🎨 Between the brushstrokes: painting through the noise
There’s a photo I’ve been sitting with lately.
It’s old. The boys are caught mid-morning—one squinting over a juice box, one content, one leaning forward, all three of them perfect. My brother and I were on a hunting trip. A chilly, icy morning. By the end the day, our freezer was stocked and the boys crashed on the way home.
That’s the image I’m painting from right now.
When you’re drawing and redrawing schematics of a snail-powered compost system… when you’ve been reading USDA tariff breakdowns for three hours straight… when you’re toggling between voice interface specs and grant narratives and trying to explain the word “heliciculture” without losing people? Yeah. You need somewhere to go that isn’t structured like a thesis statement.
You need movement. And music. And a brush or two in your hands.
Painting is where I go to move again. Not in the productive sense, but in the primal one. I dance while I paint. Loud music. Tapping feet. Arms flinging oil. Sweaty, glove-up hands, catching rhythm. Sometimes the boys join me. Sometimes they just shake their heads. But always something shifts—always.
Here’s the thing they don’t tell you when you try to build systems from scratch: thinking, wishing, and hoping can only get you so far. At some point, you have to feel your way into the next idea. You have to shake the logic loose. Let your hands remember what your brain forgot. That you are a body. That you are rhythm. That you’re a system.
And that matters.
Especially when the work you’re doing is technical, deeply necessary, and—let’s be honest—deeply exhausting. I enjoy building Helical Healing Habitat. And prototyping the EscarGrow, our smart, sealed, snail-powered compost-and-harvest system. But this kind of world-building can’t depend on ideas alone.
It needs ballast. It needs grounding. It needs the mess of paint and the hum of Fela or FKJ or whatever saxophone can cut through the static.
I think of it as charging a battery. Sometimes it feels more like siphoning off emotional overload. Either way, it’s not optional. It’s part of the architecture of my creative well. It’s how I remember; I’m designing a life. One that makes room for grief and groove and legacy and joy. One that recognizes and embraces the multidimensional.
If you’re building something that feels impossibly big, or impossibly small, take this as your permission slip: Put the spreadsheet down. Turn the music up. Move. Dance. Wander.
The work will still be there when you get back.
