August 2025 through June 2026
I slowly stopped taking photos, and I tucked away the urge to paint into my front pocket. For later.
Not good, and not bad.
I focused all the energy I had on the hierarchy surfacing before my thirties: loving deeply, the meat grinder of labor, and moving through the rhythms of the day.
Retreat is not always regression. My own retreat came from the urge to enjoy the beauty of building a life, and to be present in my immediate surroundings, letting them speak to me. To be present with the people in my life, loved ones or strangers. I didn't want to create anything.
I stopped paying attention to the art scene, to the political and cultural chatter, the masturbatory inconsequential analyses. I just lived life and talked to people. I could see everything and everyone with a clarity that felt at once old and new. I loved the world and mourned its tragedies. I doted on the people I worked with, all angels.
Around this time, I was becoming less physically resilient. I began collecting small injuries at work. I became thinner and achier. My face changed. But I grew in love. I gently tended to the important friendships I had.
Last year in Amsterdam, I got thrown off my bike and lost all the skin on my palms, broke a toe and badly bruised a rib, hip, and knee, and permanently injured both wrists. I still can't bear down on them today. But my hands work, so there is some miracle here, and much to be thankful for.
I'd later learn from doctors that the accident and the stress—from wear and tear, from the effort to change careers, from the periodic uneasy thoughts about whether or not we'll ever get to have a child, from tiredness— had slowly seized up my internal organs. I never knew this was possible. Months later I'm emerging on the other side of getting my body back to normal.
God and I speak all the time without speaking, or me going to any of his houses. He knows where I stand. My body might ache upon waking but I sleep peacefully at night. After all these years, what remains unchanged is my tenderness towards humanity and reverence for the beauty around me. Every now and then I'm moved to tears—watching my mother laugh as she lights her cigarette, smelling the breeze at the Sheepshead Bay train station, any old order of dappled morning light. Even today, I woke early in the quiet of rural Pennsylvania and opened my eyes to a cotton candy sky.
Many times over the last few years, I've melted with gratitude.
My hierarchy remains the same.
I finally developed a few rolls of film. Sporadic shots. I'll only show a few here.