into paralysis. Tired of feeling creatively hungry but somehow unable to begin. Tired of the pressure to turn every impulse into performance, every talent into a pressure for stratified perfect outcomes, every hour into proof of usefulness.

The Feeder Bluff is for people who want a gentler, stranger, more human way of making a life.

And by creativity, I mean that in the broad, ordinary, living sense.

Not just painting, though I will certainly be writing from my life as a painter. Not just writing, though writing has been one of my oldest forms.

I mean making, shaping, noticing, arranging, improvising, following curiosity, making contact. I mean the everyday acts that let a life feel inhabited from the inside.

The quiet supports underneath this work will be embodiment and connection to place, because I have come to believe that creativity needs both. It helps to be safe enough in the body. It helps to be in contact with the actual world: the room, the weather, the neighborhood, the mug in your hand, the texture of the day. Place has never merely been backdrop, it has always been a devoted collaborator.

So what can you expect here now?

• Field notes from my own creative life.

• Writing about art, place, attention, practice, and aliveness.

• Small invitations into making that do not require a personality transplant or a perfect routine (bleh).

• Reflections on creating under real conditions, rather than ideal ones.

• Less posturing. More process.

• Less performance. More participation.

• A lot lot lot more “come sit with me a minute; I think I’ve found something worth noticing.”

I will likely be writing two to three times a week. Some notes will be short and tide-like. Some will be longer. Some will be more personal. Some will be practical. I’ve got a casual mini-podcast planned with my wildly creative partner, Misha. Over time, there will also be classes and live spaces and small containers where we can practice some of this together.

If you have stayed through all of the strange shapeshifting of the last few years, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thank you for bearing witness to a process that has not always been tidy. Thank you for letting me be visibly in motion. Thank you for staying long enough for me to stop trying to invent the right brand and start speaking from the life I am actually living.

I cannot promise I will never change again. In fact, I hope I don’t. I hope I remain weathered enough, porous enough, alive enough to keep changing. But I can say that this feels like the most natural shape my work has taken in a very long time.

It feels lighter.

It feels truer.

It feels less like constructing something and more like opening a door.

If that sounds like something you want to be part of, I’m very glad you’re here.

And if this no longer fits what you came for, you are absolutely free to unsubscribe. No hard feelings. No guilt. No dramatic departure required. I would rather this be a living, willing readership than a haunted one.

I’ll be back soon with the first proper note from The Feeder Bluff.

With beach pebbles and sea amber in my pockets, from my sea‑salty heart to yours,