Five Months in Motion

A quiet season of travel, making, illness, and rebuilding gathered into a single arc of a year still in motion.

This piece was originally published on crowhurst.art.

The past five months have unfolded with a kind of restless momentum, a season where everything seemed to be shifting at once: work, home, travel, the body itself. Nothing stayed still for long. The ground kept moving, sometimes with excitement, sometimes with exhaustion, sometimes with that quiet sense of inevitability that comes when life insists on its own pace.

Before the semester fully took hold, we flew west to California. It was a return of sorts, not to a former home, but to a place that has shaped so much of my thinking. I visited the graduate program, met several of the faculty whose work has been quietly influencing my own, and walked the campus with that strange mix of familiarity and anticipation. The days around those meetings were spent hiking the coast and the woodlands north of San Francisco, moving through fog, eucalyptus, and the long, slanting light that always feels a little cinematic there. It was a grounding trip, a reminder of why I am doing this work and what it asks of me.

Not long after, we headed south again, this time to Mexico for a retreat. Jacquelyn taught the physical practice of yoga while I led meditation, our roles weaving together in a way that felt both natural and newly aligned. The theme of the week, waves within, echoed through the sessions, through the quiet mornings and the long exhalations of the group. It was a brief pause in a year already accelerating, a moment where the internal tide settled before rising again.

Then the spring semester arrived with its familiar compression. Graduate school has a way of turning weeks into a blur of critique, reading, and the slow, stubborn work of making. In Concept and Image, what began as a loose exploration tightened into something far more deliberate: Strands, the hand‑printed, hand‑bound photobook that became both an anchor and a release valve. The book grew page by page, print by print, until it felt less like a project and more like a small, self‑contained world, something shaped by touch, repetition, and the quiet insistence of craft. Binding it by hand gave the work a kind of finality, a sense that the ideas had settled into their own physical form.

Meanwhile, the house, the imagined house, the sketched house, the house that had lived for so long on screens and tracing paper, finally crossed the threshold into reality. Design gave way to demolition. Two old structures came down, leaving a raw, open space that felt almost too exposed. Then came the footings, the foundation, the concrete floors poured in slow, deliberate stages. Today, the framing began. Seeing the first lines of the house rise from the ground was like watching a drawing come to life. It is strange and grounding to witness something you have only imagined begin to take on weight and shadow.

In the midst of all this building, we left. Europe pulled us across the ocean, Spain, France, Italy, Sardinia, Corsica, a long arc of coastlines, museums, narrow streets, and the kind of light that makes you stop mid‑stride. Travel always rearranges something inside me, but this trip carried its own complications. Halfway through, a sudden wave of food poisoning flattened me, turning days into a blur of nausea and recovery. Even now, three weeks later, my body is still negotiating its way back to equilibrium. Illness has a way of slowing time, of reminding you that momentum is never entirely yours to control.

We returned home just long enough to repack before heading north for the long holiday weekend, introducing my daughter’s husband and his family to the Minnesota North Shore. Waterfalls, rocky shorelines, small‑town restaurants, art galleries tucked into unexpected corners. It felt like a gentle widening of the family circle, a way of stitching new relationships into familiar landscapes. There was something grounding in that, too.

And through all of this, the work at Praxis kept evolving. What began as an internship has shifted into something more defined, more rooted: lead researcher for the gallery’s alternative process program. My days are now filled with the slow, methodical pursuit of repeatability, cyanotype curves, platinum/palladium exposures, photogravure plates, and the delicate balance between chemistry and intuition. This past weekend, I led my second workshop, and something clicked. The group found a rhythm, a shared sense of discovery. By the end, each student held a platinum/palladium print that felt both personal and beautifully resolved. Watching them see their images emerge in the developer, that quiet moment of recognition, reminded me why this work matters.

Looking back, these months feel like a braid of movement and making, construction and collapse, travel and return. A season defined not by stability but by forward motion, sometimes graceful, sometimes chaotic, always carrying me toward something not yet fully formed. The ground is still shifting, but maybe that is simply the terrain of this moment in my life: a landscape in motion, asking me to move with it.