I have wanted to be an artist since I was a little girl.
Not in some casual, passing way. I mean it lived in me as a real longing. It was one of those desires that arrives before you have language for it—before you know what kind of artist you want to be, before you know what medium is yours, before you know whether the world will make room for that desire or not. I only knew that I was drawn to art, drawn to beauty, drawn to making.
And I was told, early, that I didn’t have the talent.
You know how these things happen when you’re young. Someone else appears more gifted in the obvious way. Someone can draw the face exactly right, or render a realistic image, or demonstrate the kind of skill adults know how to recognize and reward. And because I did not have that kind of visible talent, I absorbed the message that art belonged to other people.
Not to me.
So even though the longing stayed, I wrote it off. In elementary school, in high school, even in college, I carried that ache like something vaguely romantic and vaguely impossible. Wouldn’t it be lovely to be an artist. Wouldn’t it be beautiful. But I didn’t really believe it was mine.
It wasn’t until my twenties, after I moved out of my family home and was living on my own in a tiny apartment in Long Beach, California, that something began to open again. I decided, consciously, that I was going to play. I was going to discover whatever creativity was actually mine.
Around that same time, I found The Artist’s Way, and other books on creativity and journaling and the inner life of making. Writing had always been one of my deep loves. I was an avid journal keeper. So creativity, reflection, and self-discovery were already intertwined in me. But this was different. This was the beginning of giving myself permission to experiment.
I fell in love with collage.
I fell in love with mixed media.
I fell in love with the conversation between words and imagery and paint and paper and color.
I made handmade journals with stitched signatures and beautiful covers that were artworks in themselves.
I played.
And still, even then, the other eye was always present.
Is this pretty enough?
Is this art enough?
Is this beautiful enough?
Am I allowed to call myself an artist if no institution has validated me?
If I didn’t go to art school?
If I can’t make what the culture immediately recognizes as “real art”?
That wound ran deep, and before I even had time to really protect the joy of what I was discovering, another question arrived to swallow the whole thing:
How do I make money doing this?
How do I turn this into a profession?
How do I make this sustain me?
How do I build a life where my creativity pays the bills?
Let me be very clear: I understand why that question came. I was young. I wanted freedom. I wanted the artist life. I wanted not to be beholden. I wanted beauty and self-determination and meaning. But I can also see now that almost as soon as creativity opened, capitalism stepped in and tried to convert it into output.
And it killed something.
The journals I was making were beautiful. They really were. But if I sold one for seventy-five dollars and it took me two weeks to make, there was no math in the world that made that sustainable. Very quickly, art became labor under pressure. And when art becomes labor under pressure before it has had the chance to become beloved on its own terms, it can collapse.
So I walked away from it.
Life moved.
I met my husband.
We traveled.
I became an entrepreneur.
I built a body of work in spirituality, ritual, women’s transformation, liberation, teaching, facilitation, study, and devotion. And I don’t say that as though those years were false or wasted. They were rich. They were meaningful. They fed me. They opened me. They shaped my cosmology and deepened my understanding of self, soul, body, womanhood, mystery, and the sacred.
But something in me still lay dormant.
And part of the truth is this: I also became a burnt-out entrepreneur. Again and again, in one form or another, I found ways to make money from what I created. Again and again, what I loved got folded into the machinery of earning. And after a while I started to ask a question that my younger self never would have permitted:
What if it is actually okay to have a regular job and make art on evenings and weekends?
What if the fantasy that art must sustain you financially in order to be real is bullshit?
What if the opposite is true sometimes?
What if protecting art from economic pressure is one of the ways love survives?
What if not having to extract income from your creativity is precisely what allows it to remain alive?
These questions mattered to me because by the time I was moving through perimenopause, I could feel that I was in a threshold. Not just hormonally, though certainly that too. Spiritually. Psychically. Initiatorily. Perimenopause, for me, has been a shamanic passage. A dismembering and a reassembly. A stripping and a revelation. A ruthless and holy invitation to become more fully who I actually am.
And part of that becoming required soul retrieval.
I had to go back for the one who loved art.
The one who longed to make.
The one who didn’t need a plan.
The one who wanted color and paper and scraps and pens and marks and beauty.
The one who knew how to play.
I had forgotten how to play.
So I began again with what I had.
Paper.
Pens.
Notebooks.
Collage materials.
Paint.
Impulse.
No grand strategy. No polished brand architecture. No demand that the work be legible, profitable, or even particularly “good” by anyone else’s standards. I just started making.
And something holy opened.
Now I make art every day as part of my meditation and devotional practice. I take a photo with my phone. I don’t overly edit it. I sometimes post it. I let the record exist. But what matters is not the post. What matters is the moment of making.
Because each piece, as I understand it now, is a holy artifact.
It is an artifact of a moment in time when I was fully in the flow—fully present to color, texture, gesture, sensation, intuition, and surrender. Sometimes what moves through the work is joy. Sometimes grief. Sometimes rage. Sometimes integration from something I lived months before. But underneath it all is pleasure. The pleasure of being so present to what is happening that I disappear into it. The pleasure of contact. The pleasure of devotional flow. The pleasure of not needing the work to justify itself.
This is why I no longer think about the work in terms of style first.
I don’t ask, what is my official aesthetic?
What is my brand-consistent visual language?
What should I be known for?
I am much more interested in the truth of the process.
What wants to happen here?
What is moving through me?
What is this mark asking for?
What does this scrap of paper want beside that wash of color?
What happens if I trust the impulse instead of the plan?
That is the practice.
And because it is the practice, I have also become more protective of the work itself. The image online is not the thing itself. The original matters. The original carries the encounter. The original is the object that was touched, marked, assembled, and brought through a particular state of being. So while I may one day let originals go, if my space fills and they are ready to move into someone else’s keeping, I do not imagine making prints of this work. Any legitimate transfer of the work happens only through the original piece, or through publication in a book created by me.
Because books, too, are sacred artifacts.
That matters to me more than I can explain. The thought of gathering these works into a book—into a real container, a held object, a sacred sequence—feels like a dream I have carried for a long time.
So this is what I mean when I say I am returning to art.
I do not mean I am launching a new content vertical.
I do not mean I am building a polished art brand.
I do not mean I am finally trying to prove I deserved the label all along.
I mean I am returning to a part of myself that was always there.
I mean I am retrieving something exiled by judgment, productivity, and pressure.
I mean I am letting art be what it was before the world told me what counted.
I mean I am allowing creativity to be prayer again.
If you witness this work—here, on my website, on Instagram, wherever it appears—you are not just seeing something I made. You are bearing witness to a moment of devotional practice. A moment of contact. A moment in which beauty, grief, pleasure, color, body, soul, and mystery met on the page.
And maybe that is all art ever needed to be.