March 2026

In our neck of the woods, there is a particularly windy major roadway. Cars go fast, the lanes feel just a bit too narrow, there's not much of a shoulder, and this time of year, there are major potholes to avoid.  There's a lot going at a very quick clip, and every once in a while, while driving down this road, I think about how much is going exactly right to get everyone to where they need to go.

Same scenario, different scene - Grand Central Station at rush hour.  Countless ant-humans move through this cavernous space at different speeds in completely different directions, with their phones held out to capture the moment, to check the train time, to catch a needed call, dragging suitcases, winter coats, children and the occasional pet.  Every time I pass through, I stop to admire the footwork.  For lack of a better title, let's call it the Not Crashing Dance.

The Not Crashing Dance is the almost-always dance that never gets mentioned on the news.  This constant group project of keeping each other safe while in motion, of making minor / major adjustments of speed & direction, accommodating human error - maybe yours, maybe theirs, while all moving in tandem in the right but not necessarily same direction. No one huddles in the office kitchen to talk about it, no one gets a good job, gold star or back pat for being part of the dance.  It's the ooops, the aberrations that get the ink and screen time.   

These days, it takes just a quick sidelong glance at the news to feel like the world is melting down.  It is.  What is happening on so many different levels is not sustainable, not okay for humans, creatures, the green world as we know it.  But still.  There's a balance to be had here too.  So much is going right without applause in the silent, mundane-ness of being in the world - the air we breathe, the water we drink and in the words of Mary Oliver, the gift of being alive in this broken world.

This lens that we see the world through is malleable.  It's not made on the internet or by what pops up in the headlines, it's not the angry comment on Facebook or the guy who cut you off on the corner.  Or rather, it is, but along with a whole heavy heap of all the unsung wonderful things going exactly right.

There's an art to seeing, isn't there? 

Grace + the SfCL crew

January 2026

If you’re reading this, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Right before you are about to put pen to paper, brush to canvas, hand to clay, the moment you're ready to start, there’s a gateway of uncertainty that you have to leap through to move from thought to form. Depending on the day, the time, the way the creative wind blows, the space beyond can feel like the murkiest pit of despair or on a gentler day, maybe more like a kiddie ballpit where the colors say fun but you’re wondering who has touched what and how deep is this thing really. 

For me, that gateway into the creative feels very much akin to this particular moment in this country - an open-ended question of what comes next, but not a gentle rhetorical way. It feels like getting pushed off the diving board whether we are ready or not and the question is, when, not if, chaos comes knocking on our door, our neighbor's door, how do we want to respond?

I think the actions themselves are different for everyone - there are five hundred million talents and skills among us, both named and unnamed and we should use all of them all at once.  The images that have stuck with me over the past few months of escalating violence have been of the inflatable unicorns (and other brethren) in protest in Portland and the man playing a full drum kit in snow outside a Minneapolis hotel.  People showing up in their full humanity, in joy, in humor even in the darkest moments. 

To move forward on paper, you have to be open to catching whatever comes next, in whatever form it takes and then decide move with it, to improvise, to dance with it a little.  You have to say yes. And so you don't lose your way through all the twists and turns, you have to carry a lantern of conviction that tells you everything will not only turn out alright, but amazing.

Life as art, art as life. Or I guess, in the much pithier words of Coach Taylor, "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose." That works too. 

Grace + the SfCL crew

November 2025

Hey there -

This lands in your inbox on the eve of what feels like the slippery slope into the whirl of the holiday season. Here's what I'm thinking about this early morning.

I'm learning how to ride horses again. When you first learn to ride, you get the first set of instructions. Pull to stop, kick to go, pull left to left, right to go right. Easy, straightforward. And then eventually, you get the second set of instructions, the real ones that almost completely obliterate the first set. You learn the bits and pieces of how to have a constant nuanced conversation / dialogue / negotiation with a creature very different from you while in constant motion. The cues shift as you as you go depending on circumstance, what kind of day you're both having, and most of the time, it feels more like finessing piano keys, rather than what you were told initially was a push button start.

Painting can be like that too. We learn as kids to call something by its color. That's red. That's blue. Categories. Simple. And then you start to paint, maybe as an adult or a person parading as an adult, and you start to realize that if you want to make something look like the actual thing and not a caricature of it, nothing is actually a simple color, a simple form. That apple is actually more purple or blue in its shadows, there's a sheen of green coming through towards the center, the way its skin folds in more streaky yellow brown as it reaches the stem and how, oh how, do you get the little flecks of gold/brown/yellow that come through the burgundy red too.

I think this is the best way, at least for today, to describe what I'm feeling about this reach into holiday season. There are rituals and things that we do because we've always done them. It's the easy setting, a weird version of comforting to roll in a well worn track. But if you're a human in the world, there are many, many signs telling us that the current play book is defunct. (Fear is a funny thing. Sometimes it just makes us play the old tunes louder, in the hopes that it'll drown out the new unknown.)

This holiday season, let's decide to feel and move through the world just a bit differently. To pick and choose with care what rituals we nurture, which we discard, which new threads we weave into our everyday lives. To be subversive in the most of beautiful of ways, to create softness where there is none, to winnow the closest version of truth we can find, to live in a way that holds us in integrity with our inner values.

It's hard work, but a priceless gift for the world, isn't it?

xx,

Grace + the SfCL crew