One of the greatest lessons I've learned over the many years of being an artist is this: life happens.

I used to believe that being an artist meant always creating, always producing, always "putting it out there." My younger self clung tightly to that idea and struggled with it because, inevitably, life would intervene. Something would arise that required all of my attention, space, and energy, leaving little or no room to make art. I fought it. I resisted it. But after years of moving in and out of these naturally occurring seasons, I've come to understand that this, too, is part of the creative process. Part of the beautiful journey.

Now I know that when I'm not creating, I'm gathering. I shift into what I think of as hunter-and-gatherer mode. I become a collector of treasures. I gather ideas. I collect moments. I store feelings and experiences—sometimes consciously, but more often subconsciously—in the tiny cracks and slivers of space that exist within whatever busy season life has brought me into. Sometimes this lasts for months.

I've learned that this isn't a pause in my artistic process. It is my artistic process.

It reflects life itself—its beautiful duality. We cannot know light without darkness. Warmth has little meaning without cold. Joy exists alongside sorrow. The Yang and the Yin. Movement and stillness. Seasons of creating and expressing, and seasons of quietly observing, gathering, and simply being.

And then, one day, the magic happens.

Without forcing it, I find myself creating again. All of those collected fragments begin to emerge. The seal that formed during the quiet season slowly breaks open, and the work starts to flow. This week, that happened for me.

During my most recent season of busyness—when work and life's responsibilities took priority—I also lost my mother. She passed away in March. There are no words that can truly describe what that kind of loss looks like or feels like. It became another thing I carried while continuing to move through the commitments of everyday life.Then, one day in the later spring, while cleaning our yard after the long, harsh winter, I found myself sitting in front of the river rocks that line our house. They were covered in crumpled, decayed leaves, twigs, dirt, broken maple keys, and tiny insects—some still moving about, others already gone. I wanted to clear away the debris and reveal the stones again.

So I picked them up, one by one. I brushed away the bits of earth caught between them and carefully placed each one back where it belonged.

Hours passed.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped cleaning and started seeing. I became absorbed by each stone's textures, colours, dimples, weight, and the warmth each had absorbed from the sun. I found myself marveling at their quiet beauty.

And sitting there among those stones, I felt something shift. Not a great wave of healing. Just the tiniest, crumb-sized first steps toward it.

So this week, as my own schedule has begun to open into the spaciousness of summer, I finally began again. I began “making art”. Making stones for now. Out of paper. Paint. Pastels. Charcoal. Whatever wanted to become part of them. And it has felt so. incredibly. Good. I can already sense that I'll be making them for days, perhaps weeks, to come.

As I work, I feel my mom with me. And I feel my dad, too. I lost him in 2021. He was a mason. He spent his life laying bricks and stone, creating beauty in his own unique artistic language. With every stone I draw, paint, and affix to the glass that is my canvas, I feel close to them both.

There is one final word that keeps returning to me. Grateful.

I am endlessly grateful that art gives me a way to make meaning from my life. It allows me to sit with my experiences, deepen my relationship with them, honour them, and eventually transform them into something I can lovingly share with others.

Perhaps this is what creating has always been. Not a constant state of making. But a lifelong rhythm of gathering... and then offering.