January Ripple Room: On Swimming at Your Own Pace
I started our first Ripple Room of 2026 the way I always do: with a question: “How is the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026 looking for you?”
I expected the usual New Year energy—fresh starts, new intentions, that collective exhale into January possibilities.
Instead, what unfolded was something quieter and truer: a conversation about rhythm. About pace. About the difference between swimming against the current, swimming with the flow, and simply… swimming.
One person said something that has stayed with me since
When you position yourself as swimming against the current, you’re still orienting yourself to everyone else. You’re still letting the crowd determine your direction—even if you’re moving opposite to them.
Resistance is still a relationship.
But what if you don’t want to join anyone at all?What if you just want to swim?
That’s where I’ve landed.
Not pushing against anything. Not riding any waves. Just moving through my days with a rhythm that feels right—floating some days, swimming others. It’s been one of the most clarifying shifts I’ve made.
What the Body Already Knows
The Ripple Room has never been about techniques or tutorials.
It isn’t a class where I teach and you learn.
It’s a space where we gather to notice what’s already happening—in our work, in our lives, in the ways we’re choosing to move through the world.
This gathering felt especially like that.
I shared pieces from my journals—not as finished art or demonstrations of process, but as evidence. Looking back through those pages reminds me of what my body knew long before my mind caught up.
There was the painting that began during my daughter’s swim lessons, when I spent two weeks crumpling paper and taking my frustration out on it—only to watch something unexpectedly beautiful emerge.
There was the face that appeared one day on a background because I felt an unexplainable itch to make it.
And the painting inspired by hygge—that Scandinavian sense of warmth, safety, and being surrounded by good things and good people—shaped in real time by colors called out during a live Zoom.
None of these were carefully planned projects. They weren’t optimized or premeditated. They were the natural byproduct of living.
The journals hold all of it: the experiments, the grief, the play, the mess. Pages where paint bled through because the paper was too thin. Moments when I thought I was making one thing and it became something else entirely.
A lint roller covered in glitter that felt too beautiful to throw away. My daughter’s handmade gifts—felted hearts, crocheted monsters, an air-dry clay ring holder—constant reminders that making with our hands matters.
This is what I mean when I say the body knows.
Your fingers make choices before your brain has language for them. The lavender oil you use while crumpling paper leads you toward purple without conscious intention.
The surface you grab becomes the exact right one for what wants to emerge.
The Opposite of Hustle
For the past three and a half weeks, I’ve had social media fully blocked—on my phone and my desktop. Not deleted. Blocked. I can’t even type the URLs into Safari during a weak moment.
What surprised me wasn’t withdrawal. It was clarity. I realized I wasn’t really connecting with people before. I was keeping tabs on them. Watching stories, liking posts, scrolling feeds—that’s not connection.
Connection takes time. Energy. Intention.
The first few days, my hand kept reaching for my phone out of habit, expecting the dopamine hit and finding nothing there. My inbox shrank to three emails because I finally responded to what I’d been avoiding. I read more with my daughter. Took longer walks without my phone. Made more art—not because I tried harder, but because there was suddenly space.
And I kept returning to the question that’s been guiding everything: What is enough for me?
Am I doing this because I think people expect it, or because I actually want to? Am I making this because other artists are making it, or because my hands genuinely need to?
Whenever something started feeling like hustle—like proving I’m a certain kind of artist, like needing to be more productive or visible—I came back to that question.
Enough looks like this:
A Ripple Station by my mailbox where I place whatever I’m experimenting with, no explanation required.
A monthly gathering with people who understand.
A community Inside the Ripple Studio, where things are available when you’re ready—no urgency, no scarcity.
Ease instead of emergency.
What Happens When We Gather This Way
The Ripple Room isn’t about watching me make things. It isn’t about learning my process or replicating my style.
It’s about permission.
Permission to move at your own pace.
Permission to make things simply because your hands need to make them.
Permission to keep what you love, even if someone calls it clutter or hoarding.
Permission to let go when you are ready.
Permission to spend two hours in your art space while snow piles up outside because this is your haven.
Permission to just be.
Cole, one of the attendees, said it perfectly in an email to me:
“Your words of honest, unhurried, and grounding land so deeply with me. What I appreciate so much about you and about this space is that I (we) can all show up as ourselves (however we are on that day). There’s no pressure to perform. If I want to sit and absorb, I can do that. If I want to speak, I can do that. Even if I have no clue what’s being talked about, I don’t really mind. It’s just nice to BE in a space and an atmosphere that welcomes this energy with open hearts. This world needs it ❤️”
When we gather monthly, we’re validating each other’s rhythms. We’re saying: your pace is right. Your way is enough.
Keep swimming.
I don’t record these sessions. The point is being there—participating or witnessing, not consuming a replay later. What happens in the room belongs to the people in the room.
What I can share afterward is this: the resonance. The themes that linger. The quiet shift that happens when you’re seen.
That’s what the Ripple Room offers.
Just space—to be exactly where you are, moving exactly how you need to move, witnessed by people who understand that this, all of it, is enough.
