The Work That Remains - A Reflection on Living the Path of Remembering

I woke this morning with a question that didn’t feel like something I was thinking about so much as something that had been trying to reach me for some time.

What if I didn’t focus on being seen or figuring out how to speak about what I do? What if I simply lived and created in the way I am most drawn to live and create and allowed that to be enough?

I went back and read the chapter I wrote about the flooding in my studio, and what struck me wasn’t the story, but the recognition of who I was in that moment. Standing beneath that ceiling, seeing it begin to swell again, and feeling no panic, no bracing—only a stillness that had nothing to do with trying to be calm and everything to do with something in me having already been rearranged into truth.

I can feel now that what led to that moment was not just what happened to me, but what was stripped away through it. Stories I didn’t know I carried. Identities I no longer needed. Ways of being that could not survive what I was becoming. And what was left was not something I created—it was something that revealed itself.

I know that place. I have lived it.

But I also know how easily it fades.

In sacred ceremony, everything false falls away. Truth is not something I think about—it's something I am inside of. It's immediate, embodied, undeniable. But as I return to the rhythms of daily life, something begins to layer back over it.

Not completely, but enough that I feel the difference.

And this is where I find myself now.

Not outside the path, but not fully living inside it either. Standing at the edge of something I already know is true.

Because what I can feel now is that this is not something I return to from time to time. It is a way of living. A way of being that asks to be carried into the ordinary hours, into the choices I make, into what I give my attention to and what I refuse.

And I can feel my resistance to that.

Not because it isn’t true, but because I know what it asks. A willingness to remain in truth even when nothing is forcing me to. A willingness to not turn away, even slightly, when it would be easier to step back into something more familiar, more shared, more easily understood.

There is a cost to that.

Not dramatic, but quiet and ongoing.

I don’t get to pretend anymore. I don’t get to move in ways that aren’t aligned without feeling it. I don’t get to leave myself in subtle ways.

And so the question I am sitting with now is not whether this path is true.

It is whether I am willing to live it as my actual life.

Not only in the moments where everything falls away and truth is undeniable, but here, in the ordinary hours, where nothing is asking it of me except my own willingness to stay.

Because this is what I know.

I am not here to speak about remembering.

I am here to live it.

And to create from within it.

Everything else comes after that, if it comes at all.

This reflection is part of a larger body of work that continues to unfold through the lived experience of remembering.

If something in you recognizes this, you can begin here.