There are seasons in a life when everything arrives at once and you have nothing left to give and still you keep going, because something in you knows that stopping is not actually an option. Making things, I have found, is one of the few reliable ways to move through those seasons. It doesn’t solve anything, but creation gives form to what has no shape yet, and sometimes having a shape is enough to make it survivable.

I cut circles. Hundreds of them, no color and no plan, just the quiet repetition of scissors through paper during one of the hardest years I have known.

I pasted them down like ripples, or nerves, or petals. What came out looked like a topography of something that had no other shape yet.

I think this is how we survive the things that don't have words: we build them into form instead. Layer by layer, one thing settling over another, until something solid exists where before there was only the weight of everything passing through. The way sediment forms at the bottom of water, slowly, without drama, out of everything that fell.