Love Letters - Vol. 2026, No. 4

Love letters from me to you about what I've been thinking about, playing with, and obsessing over. Updated (hopefully) weekly.

Hello, my friends!

I fear it’s been quite a while since my last check-in. My apologies. I have been working through artist block, a change of scenery, an up-ended and suddenly busy schedule, reordering my priorities, and trying to figure out what I’m doing with my life. You know, just casual things. So please grab a cup of your warm beverage of choice and I’ll catch you up on the happenings!

The last part of January was insane with the tail end of packing and moving out of my old apartment. I spent a good bit of time seriously thinking I was moving to Seattle to help out a friend of a friend who had been hospitalized, but then last minute that didn’t happen. Which really is good, because I’m glad that she didn’t need further hospitalization, but the back and forth of thinking I was going to do a cross state move, and then realizing I wasn’t, was a bit rough on my nerves.

I finished moving out of my old apartment and said “until we meet again in like 6 weeks!” to my dear roommates of nine years/friends/chosen family as they moved to their new home out of state. I ended up going north up to the California wine country after kindly being invited to stay with some of my other amazing friends when my Seattle plans fell through and it’s been wonderful! I’ve lived in the hustle and bustle of Oakland for so long that the trees full of spring blooms and the vineyards and fields really do feel like a breath of fresh air. I’ve also been loving getting to hang out with my friends here. For so long, we’ve really only gotten to see each other a handful of times per year, so getting to hang out with them all the time has been such a treat! 

I find that left to my own devices, I tend be a fairly solitary creature (thank you for that, childhood trauma), but my wine country friends are social butterflies who are really involved with their local community and have a large group of awesome friends that they’ve been introducing me to. It’s been really fun and really good for me to get out and dust off my rusty crusty social skills. My dear friend here is also an artist and so it has been amazing and encouraging to talk about art and see art and be immersed in the art world. I’ve gone to several artist receptions of new work and it’s been really inspiring to be around other artists who are taking their art so seriously and who are brave enough to share it with the world. 

My friend also treated me to an afternoon photography workshop. I take a LOT of photos, but I’ve never really had an opportunity to take a class about photography so I was super excited. For the workshop, we went around an amazingly beautiful resort and practiced the art of observing. Then we got to print out our favorite photo of the day, mat it, and sign it. Despite a camera roll that bulges at the seams, I’ve shared very few of the photos I take and I don’t think I’ve printed out anything in at least a decade, let alone framed it and treated it like a true art work. And you know what? It was wonderful. It was so so special to hold the result of my work in my hands and sign it and say “hey, I did that.” To say that my vision, my voice, is worth printing out, and treating as something real and special. 

Unfortunately though, despite being around a lot of artists, I spent about a month struggling with a bit of The Artist’s Way induced artist block. I’m currently on Week 9, and one of the tasks is to go back and read your morning pages. Now, since I have been working on The Artist’s Way for roughly a millennia, I have a LOT of morning pages and for whatever reason, I decided to start all the way back at the beginning (August 2023). And wow, the level of cringe I experienced trying to read my first volume of morning pages! Honestly astronomical. It was clearly detrimental to my process and I was having some serious doubts about my ability to execute my ideas. In all fairness to myself, those early morning pages were really the first time in over a decade that I had written more than a work email. But regardless, reading my clumsy first attempts at writing really kind of like hurt me and made me think “is writing really an art form that I think I can do and should spend time on, let alone subject others to?” I clearly wasn’t really sure there for a while.  

I’ve thought about it and remembered that morning pages are messy and not made for judgement. They are for practice. They are for shaking off the cobwebs and letting loose the inner mess. Two and half years of morning pages has made me a better and more confident writer. My pages are still messy and boring and whiney, but they have changed my life. Morning pages helped me find myself again. I had a little bit of time this year where I thought, you know, maybe I don’t need my morning pages anymore, maybe I should be spending that time more wisely, but I was wrong and I have once again come back to them. Because they are a warm up and a safe space and a way to find my own true north again every day. 

And as I’ve started writing morning pages again, I’ve also gone back to creating. I bought a tiny set of watercolor and I’ve slowly started trying to see what they can do. I haven’t played with watercolor since college and it is just as difficult as I remember it being, but I’m okay with it. It’s still fun. My friend asked me to write out a poem for her and so I did that and I added a bit of watercolor embellishment. 

I also made this tiny flower painting with watercolor for new friend as a thank you gift. 

Wishing you a wonderful week ahead of fun and creativity! I'm off to see what other trouble I can get into with watercolor!

Much love,

Lucy