I Quit.

The studio door was inviting all week. I know because I kept walking past it.
Not closed off or unavailable. Not locked. Just standing there the way it does when I'm between projects, beckoning. The north light from the two large windows demanding a peek every time I walked by as I headed to the woodshop. I walked past it going to get the garden. I walked past it headed to the chicken coop to collect eggs. Every time, some part of me registered the door, registered the rooms behind it, and kept walking, seemingly vacant of emotion. Almost like I was mad, or disgusted merely by the pure existence and proximity of it. Weird. I am talking about my security blanket. The place I pray, sing, dance, create completely unfettered, and I am repelled by it like two ends of a magnet. What gives?

Usually, I go in even when I don't feel like it. That's the rule I've told myself for forty years, the professional's rule, the one that separates people who make things from people who talk about making things. This week I broke it, and I didn't just bend it a little. I didn't paint. I didn't ruck. I didn't go to the gym. Pickleball happened exactly twice, which for me is practically retirement. I did work on Elise's table, hands in the wood, sawdust and resin in my shirt collar by the end of it, and I wrote more than I have in a while. But even that felt like it was happening around the edges of something, not in the center of it. Adjacent to the week instead of inside it. Am I broken?

I didn't send the weekly email last Monday either. Some of you noticed. I didn't miss sending it, which surprised me more than not sending it did.

I've spent a fair amount of this week asking myself what exactly was going on. I quit. I am not sure what I was quitting, since I couldn't get more specific than "everything" for longer than I'd like to admit. Not depressed. I can count the genuinely depressed stretches of my life on one hand, and this wasn't that. Melancholy, maybe, the low-grade kind that shows up in the ebb of things, the way a season changes before you've registered the last one is over. I've decided that's allowed. Not everything that dims for a week is a symptom. Some of it is just weather, cycles and seasons of life.

But melancholy wasn't the whole of it. Some of it had more spine to it than that. A fist in the air. A kind of internal “bugger off”, aimed at I'm not entirely sure who or what. Not my family or friends. Not the calendar. Maybe the forty-year version of me who wrote the professional's rule in the first place and has been running the show ever since without ever asking whether I still agreed with it. There's a rogue streak in me that has never much liked being told what to do, even when I'm the one doing the telling. A contrarian my entire life, and acutely aware of the societal pull to become one of the sheeple, which, right or wrong, I vehemently fight on a daily basis. God made us each wonderfully and individually unique. I want to honor that in everyone; that is part of the fight against becoming a sheeple.

But it put a real question in front of me, and I haven't fully answered it. Where's the line between honoring how you feel and being disciplined enough to actually finish what you started? Perhaps that is a poor question coming from me, since I have dozens of unfinished paintings and projects lying around in various modes of work in progress. I've never trusted the version of "you don't need goals" that gets passed around lately, mostly because I've watched what happens to people who stop having any. But I've also spent most of my life running at full tilt, hair on fire, forty years of showing up whether I felt like it or not, coming off what amounted to a Mach 3 pace, and now I'm trying to learn how to ride a tricycle instead. Not a downshift. A different vehicle entirely, with different physics, and I keep grabbing for a throttle that isn't there. Nobody warned me the transition itself would be this bumpy. I assumed slowing down would feel like relief. Some days it just feels like static, and some days just feel, bleh. Is my "purpose" somehow fogged and in need of clarification?

Somewhere in this week I also started wondering if I'm a hoarder. For real.
Not casually. I stood in the unfinished, unorganized, woodshop one afternoon and did an honest count of what's stacked against the walls and on my racks, while remembering what is also in the studio still not organized from moving. Rolls of raw silk still waiting for a dye bath. Boxes of beeswax and damar resin. Cold wax medium, hundreds of tubes of oil and acrylic paint. Every size and type of substrate you can think of. Frames, pigments and powders. Printmaking plates. A shelf of resin I keep meaning to pour and don't. The list goes on. 

The woodshop reveals lumber from three different restoration jobs I started and set down. More building material and more art material than I'll use if I live to be a hundred and ten, and I couldn't tell if that was a multipotentialite's toolkit or something closer to a diagnosis. The embarrassing images tell the story, I still shared them because well, they are real. That is the state of the studio and woodshop at the moment or should I stay still. Over a year from when I moved to the current building. Chaos. Transition. 

Standing there, I actually laughed out loud, because it occurred to me that El Anatsui could probably build one of his massive bottle-cap tapestries out of what's against just one wall of that shop, and Colin Delfosse, the artist behind Fulu Act, who builds wearable sculptures out of city trash, syringes and tin cans and scrap phones, would look at my studio the way I look at a lumberyard. Somebody else's junk is always somebody's raw material. I'm just not sure yet whether mine is raw material or evidence.

The ideas are never the problem. They never are. It's the energy to chase all of them down that keeps coming up short, and I don't yet know if trimming the studio and woodshop down would free up more of that energy or just take away the raw material I didn't know I still needed. I stood there a long time not answering my own question. Then I went back inside and worked on the table some more, which felt like the only honest thing to do with an unanswered question: keep your hands busy while it sits there stewing on the edge of your subconscious.

Here's the strange part. When the clarity does come, and it comes in moments, not stretches, it's remarkable. Small explosions of dopamine fire, something lifts, the way fog lifts off the river in the morning, and for a few minutes I can see exactly what I've been missing, and the pull toward a more purposeful way of living gets loud enough that I can't talk myself out of it. Maybe that answers the purpose question from a minute ago. Maybe it just complicates it further. I don't have good language for it either way. It isn't inspiration exactly. It's closer to being called, though I'd feel strange saying that out loud to most people. I don't know if everyone gets this. I don't know if it's age, or the specific hinge I'm standing on right now, leaving one life for another. I just know it's real, and it doesn't show up on a schedule.

The embarrassing state of the woodshop, also unfinished.

This week gave me more questions in the studio than answers. Then yesterday a package showed up that I'd been waiting on for two weeks, and it shifted the mood of the whole thing.

It's a hand mix polyurea, the kind that cures rock hard but stays flexible, and it means I can finally stop spraying hard coatings or wrestling with resin and Bondo on the foam pieces I carve for the rock frames I build. Brush it on, sand it, paint it. That's it. I've been wanting a cleaner path from carved foam to a finished, paintable surface for a long time, and if this does what the spec sheet says it does, I already know what I'm carving first.

I don't have a tidy ending for any of this. The table for Elise is coming along, slower than I planned, better than I expected. The studio door is still there, still beckoning, waiting for whenever I walk back through it, presumably next week. On my terms this time. Not out of habit. Fist still half up, just in case.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio