What is the moral responsibility for a creative who doesn’t have much to wade through? I went to therapy a while ago because some giant thing was knocking on the door of my soul and I couldn’t hear it. There, the universe made itself known to me—asked me simply, to witness it. I watched a small bean of light swirl around an ellipsis and was filled with the understanding of all there is to know. My body shook with the magnitude and aching simplicity of this thing. Tears rivered around my ears and pooled on the floor beneath my quaking body. I was both mountain and grain of sand. Prehistoric whales swam through constellations. Skies unzipped themselves into infinite wonder, revealing all the ways light can be found in the dark. The more I tend to the benevolent harmony of all things, the more I live it in dreamlike moments experienced with my eyes open, blanketed by stars in both water and air, heaven and earth. It is a gift to experience in waking moments the same atmospheric transcendence that meets me when I close my eyes.

And yet, it is easy to trust fear in the world we inhabit. When I sit with this, I hear what I am uniquely suited to deliver: there is light in darkness. There is also light in light. My job is to let it flow through me to all of you. To place it in your hand. To hold it without flinching.

During the Norton Island artist residency  recently, creative writer Naomi Cohn and I took a walk to talk about portals and spent most of the time admiring tide pools. Early the next morning I walked to the porch and she was sitting there, glasses off, writing in braille. I gave her space. She eventually finished, put her glasses on, found me sitting there and said “oh! It’s you. I was just writing about you. I figured it out. We are the portals.”

It’s true. We are all portals through which consciousness takes form. I suspect my work is a portal that points everyone back to whatever light resides within them. From that place, hidden or exposed, it begins to sing.

As I worked in my happy slant of light in my studio during this residency, tying hundreds of colorful knots, it occurred to me how creation happens in community.  It occurred to me that this lightness that I so naturally bear wasn’t meant to be hoarded in one transcendent room. It was meant to be offered, suspended, scattered over the island in pockets of delight and reflection as an invitation inward or outward depending on where each of you were at the time. The results, to my delight, were immediate. Other creatives began sending me pictures, telling me stories of their tangled anxieties relaxing in the presence of something my hands had delivered, of a piece I had hung suddenly becoming a beacon for them.  Or a way into a character forming in a story they were writing. Holy encounters. Sirens singing. Something light to hug in the comfort of a shadow. Even I benefited from them, when the sharp pull of collective grief drew me away from myself for about an hour until I realized what was happening and re-attuned.

My work speaks to this—a sentient quilt as a singular breathing organism made of individual parts; if you listen long enough with your heart open suddenly you naturally begin breathing from that open place and you find a shape that feels like you. Maybe it is shining, maybe it is withdrawn in the background having an argument with itself or wondering when the peak of grief will subside. Maybe it is hiding, trusting that the depths of sadness will be made lighter by a neighboring brightness.

Hoping some benevolent thing that realizes the holiness of being—a mouse, a star, a winter wren—will stand proudly in herself, next to you. Brave, exposed, and alive.