Courage and fear are often the same feeling, just on different days. The moment before you do the thing you are afraid of is indistinguishable from the moment you decide not to. What separates them is something very small and very stubborn that lives somewhere underneath the fear, and it is not always loud.

I flew alone to my first artist residency and cried on the plane. I climbed an active volcano and at a certain point found myself in the dark with no one ahead and no one behind and a voice inside telling me to stop. I did not stop, and I still do not fully understand how, except that something in me was more stubborn than the fear. I came home and made this piece because creation is how I understand what I have just lived, how I turn experience into something I can see from the outside and finally make sense of.

When you throw a stone into still water, it creates ripples. The stone does not decide how far they travel. It only has to land. I think the moments we keep going when everything in us wants to stop are like that; they send something outward that keeps moving long after the moment itself has passed, into parts of our life we cannot see yet from where we are standing.