“If you are in a fragile or stressed state, it may help to think of yourself as a garden. The more attention you give your unseen garden, the more you may come to understand it. Every act of feeding, digging, and pruning will reveal a new truth.”

from Strange Gardens Dark Properties, 2025

“I knew that something was wrong with the way I used my body. On the computer, I was only using my mind. The garden helped me identify that I needed to engage my whole being: mind, body, and spirit. I needed these three pillars to hold me up, instead of trying to balance everything on one.”

from Growing Beyond the Computer Are.na x Dark Properties, 2024

A Pious Work of Salvage is an ongoing project first presented in a guest lecture to Virginia Commonwealth University’s grad seminar, 2024

“Leonardo da Vinci wrote that an image is poetry seen not felt, however, a maker of images that abandons true nature for false beauty is unable to make anyone see.”

from Authentic Type Specimens AUTHENTIC, 2024

“Written language has a long history of influencing feeling and thought. In our current era, we often rely on images to evoke emotion … The future of accessing visual media is not only about who or what makes the images, it’s also about how we describe them.”

from Ambient Music Plays Google, 2024

“Language is a product of observational learning, so gaining the vocabulary requires first noticing the smell, the environment around that smell, and the reactions it prompts. There doesn’t seem to be any way to represent smell other than to physically present it or describe what kind of attention it attracts.”

from Cherry Chapstick Are.na, 2024

“Terms like spinster and old maid are still attached to women who exist outside the Home and the Church, declaring that these women disrupt social order and can no longer be called women. I can’t think of a more comfortable, self-reliant life for myself than that of a woman who holds onto her autonomy”

from Notable Spinsters included in Korte Metten at Kieken Centrale, Antwerp, Belgium 2024 and an earlier version was published as I Just Need Space in The Smudge, July 2019

“It is impossible for most to write well on a first try. Excessive language is how a writer digs for the actual point they can eventually say better. I must say a lot of useless things to find out what I’m really trying to say. The useless is useful even after it’s gone.”

from All the flowers in May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude Third edition in the Everything I know about...so far series published by The Institute for the Study of the Urtext’s Urditions imprint, 2024

“Feelings are ignored and overlooked as potential evidence-based resources, but since they are a part of the human experience, it seems possible that they are essential tools in both the construction of our world and our understanding of it. Using that tool to access possible alternatives might help us fix what’s not working.”

from Poetry’s So Common Hardly Anyone Can Find It Are.na Annual 2022, and the final graduating thesis for the completion of my DIY MFA

“Keeping an unserious record of my mysterious sensitivities led me to see patterns, like how I seem to have an easier time dealing with my body when I am alone, instead of pretending I am “normal” while my internal reality slowly bleeds through to the external reality of a very long work meeting.”

from The Circus Tent is a Good Metaphor for the Whole Show Going on Inside Mixed-media essay published in the anthology, Our Red Book, Simon & Schuster, 2022

“The hard truth about being an artist within an economic system that favors private property, a price system, and competitive markets is that the artist often needs full-time paid work to exist. That job takes valuable time and creativity away from the artist, which means this system defines who gets to be an artist and when.”

from Can I Be An Artist Here American Institute of Graphic Arts, 2021

“Through forming my framework to create in, the return investment is not a monetary profit. The gain is my revolutionized vocabulary of art in a softer space.”

from A Soft Manifesto The Creative Independent, 2020

“Black and white, yellow, red, and blue preserve their relationship with light through the scales of tones between their lightest and darkest. The continuous scale does not change in saturation, but changes in brilliance. As all colors we can and cannot see differ depending on their surface, surrounding, and our state of mind—they will always in some way share their brilliance.”

from Everyday Color Theory Google, 2020

“The more I learn, the more humility I feel. By expanding our exposure to ethical thinking, we can better understand who we are, what we could and should be doing, and why we’re doing the things we do. With that self-awareness, we’re in a much better place to understand where we can be most effective.”

from Finding Ethical Design Google, 2020