Blogs are bad at goodbyes and intermissions.

Part of the loveliness is that there are no chapters like a book, no page count to adhere to. They can go on and on. But we're all folks who generally like closures and order.

A week ago marked 5 years of this blog going live. Though the themes and practices around it have been in the works for 7 years since 2019. At the time, I was itching to explore new mediums, searching for a more authentic voice, and ready to start contributing my piece after years of taking influence from so many sources. So I began! I wrote music, picked up new instruments, went pro on software work, and was soon putting words on the internet.

Through the process of working on this dot com stage, I had real fuel to continually find the answer to what it was I wanted to make and share. Largely, it's been a mailbox full of love letters: to musicians, developers, writers, and artists. You end up learning to see these things more closely when trying to imitate and remix. And so I've had many years to deconstruct the inner workings of all sorts of genres and media.

In my mind, I was reaching for destinations. I have so many peers who adore traveling. I like to think this is my version of it. Going behind the scenes of these practices, getting a tactile understanding of what the process looks like. Overly romantic, maybe, but true all the same.

The more broadly I traveled, though, the more I realized that the sensations: flow state, inspiration, study, craft. These weren't mutually exclusive to any individual practice. The constellation made it clear that the cliché is correct — what you end up searching for has been here all along.

Not only that, but after 7 years of devoted work, it turns out I've reached where I was aiming to go. There's always more to learn, of course, and no one ever fully arrives. But I've gradually gone from "It would be great to paint something like this" to "Hey, I've painted something like this!"

It's that duality of a rewarding sensation from reaching the top of a mountain, and then wondering, a bit nervously, "What next?"

All this to say I'm at a chapter's end.

I'll be considering myself on hiatus from this site. No current plan or intent one way or the other on returning. To be determined. I'll be taking the time to see what comes up next.

Many of the ideas that made it here were born during a stretch of time when I wasn't working on a major body of creative output. Closing out the site for a while is not saying no to meaningful work, but saying yes to the silence that allows for more to come through.

It's not seen as much on here, but I'm also more interested in the sketches, drawn or otherwise. Any online bucket builds up expectation. There's the quiet thought, even if it's self-imposed, to rip through another finished piece. The pause is to help start fresh and see what blooms naturally.

A big motivator of all creative practices, including the blog, has been a desire to capture life in a way that the beauty grabs even a fraction of the inspiration. And so what if the most creative work is in how we choose to live our days and be with them? As much as I adore all of these media: written, aural, and visual, they all pale in comparison to the lived experience. Perhaps it’s time to stop assuming that these feelings are only really had on the other side of a detailed rendering, a sweet phrasing of a melody, or finding the perfect word. It’s already here, and it always has been.

I’m a big believer in an idea that has developed from all of this work. That life is richer when reflected on. That won’t be going away from my routine; there’s still plenty of room for sketchbooks, journals, and other private means of doing all that. The pause is here online.

So who knows. Maybe a hiatus. Maybe a week, maybe a year. Maybe the end of the book on this particular project. It’s not so much about giving up on a site, an app, a painting, a project. So long as we’re still guided by curiosity, enthusiasm, and whatever is authentic. It doesn’t entirely matter what the canvas is, or how large it is, or how many rooms you can fill with paintings.

Well, we'll see. For now — Au revoir!