We forget, sometimes for long stretches, that joy is also allowed. That making something does not require suffering as its entry point. That creation can begin from abundance just as honestly as it begins from grief, and that what comes out of a quiet, open season is as real and as true as anything born from urgency or survival.

After a very hard season I found myself at a lagoon so blue it looked like an invented color, and something in my chest went wide and soft and I remembered that I was allowed to feel that. I came home and made this piece as a gift to that feeling, with no concept and no pressure and nothing to prove.

Refraction is what happens when light enters a new medium and bends, revealing colors that were always there but invisible until that moment. I have been wondering ever since whether the same thing happens to us when we finally let ourselves rest long enough to feel something other than what we have been carrying.