Sunday Prompt for Week 13:

What revelations or aha moments have we had recently that have yet to transition into activation or alignment of our living?

How are we receiving insight, clarity, or understanding, that we are letting settle into the background without changing how we actually live? What keeps us from bridging the gap between knowing and doing,…

Read more

Here are a few honest thoughts on why the distance between artists and the people who love their work feels worth closing, with one small, slow offer I want to try.

From art patrons to artists

When you see a completed painting, in one sense you’re looking at a singular image. There’s a clear visual, what appears to be a moment captured and held.

But within the creative process, life and work of an artist, each artwork holds a complex weaving of emotions, memories, experiences, ideas, decisions, and skills practiced.

Art patronage is a historic and modern financial practice of supporting this multi-faceted journey of the artist and their creating. It has historically been institutional, or a viable role only held by the wealthy classes, often driven by systems of status and prestige. Some of these institutional structures continue today, and are often primary ways that artist’s are able to carve out a viable living where they can contribute their ideas and skills, and sustain their roles as illuminators of the key elements of our humanity, culture, emotion, struggle, and beauty.

Institutions, as we know, are often encumbered by systemic barriers and issues, or even at best, are known for their general bulkiness. Complex applications and fees, lengthy delays on payments, cuts in funding, etc. can often diminish the effect of these structures in equipping and empowering the artist to hold their role well. In addition, the real human connection and interaction between the patron and the artist can be minimal, held at a distance by the structures in place.

This isn’t my tirade to dismiss the potential goodness of any of this. As someone considering both the historic roots and the present day structure of this for the first time, I am still learning a lot, and also noticing some things as an emerging insider with my outsider glasses still on.

The digital world has begun an attempt to dismantle or reform these structures. One way this happens: Artists can set up accounts with apps like Patreon (or Substack!) and receive funds directly from contributors that are interested and invested in their work. This is exciting, and a bit overwhelming, with new challenges being felt from the flood of information and access. Digital culture’s over-stimulation can cripple the process in a whole new way.

What if we took this offline?

Lately, I’ve been seeing artists offering monthly snail mail. Often, these subscriptions involve a small art print, with personal touches. This is resonating and is beautiful because it takes the connection between artists and patrons offline.

Artist patrons can be individuals who bring a complete artwork into their space, absolutely. Those who are able are still key. Patrons could also be business owners who host artwork in their shops, restaurants, offices, events, allowing the work to be seen by others in a more public way, creating environments that are inspiring and meaningful. Institutionally-supported galleries and public art spaces are an essential life source to our communities.

But not everyone is in a position to walk closely with the artist and their art-making in this larger contributional way. Digital spaces like Substack and other social media have become and continue be a way for anyone to connect to the artist’s journey, but it can remain detached, impersonal, and non-reciprocal. We may consume an artists digital images, but we don’t know how to weave our own contributions into the process beyond clicking a like button.

There’s no shade here, the sheer volume of digital images that fire into our brain at a rapid pace understandably create little space for genuine, relational response. Not to mention, seeing a creative work on a screen does not invoke the same emotional response in us as physically encountering the work of someone’s hands.

Notes from the Studio

Enter my new little snail-mail offering.

Here I am, an artist making emotionally complex, narrative artworks in an abstracted figurative style. As I said in the beginning, that process has so many facets, many small steps along the way that make up a vibrantly alive, creative process. I truly love to share not just the outcome of that journey, but also the in-process moments, the mistakes that lead to clarity, the surprises I encounter along the way.

I have so many of these moments documented in sketchbooks and on scraps of canvas. These are the incomplete, raw thoughts and emotions that eventually make up a refined whole.

And I would really love to share them offline in the form of a physical postcard, held in your hand, with my written notes on the back.

Notes from the Studio is a monthly postcard subscription. This is my small, slow, affordable, offline answer to the distance between an artist and the people who care about their work. Each month I’ll send you a postcard featuring one of these in-process moments on the front. It might be an ink study, a figure sketch, some fragment from the making journey. On the back will be a handwritten note from me, sharing what I’m noticing that month as I create.

I am offering this as an accessible invitation to you to become an actively participating patron of my creating process and journey. If you aren’t in a position to collect a large painting, you can still hold a piece of the process in your hands and feel genuinely connected to the making of it.

I’m offering this for $8 a month, so that I can keep it personal and sustainable. It feels like sending a seed from my studio, to be a source of creative growth in your hands. In return, you are contributing to my sustained life and role as art-maker in this world, allowing me to do it well and deeply.

Notes from the Studio Sign Up

The artist has and always will need patrons. Artists and the people who love their work need each other, and we can create our own ways to connect meaningfully, to close the systemic distances between us. This is my attempt at that. Here’s to minimizing reliance on institutions, and making room for slow connection in a fast, anxious world.

I would be honored and grateful to send you some mail.

Sunday Prompt for Week 12:

What is our capacity for nuance? Where are we stuck in a limited perspective on what might fit best or be possible for specific moments and situations?

How are we patterned to think only in binaries when situations are full of complexity? How are we seeing only through concrete formulas, good or bad, success or failure? Where ha…

Read more

Sunday Prompt for Week 11:

What have you forgotten about listening? What is it like to truly listen deeply?

How has the constant noise, the need to be heard, the pressure to have answers, and the fear of what you might discover prevented you from listening? What would it mean to remember how to take time and perspective to really notice what is there, bei…

Read more

I’m grateful to announce that I have completed three paintings for the Honest Prayer series, inspired by a few of the emotionally raw prayers found in the biblical Psalms. Let’s walk through the whole series in order, showing the personal journey that progressed in real time.

These kinds of movements are often not only personally experienced in specific seasons, but are familiar territories that countless souls have wandered through the centuries.

As I mentioned when this series first began, I have been collaborating not only with the biblical Psalms, but also with the beautiful poetic work of Malcolm Guite in his own creative project inspired by these passages.

How Long?

The first movement began in the sixth Psalm. I started this piece weary and raw from memories that had been unearthed, new layers of grieving that abruptly stood in front of me, refusing to be ignored.

The painting unfolded with surprising ease, as if a perfectly sized vessel had been offered to hold the emotions, and I was being invited to pour them out onto the canvas.

These moments in particular from the original text and Guite’s poetry paralleled in undeniable synchronicity with what was showing up on canvas:

“All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.”

Psalm 6:6

“How could I think you punished me? My fears

Just magnified the shadows that I cast

Till you were lost in shadow too.”

Malcolm Guite - Psalm 6:VI Domine, ne in furore

The painting is awash in shadows, but there’s an overall glowing presence in the environment that feels as if it’s quietly floating toward the figure.

Overcome

The journey shifted into the second artwork, “Overcome,” inspired by the 13th Psalm. A light begins to break through, causing us to respond with overwhelm and even self-shielding. This movement is where I recognized that what I am longing for must be found by walking straight into the heart of the grief, and that what threatens to destroy us is precisely where we might find ourselves overcome by the loving presence that meets us there.

“Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death.”

Psalm 13:3

“Place your wounded hands in mine and raise me up

That even grief itself may turn to grace.”

Malcolm Guite - Psalm 13:XIII Usque quo, Domine?

I feel the shock and even the resistance that rises in me. Will I fully embrace what is being offered here?

The Story

The third and final movement in the series, “The Story,” is inspired by the 78th Psalm. Not fully after the agony and the grieving, nor the resistance and the overwhelm of light, but even in the midst, our experience with being found, held, and restored becomes a responsibility. Words, images, creative imagination bubbles up in us and begs to be formed and articulated. This "story” must be written, handed over as a witness for those who might see, those who come after us.

“I will utter hidden things, things from of old—things we have heard and known, things our ancestors have told us.”

Psalm 78:2-3

“My delight

Will be to share the story of the one

Who came to me before I came to him.”

Malcolm Guite - Psalm 78:LXXVIII Attendite, popule

That we might bear witness to the fullness of these steps we have walked, a gift that we can give as comfort and hope for others or even ourselves when we find ourselves in desperation once again.

The series is available here:

The Honest Prayer Collection

Sunday Prompt for Week 10:

What parts have us have been stuck in the same position? How are we holding rigidity, tension, and strain while other parts of you have grown weak and atrophied?

Where are you exhausted from compensating? What systems meant to give you range and freedom, have become imbalanced? What is your body trying to tell you about where yo…

Read more

Sunday Prompt for Week 9:

What have you forgotten about where you are? Where do you find yourself physically, emotionally, spiritually in this moment or season?

How have we lost touch with the practice of acknowledging the truth of our present location? What would it mean to stop and answer honestly, “Where am I?”

Read more

This summer I am embarking on a creating season. After wading through the vulnerable visibility of exhibitions and art fairs, I’m taking slower time for new work to come forward and take on form and color and narrative.

So far, I have a completed a painting that launches a new series that I shared about here, and a couple of smaller abstract ink paintings. This week I’ve begun a second larger painting for the collection. I felt stuck at first after “How Long?” was completed. Sometimes when I create a piece that seems to come through with minimal struggle, I feel nervous starting the next work. It’s as if the emotional or technical flow of the first piece somehow negates the potential for the next.

While I haven’t fully unpacked what is underneath this pattern, I shared about the resistance with a small group of friends that have been gathering monthly around creating. They offered suggestions of ways to enter into the creative process with this new piece, challenging me to shake up any process formulas I have started to mentally cling to.

This was a needed reminder that each time we create or go down a new path of exploration, we must be open to what we might find there. It might, but also might not, fully reflect previous paths. Just because one path unfolded a specific way doesn’t mean I’m locked into a perpetually repeating performance. While the “How Long?” painting initiated with a very tangible, raw emotional state, leading straight to the unfolding narrative, this next painting may need to begin somewhere different.

As the two paintings are connected as a series, I have already felt a strong pull toward exploring various Psalms, and sitting with the distinctly human moments of emotional honesty that are found in these poetic prayers. After chatting with my friends, I realized there is already a Psalm that I have had a stirring experience with in the past week, specifically Psalm 13. This Psalm in particular had met me as a response to hearing a story of intense despair; in particular, the phrase “sleep in death” struck a deeply true chord.

This nudge that I had already received that week was the launching point I needed into the next painting. I just hadn’t recognized it because I was waiting for something to begin in the exact same way as the other painting.

Our receptivity to nuance, our attuning to what is actually stirring and what is being offered to us, is one of the richest capacities to grow in our minds, bodies, and souls. It guards us from the deceptive allure of formulas that might rigidly oppress our journey. This capacity opens us to see ourselves and one another with more compassion, fullness, and love.

With the first layer complete, I am now building out the narrative of this painting. Keep an eye out for updates on this piece in my notes, if you’re interested in continuing to witness what’s taking shape. As pieces are completed, they do become available for collecting through my website.

I’m continually grateful for all who take the time to take these deeper dives into the process of contemplative prayer that painting is for me.

Sunday Prompt for Week 8:

How has our capacity for curiosity and exploration become diminished? What does play look like for us in adulthood?

What really is play? Are we expected to mature and become too serious for play? How might our relationship with performance and perfection and pain effect our capacity for play?

Read more

Sunday Prompt for Week 7:

How has our capacity for imagination diminished?

Where has cynicism, self-protection, and disappointment crept in to our natural instinct to dream and wonder? Where has cheap fantasy or numbing and disassociation replaced a grounded, deeper sense of what is creatively and restoratively possible?

Read more

I’m coming off of the heels of a full, intense season of growth and exposure. My paintings were on exhibit throughout January and February, I participated in two large art fairs through March and April, all while being filmed for a short documentary.

I was bracing myself for a likely crash and burn at the end of all this, and I’m currently still skidding across the pavement. It feels like a rather long, slow motion moment of falling flat on my face, as the fullness of events and exhibitions is still waning down, while my skin is being scraped off of my hands and knees.

Living as a ghost in my own life, allowed me to chronically avoid looking pain fully in the face (more on this invisibility narrative and learning to be present to grief is referenced in previous posts over the past year and this documentary). This is the downside to allowing fullness back in, the full range of feeling and growing and stretching and grieving. And falling.

In fact, life kinda feels like a roller coaster now. I don’t know why I ever expected that experiencing the fullness of life and the spiritual journey would feel consistently any one way. It never has really, any emotional “consistency” was due to numbness and disconnection. If the journey is a winding river heading toward the ocean, there are moments of dryness, moments of slow trickling, moments of tumultuous rapids, moments of violent convergence.

But it’s either that, or a stale, stagnant pond of murkiness.

So back to the crashing and burning across the pavement, after all of the events I promptly got sick. I felt a wave of sadness hit, a drop in adrenaline. Everything that feels disappointing, or unknown, or wounded became glaringly visible, as the busy pace quieted.

I’m realizing that this raw moment of stopping, crashing, falling on my face is a pretty decent time to practice creativity. Creating begins the process of bandaging, the salve, the restoration, the cry for help, the being held. Falling disrupts the distraction and the avoidance, so what is actually there confronts me with full honesty.

So I began to create last week. The beginning sketches, a clear feeling of crying out in agony. That moment felt crystal clear as the starting point, so I sketched it.

Then the canvas was prepped and I started to pour alcohol and ink everywhere for an initial, emotional layer. This part of my process is very whatever-will-be-will-be. A lot of what appeared was sprinkled with these shimmering bits. Overall muddy, raw colors, with hints of a glowing presence.

After this had dried the next day, I started to describe the story with a figure in a scene. This story is unfolding inside me, it’s not a story that not only happened once long ago, but rather a continual story thread of pain and crying out that is continuing today. The painting continues to move wherever it is meant to move, it’s grasping for the words to say what it is wanting to say. Certainly, I’m involved, and yet there’s the sense of being a vessel to pour something out.

As I was moving deeper into the layers, I read this reimagining of the sixth Psalm, a poem from Malcom Guite’s collection of poetry titled “David’s Crown”, noticing the synchronicity between this ancient prayer and what is being expressed through this painting.

I invite you to sit with me in this prayer, in it’s incomplete, not fully expressed or answered state.

With gratitude for your attention and witnessing of the process.

Psalm 6: VI Domine, ne in furore
by Malcom Guite

Whose mercy wakes me at the break of day?
I feel my weakness. All my bones are vexed
And all the faith in me seems worn away

As though I've lost love's memory. Perplexed
By false complexities, I mime faith's part.
I keep the book but cannot read the text

Unless you come, and write it in my heart,
Unless you help me read it through my tears
And hear me out, and, hearing, heal my hurt.

How could I think you punished me? My fears
Just magnified the shadows that I cast
Till you were lost in shadow too. Love hears

My cries and clears the shadows of my past
Flinging them back before his growing light
Until I recognise his face at last.

Sunday Prompt for Week 6:

What have we forgotten about smiling, laughter, our unfiltered exuberance? When are we allowing our spontaneous joyful response to ebb and flow in our day?

How have we shrunk our enthusiasm and our delight, perhaps out of embarrassment or the vulnerability that comes when we express our deeper desires and passions? How might we b…

Read more

Sunday Prompt for Week 5:

What have you forgotten about singing, allowing notes to softly hum in your chest or belting out an anthem with your full emotion and power?

How has pain and disappointment deflated your capacity for the joy of song? How has silence and withholding grown from a self-consciousness that hinders melody as part of your living?

Read more

I was recently asked to be the focus of a short documentary, exploring my unfolding journey of becoming an artist in mid-life.

There’s an ocean of emotion, longing, and grief that has been building in me, yet restrained for many years. Cracks in the structures that have held these emotions back have become increasingly visible, deepening significantly last year (some of you who have been reading here for a bit might remember), as overwhelming waves of grief started hitting me through an honest exploration of relational loss.

It is certainly good work, learning to articulate our story, understand different layers of our experience and how it has shaped us, and even learn new ways of thinking. But the moments when my emotions align with that understanding have often been sporadic, only breaking through fully in infrequent moments of crumbling.

My journey into art-making has directly paralleled the progressive cracking of this emotional dam. This barrier has long allowed me to hold my deepest emotional self at arm’s length, and is often my harshest enemy against living a more vibrant life.

I have developed a deceptive reliance on knowing the right answers, working to make sense intellectually of struggles, pain, and trauma. The danger here is the habit of emotional distance. Thinking but not feeling, going through robotic motions, yet not really breathing deeply. Chronically, subconsciously distancing others from the full range of myself, creating a maze of internal compartments marking what is good and bad, safe and unsafe, near and far.

For the past couple of weeks, I welcomed a generous and thoughtful documentary crew into my home and studio. They set up their gear while I shuffled around my house trying to pretend like it was perfectly normal to go about my highly sensitive introvert’s life with cameras in my face as I attempted to answer existential questions.

Memories from the years spent alone and isolated in my room as a kid felt somehow glaringly fresh and raw. A clear sign of the dam breaking, I suppose. We might call that a trigger, but as messy and overwhelming as it feels, this also holds the gracious potential for reintegration. As memory connects to the here and now, the detached threads can start to weave back together again.

Part of the film was to follow along as I exhibited at a local art fair, three days where myself and other artists showed our creative work, each from our own uniquely curated hotel room. Raw emotions kept building throughout the weekend, as I sat in my little hotel room, feeling continually flooded, weeping tears in the morning as the backlog of emotion caught up with me.

Then each afternoon, I would dry my tears and open the door to my room, and invite art fair guests and the cameras back in to my intimate space of feeling, longing, and grieving.

I’m back home now. This morning I packed up a painting to deliver to a couple that had entered my hotel room this weekend. They recognized something of themselves in that place of intimacy, in that room that had been flooded with both grief and victory.

What has begun to flow steadily in me joined their path for just a moment, and now can live steadily in their room, as the threads within us become the threads that connect us.

The small film that has been filmed will be releases soon. Links to view this will be shared when they become available. You can also follow more closely and learn about the filmmaker over on his Instagram.

Subscribe now

Sunday Prompt for Week 4:

What have you forgotten about seeing, tracing slowly with your eyes, fully taking in the colors, shapes, shadows, and outlines of all that is around you?

How has habit of hurry and distraction prevented your noticing and sitting with the details small and large of what you see everyday? What gifts and what pains are near you that…

Read more

Sunday Prompt for Week 3:

What have you forgotten about breathing, both the physical ebb and flow of taking in and releasing and all that it symbolizes for our spiritual journey?

How has the pace of our day caused us to lose our breath? How has the wounding or the fea…

Read more

My grandmother Virginia died when my mother was 12 years old.

Her life, her personhood, and her premature death were woven as legend throughout my growing years.

As I approach the same season of life she was in when she died, I feel a deeper yearning to reconnect the missing threads of her story that have been lost from time and from her missing first-hand presence and voice.

I stand in the grief that I am not able to fully parse together what was true, deciphering what was legend, what was never shared, what remains hidden from what was true. It’s not only grief that grips me, there’s an aching, knowing that our stories connect in deep ways, but only having fragmented clues as to how and why.

Context is a gift. It’s a privilege. It helps us in placing our feet on the ground, allows us to make connections that hold us and guide us.

Women have had to carve out unique ways to gift context to their daughters. Systems across time have attempted to silence, hide, and diminish our full personhood, making it difficult to receive and witness our expression of truth and goodness and beauty. The added layer of traumatic, premature death has created aching holes and severed connections to my knowledge of my grandmother.

From both the fragments I have been given and the evidence that I have sought out, I know that my grandmother, Virginia, journeyed through the world and it’s systems around her with a remarkable kind of truth-driven integrity, curiosity, and creativity.

This hunger itself at times created reactions of bewilderment and threat from others in a time and space where those qualities were not always understood or welcome. She experienced moments of loneliness and isolation because of the difficulty in finding spaces that could fully embrace her level of inquisition.

Yet this woman seems to have lived with every inch of depth that she could carve out. She wrote poetry and songs, published articles in a local newspaper, and acted, wrote, and directed plays.

One such play she prioritized over her high positioning in a statewide beauty competition. Remarkably I found a myriad of articles describing the shock of this choice between beauty awards and her own creative work posted in newspapers from all over the country, giving evidence to the established cultural expectations that she was defying.

She was wise in her choice to prioritize this work, as she was discovered by a well-known Hollywood theater owner and manager when he came to view the play that she wrote and starred in. He recruited her to join the industry in Hollywood, but after a year of training with a theater group there, she rejected this path due to her discomfort with the moral and ethical compromises that she was witnessing there.

During World War II, she boldly learned to fly an airplane, served in the Red Cross as a nurse, and fell in love with/married a Sicilian-American man in the Army Air Corps. For the remainder of her life, she advocated for neighbors and friends, threw herself into community and political engagement, continued to write, corresponded by mail directly with Helen Keller, and engaged in intense theological discussions with her husband’s Catholic priest and other local faith leaders.

One such discussion of theology led her to be kicked out of her participation in her Mormon church practice. From that point onward, her spiritual journey remained private, while the kids and my grandfather went to Catholic mass, she stayed at home alone listening to the radio and reading the scriptures.

She did all of this while creating a safe and nurturing home for her seven children until they lost her prematurely at age 45 to a brain aneurysm.

I have these puzzle pieces that tell a complex and rich story, a story that feels relatable as I notice the threads of creative joy, spiritual intensity, truth-seeking, questioning of legalistic and corrupt systems, and loneliness that also mark my own journey. I know that there are many textures and nuanced layers of the story missing that I can only guess at, that my mom’s child-self could not have known or remembered these 63 years after her death. I recognize that these memories are deeply intertwined with the subsequent grief, trauma, and immense loss of her life.

Sitting in this tension feels necessary as I cultivate my own capacity for telling women’s stories through painting. I want to mark and name both the pains and losses, and the wisdom and beauty that our mothers and our grandmothers stories have held.

I want my work to be a gratitude and a witness of their living and breathing, their suffering and longing, their building and their cultivating, as we consider how we too might journey meaningfully in this world.

Their complex lives tell of burdens they carried that may have crushed them or that they may have courageously thrown off. Regardless, may we now release these weights and work to carve out our own lives of vibrancy despite the pains and the barriers.

Their creative work of quietly (or not so quietly) planting restorative seeds, may we continue to tend.

This post is dedicated to the fragmented yet still abundantly inspiring memory of Virginia, of which I have been gifted pieces from my grandfather and my mother, and the breadcrumbs that she herself left in writing and the vibrant public acts that called attention to her.

Share

Sunday Prompt for Week 2:

What have you forgotten about Love, the Love you were meant to receive and give with every part of you, mind, body and soul?

How have the systems, the ego, the wounds, the rushing, the performing taught you to forget about being loved and bei…

Read more

Sunday Prompt for Week 1:

Read more

Emerging into public art-making has increased my range for full human capacity, new levels of terror, embarrassment, resonance, and connection.

It all started with baby Instagram posts where I would show very shadowy and obscured angles of a new painting sketch that I had made, followed by gripping panic for the rest of the day. This start is no “once upon a time,” it was a few years ago.

Fast forward to last week, where a year’s worth of my paintings were arranged on an 8x10’ wall, with thousands of art-goers milling around for four days. No doubt this was a practice in resilience and persistence. This experience was not easy. Feeling ignored or rejected, feeling awkward and uncomfortable, feeling overwhelmed and drained, were all part of the emotional experience of making my deep work visible. I won’t pretend that stepping into visibility erases the risks that I had sought for so long to avoid.

But other emotions were discovered. One such moment was a feeling of deep and profound resonance while chatting with a retired therapist who immediately recognized the emotional stories in my pieces from her many decades of journeying with women. I felt equally honored by the delight of a young woman who is just beginning adulthood and her own painting journey. It was lovely to witness her inspiration from my way of expressing women’s stories.

This range of life seasons between women was a grace to witness. If I stayed in the shadows, I would not have witnessed this thread, experienced this new level of connection over honest storytelling, as our stories are heard and celebrated.

What a gift.

100 Days of Small Paintings

Small paintings continue on persistently, as we reach Day 32 today. At the art fair last week, nearly half of the small paintings so far were purchased! It was really lovely to be able to offer a more affordable, yet still hand-made painting. The desire for these small artworks was stronger than interest in prints, a confirmation of our growing hunger to return to what is closest to the human touch.

Still available paintings are here on my website for collecting, go take a look at what remains post art fair if you are interested in your own handmade piece. More will continue to be added each week.

Additionally, a local shop owner has commissioned a set of small portraits for a new branch of her store. If you’re local in San Francisco, send me a message and I will let you know where you will be able buy select small paintings in person in the coming weeks.

The Living Mood Board Launches Sunday

Finally, take note that The Living Mood Board is launching this Sunday, March 29. This is paid subscription layer to my Substack that will include an additional Sunday weekly that facilitates a year-long creative spiritual practice. These weekly prompts are contemplative invitations to notice the spiritual threads weaving through your days (you can read more about the subscription here).

Additionally, seasonal art prints will get delivered to you in the mail each quarter. If you subscribe before Monday, you’ll be included in the spring season delivery!

I’m so looking forward to cultivating space for this community and practicing a slower way of moving through our days, listening to the whispers that are stirring around us and in us.