I almost shaved my face with a brayer this morning.
Let me back up.
Many of you know what a brayer is, but for those that do not. A brayer is a small rubber roller, the kind printmakers use to spread ink evenly across a surface. Mine had been sitting on the studio table all week with dried Golden acrylic crusted on the roller. A careless oversight. Good brayers aren't cheap, and this one deserved better than neglect. So, I brought it inside to soak in miracle performing Murphy's Oil Soap, hoping the gentle chemistry might loosen what had hardened and give the thing a second life.
It was sitting on the bathroom counter this morning, next to my razor.
My mornings are rhythmic. Up at four. Thirty minutes of morning pages, that stream-of-consciousness journaling that clears the static from a restless, neurodivergent brain. Then out the door for an hour. Rucking, running, or lifting, depending on the day and what my body is asking for. Back home. Shower. Good high protein breakfast. Head to school. The routine has deep grooves worn into it by now, and most mornings my body moves through the motions while my mind wanders somewhere else entirely.
That's what happened. Shaving cream on. Hand reaches for the razor. Except it wasn't the razor. It was the brayer.
I caught myself just in time, and I laughed. Not a polite chuckle. A genuine belly laugh at my own absurdity, standing there in the bathroom holding a paint roller up to my face like some kind of bewildered caveman who'd invented the wrong tool.
What a ding-a-ling.
But here's the thing. My mind wasn't just wandering aimlessly. It was somewhere specific. It was already hours ahead, running through the four-hour drive I'll make later today to bring Noah back home, and the stop I'll make on the way back to see Elise. It was on the silk pieces still waiting in the studio, hand-dyed scarves, bag scarves, and scrunchies I'm making for each woman in Elise’s wedding party, all in the soft colors she chose for her day. It was on the six weeks between now and the ceremony, a number that keeps shrinking while the to-do list stays stubbornly long.
It was on the painting that qualified for the State competition with our art club. On the website I've started rebuilding. On the retirement coming the end of May that will change everything about how my days are shaped. On a project I've been working on called Unhurried Letters, which is ready to launch except for a few photographs and a video for the sales page that I haven't finished yet.
My body was in the bathroom. My heart was everywhere else.
Ancient Sentry WIP
I've been thinking about presence lately. About how hard it is to stay inside the moment when the moment feels small and the things we love feel urgent. The creative mind is always running ahead or circling back. That's the gift of it, we see what isn't yet, we hold what's already gone. But it's also the cost. We miss the razor. We grab the brayer. We forget where we are because we're so busy being somewhere else. I am working on being more present.
Unhurried Letters came out of that tension. It's a monthly envelope I've been building, a handwritten travel story, a limited edition fine art print, a recipe from where the story and print were inspired, something beautiful to hold. Twenty minutes once a month. Something that arrives in the mailbox and wants nothing from you except your presence. No homework. No output required. Just permission to slow down and receive.
The first issue is called "The Busker and the Bad Juju." It's a story from Faro, Portugal, about a street musician I found one morning in a stone alley, playing a yellow wood flute, dreadlocks draped over his shoulders like vines reclaiming a temple. A teenager took his picture without paying. "No coin?" he said. "Bad juju. Bad business." The words were playful, but there was wisdom behind them. An ethic. An understanding that what he was giving, a vibration stitched into the fabric of space, was not something to be taken without exchange.
I've been holding onto that first mailing, waiting for the ASMR video to be finished, the photographs to be just right. Waiting for everything to be ready. But this morning, standing at the sink laughing at myself, I started wondering if ready is the wrong word. Maybe the thing is already what it needs to be. Maybe the people who've been with me longest, the ones reading this, don't need a polished sales page to understand what I'm offering. Maybe they just need the invitation.
So here it is. If you want in, you're in. The first envelope ships in two weeks. I'll put a link at the bottom of this post.
Ancient Sentry
The brayer is still soaking. I checked on it after I laughed and put it back in the dish. The paint is starting to soften. Not all of it, not yet, but enough to see that the thing might be salvageable. It just needs time. It needs to sit in something gentle and let what hardened slowly release.
I thought about making that the point of this essay. Something about how restoration is slow, how we soften over time, how grace works quietly in the background while we go about our ordinary mornings. It would have been tidy. It would have landed gently.
But today is Easter. And Easter doesn't land gently.
The resurrection is not a metaphor for gradual improvement. It is the most dramatic event in the history of the world. The stone had already been rolled away when they arrived, the tomb standing open in the quiet of early morning. In one account there had been an earthquake, an angel descending to roll the stone aside, and the guards, trained men, left shaking, undone, like dead men themselves. The women came carrying spices for a body, but there was no body to be found, only messengers waiting inside, calm and untroubled, as if none of this were ever in doubt. And then the question that doesn’t explain so much as it reorients everything: why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has risen.
That is not slow. That is sudden. That is cataclysmic. That is the hinge on which all of human history turns.
The brayer soaking in Murphy's Oil Soap is not Easter. The brayer is me. The brayer is all of us, hardened in places, neglected in others, hoping that time and gentle chemistry will loosen what we've let dry and crack. We soften slowly. We are restored over years, over decades, over lifetimes of ordinary mornings and absent-minded mistakes and small graces we barely notice.
But the event that makes any of that possible? That happened all at once. In a garden. At dawn. On the third day.
Everything changed in a moment. We spend the rest of our lives catching up to what already happened.
Busker and Bad JUJU WIP.
Later today I'll drive Noah home. Four hours each way through the Nebraska landscape, watching the light change across fields that are just starting to remember green. I'll stop to see Elise on the way back, hug her, talk about the wedding, probably laugh about something. The silk pieces will still be waiting when I return. The website will still need work. The painting will still be heading to State. The retirement will still be coming. The Unhurried Letters envelopes will still need to be photographed, stuffed, stamped and sent at the end of the month.
And somewhere in all of that, if I'm paying attention, I'll remember what today actually is. Not a day for productivity. Not a day for catching up. A day for standing still and letting the most dramatic, beautiful, world-remaking truth settle into my bones one more time.
He is risen.
The tomb is empty.
And grace, which arrived all at once two thousand years ago, is still arriving, in ordinary mornings, in belly laughs at the bathroom sink, in brayers that might yet be saved, in envelopes that carry stories from stone alleys in Portugal, in the long slow work of becoming who we were made to be.
Maybe that's enough. Maybe that's everything.
Happy Easter.
Keep making, keep growing, be you.
Tio
P.S. —If Unhurried Letters sounds like something you need, here is the link.
Founders pricing (the first 100), is $15/month. The first envelope, The Busker and the Bad Juju, ships in two weeks. No pressure. No urgency. Just an invitation.
Starling for friend Pam WIP
Joyful With a Soulful Mourn