Your Life is Your Masterwork
On loss, making, and letting life reveal its own shape
I’ve spent most of my life making things. Paintings, businesses, rooms, books, cloth. I know that feeling of standing back from something and thinking, There. That’s done. There’s satisfaction in that. You can see it. You can touch it. You know what you made. Other people get to validate it or not, but either way it exists. It’s undeniable and concrete.
Life has never worked that way for me.
Every time I thought I knew what I was building, something shifted. Sometimes I was the one who changed it. Other times life changed it for me, usually without asking. My health changed unexpectedly. People I thought would be there for the long haul left. Relationships of all kinds changed without warning. Work that once felt important stopped feeling relevant. For years I treated those things like detours. I kept thinking I would get through whatever was happening and eventually find my way back to the life I was supposed to be living.
That idea has really changed for me.
I keep coming back to this thought that maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong direction all along. Maybe the painting or the book or the textile, or anything I create outside myself, isn’t the masterwork.
Maybe it’s my life.
I see that much more easily when I think about painting. When I face a blank canvas, I begin without knowing what will fill it. An empty surface isn’t a problem to solve or a space that needs filling just because it’s empty. Even in the rare instances when a vision sends me to my paints, I rarely end up with the painting I thought I was going to make. Something changes once I’m in it. A mark appears, a color takes over, I paint over something I was sure I needed. At some point I have to stop trying to get back to the original idea and work with what’s actually in front of me, letting it show me what it wants to become.
It has taken me a very long time to do that with my life.
For years I kept reaching backward. When my body changed, I wanted my old body back. When my work changed shape, I immediately started thinking about what I should do next. When a relationship shifted, I found myself looking for a way to get back to the way it had been. I don’t think I even realized how much energy I spent trying to restore things that didn’t need to be restored.
This last year made that impossible.
The last couple of years have stripped away almost all resemblance to the body I once knew. No amount of medical intervention has restored my energy or physical strength. There are times when I feel as though I’ve aged decades in a matter of months, and I no longer look or feel anything like the “invincible” bodybuilder and athlete I once was.
Learning to live inside that body now, to listen to what it’s telling me and actually give it what it asks for instead of overriding it, has been some of the most humbling and challenging work of my life. There are more nights than not when I fall into bed so depleted that I wonder where the life energy for another day is going to come from.
And yet, strangely, another kind of energy in me feels stronger than ever. I don’t mean the physical energy that gets me from one end of the day to the other. I mean something deeper than physical stamina. My soul energy is stronger than ever. It’s there in the pull toward beauty, in the urge to create, in the desire to connect, in the moments when something in me lights up even though my body is exhausted. My physical world has become smaller in many ways, but the energy that feels most essentially mine has not diminished with it. If anything, it feels more concentrated now, more alive because I’m finally paying attention to it.
My health has changed my relationships in ways I didn’t expect. I say no to more things now because I simply don’t have the bandwidth, and over time some friendships have fallen away as a result. Most people don’t really understand what it takes for me to do something as ordinary as meet for lunch, take a long phone call, or spend an afternoon away from home. Their lives keep moving in ways mine doesn’t always fit anymore.
Work changed with my body too. Painting and cloth had always been physical for me, and as my strength disappeared, so did the way I had always worked. Making has never felt like something I do on the side. It’s one of the primary ways I live, the way I move through the world and make sense of being here. Losing access to that in the way I knew it was much more than a change in work. It changed the shape of my days and the way I inhabited my own life.
But my body wasn’t the only thing that interrupted the old way of working. When the studio flooded and I was forced out for six months, I suddenly had a distance from everything I had built that I had never given myself voluntarily. Clearing out the damage meant looking at paintings, materials, projects, ideas, and things I had stored away because at some point I believed they were important. I had to handle all of it and ask questions I hadn’t been asking:
Does this still matter to me? Do I still want this? Am I carrying it because it belongs in my life now, or because it belonged to the woman I was when I made it?
I still don’t know exactly what I want to carry forward, but I know I don’t want to carry all of it. I was holding so much that I couldn’t see what it was costing me to keep holding it. And in keeping such a tight grip on the past, there wasn’t much room for anything genuinely new to arrive unless it was somehow built on top of the old.
When I finally came back into the studio, I didn’t want to put everything back the way it had been. I knew this was bigger than rebuilding what was.
So much has fallen away that I can’t pretend I’m simply between one version of my old life and the next. I’m somewhere else now, and for once I’m not rushing to replace what’s gone.
That’s new–the not rushing part.
I’m very good at filling empty space. I know how to make a plan, build something, and keep moving. I’ve done that my whole life. For a long time I thought that was strength, and sometimes it was. But it also kept me from sitting with the discomfort long enough to know whether I actually wanted the next thing I was so busy creating.
Right now I’m in an in-between place, and I’m letting myself stay there.
Part of that is physical. My body simply doesn’t have the energy to push the way it once did. But even if it did, I no longer want to force a direction just because uncertainty makes me uncomfortable. I want to give the next shape of my life enough room to reveal itself instead of building it from the same reflex that shaped so much of the old one.
At first, this in-between place felt mostly like grief. There was so much loss in it that I couldn’t imagine anything else. Lately something has begun to shift. I wouldn’t call it excitement exactly. It’s quieter than that, more like anticipation without the demand to know what I’m anticipating. I’m beginning to notice little breadcrumbs along the way and enjoy following one without insisting that it tell me where the entire path leads.
A conversation I thought would be about my book turned into a connection with a woman who has a podcast, and something in me senses that it may lead somewhere I can’t anticipate yet. Working with the Women of Power collective has a similar feeling. I don’t mean bigger in terms of branding, visibility, or business. I mean bigger in terms of legacy, meaning, purpose, and connection. I’m less interested now in turning every opening into an opportunity and more interested in noticing which people and experiences have real substance.
There are days when this feels peaceful and others when the old desire for a plan comes back. But the less I pressure myself for clarity, the more interested I become in the possibilities I haven’t discovered yet.
And some of the most important changes are happening in ways that would barely register as important from the outside. There are afternoons when I leave the studio early and get in the pool simply because floating in the water feels wonderful. I’m tending to my home, not only my work. I’m spending more time with my dogs and imagining how I want the garden patio outside the studio to feel, not because I’m designing it for anyone else or trying to turn it into something impressive, but because seeing it that way makes me happy.
I get up from my desk and walk outside into the sunshine. I light a candle and sit in the big leather chair in my studio, wrapped in the Soul Wrapture I finally gave myself instead of saving it for someone else. There’s nothing productive about any of that. Nothing gets finished. I have nothing to show anyone at the end of it.
But it feels like my life.
I think that’s part of what I was missing for so long. I knew how to recognize accomplishment because it gave me something visible to point to. What I didn’t always recognize was life when it came with no agenda at all—nothing to produce, nothing to prove, nowhere to get to. Just the experience of being here and letting that be enough.
That same willingness to let things reveal themselves is changing the way I think about Soul Woven. I don’t feel any need to define it too quickly now. I’d rather pay attention to what keeps gathering around it and let it show me what it is becoming.
Soul Woven didn’t start because I decided to create a brand. It grew out of the different ways I kept finding my way back to myself.
Painting often gave me the first glimpse of something I couldn’t yet explain. Writing put it in front of me in black and white. It gave language to the guidance that came through painting and poetry and helped me pull together pieces I hadn’t recognized as part of the same whole until I saw the words on the page. Cloth reached me through my body in a completely different way. The books gathered the larger arc of the journey, and over time the conversations, gatherings, and responses from other men and women showed me that these forms were reaching something in them too.
I used to think I had to make all of these parts fit together somehow. Now I see that they already do because, taken together, they form a life, and there is nothing neat about that shape. There are loose ends and frayed edges, broken pieces, things that never fully resolve, and parts that remain mysterious even after you understand how much they shaped the whole.
I also don’t want to romanticize the life they came from. I don’t believe every painful thing happens for a reason, or that suffering becomes beautiful if we understand it well enough. Some things simply hurt. Some losses remain losses. But they still belong to my life, along with the joy, the beauty, the things I wish I had done differently, and the parts that still don’t make any sense at all.
This is where the idea of a masterwork has begun to mean something different to me. It isn’t about making your life impressive or beautiful or even understandable. It’s about living inside the whole of it without constantly trying to edit yourself into a better version or treating the unfinished parts as evidence that something has gone wrong.
I’m sitting in a blank part of the canvas right now. I have some sense that something is taking shape, but I don’t know exactly what it is. In the past, I probably would have named it already. I would have made a plan around it, built a structure, figured out how to make it useful.
I’m paying attention to what draws me toward life again—the people who arrive and somehow open a door, the conversations that stay with me long after they’re over, the ideas that keep circling back until I finally listen, and those moments when my body leans toward something before my mind has decided whether to follow it. Sometimes that means picking up a paintbrush or reaching for a piece of cloth. Other times it means taking my dog into the desert and feeling the air brush my hair across my face.
I’m trying to trust those moments and let life itself show me what’s asking for my attention instead of deciding in advance what should come next. I don’t really want clarity about the future anymore. I’m finding that I like the surprises that come when I leave enough room for them.
I don’t know where all of that leads yet, and for once I don’t need to.
I still make things. I hope I always will. I just don’t think the thing I finish is the most important thing I’m making anymore.
My life is.
Continue the thread
Soul Woven grew from this way of living—the books, painting, cloth, story, and gathering all emerging from the same life.
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