Whenever I think about making or holding space for others, I think about carpentry. I dream of simple tables made with simple materials, products of the middle ground between utility and artistry. Sometimes they’re stained. Sometimes they’re bare, reminders of the trees they once were. But these tables, they are not here to admire. They are not here to be eaten upon. They are not here to be decorated or inserted into Pinterest dream boards. No, these tables are here for one purpose only: to hold weight.

Whenever I think about the pressure we feel as humans, both self-inflicted and pushed upon by others, I think of a stack of books, papers, and other rectangular tedium, smushed and piled atop each other, a leaning, swerving column over ever-shifting gravity. The forearms begin to flare up. The weight cannot be held much longer. And so the body shifts, in ways both awkward and dangerous, to change the center of the situation. To find something approaching comfort. It’s bound to fail. The pile will clatter to the floor, a cacophony of failure, overextension, and demoralization all crinkled together.

In this metaphor, there’s only one way to help: to tap the person on the shoulder and guide them in the direction of this particular table. To slowly move in unison with their hands, nudging them towards the boundaries of this wooden place of respite. All the responsibilities and worries and fears and deadlines still exist. They’re not going anywhere, still stacked high above everyone nearby. But for a minute, if only a minute, the person can feel their way back to something normal. They can rediscover the contours of a healthier body. They can remind themselves of what of these pressures they have control of and which they do not. They can gather themselves and begin again, a bit stronger than before, still weary but always, always thankful for that safe space in their time of need.

We’re always fighting time. Trying to get more of it. Trying to make more of it. Trying to see where it’s gone missing in plain sight. We keep reminding ourselves everyone gets the same 24 hours a day even though we’re fully aware not everyone has the same privileges or life situation to work with.

I especially felt time beating upon me as we watched our daughter grow and celebrate her first birthday. It doesn’t seem possible that a tiny human could change that much in a year. And yet. Millions of babies do it every year, without fail, without ever once stumbling upon the Fountain of Ever-Youth and remaining in their current form for more than a few days.

I’ve always been drawn to the aura of knight armor, and yet looking back at the picture I drew, I can’t help but think about how armor eventually went out of style. Something far more efficient took its place. Something easier to move in. Something you didn’t drown in sweat from. Over time, the materials got better, lighter, and stronger. Things evolved.

And yet. We’re still fighting.

Time is all about framing. It is what you make of it. It can be your friend or your enemy, and sometimes both at once. How we view time says far more about us than anything ticking or tocking. It says how we feel about the way we spend our lives. It says how much we build it out with being busy. Time can be your adversary or it can be your companion, the pacemaker walking alongside you, quiet and steady, simply doing a thankless job. Time, in its best moments, can even disappear inside a world in which seconds become hours and hours become seconds, when the expansion and contraction of the universe around us reminds us, in those beautiful, fleeting moments, that there just may be some magic left in this world.

The internet has warped our brains to think we need a bigger audience than necessary. The likes, the loves, the retweets, the emoji responses – it all minimizes pure human interaction into such a confining form that we can’t help but feel wanting of more. One of the more reassuring things my younger 20-something read is when Kevin Kelly wrote about how you really only need 1,000 true fans to have a career. If you get them, they will follow you wherever you go and will sustain you through painful droughts. I think about this a lot as some of my favorite writers – people who’ve made a clear impact on me – have increasingly moved to Substack. The ongoing disruption of social media – especially in Twitter – has forced creators to find their true fans.

When I drew this picture, I thought about how you only really need three true fans in your life. You need at least three people who know who you are and who will give you the space to walk around and vent with your pokier edges. These are the people who’ve seen you through your highs, lows, and many in-betweens. They’re the few people you feel like truly get you. And when shit gets really heated, they’re what you can count on to whir around and cool you down. To make you feel refreshed.

From Alice Wu’s transcendent The Half of It (on Netflix), there’s been a movie line that’s rattled within my brain since first viewing:

“I had a painting teacher once tell me that the difference between a good painting and a great painting is typically five strokes. And they’re usually the five boldest strokes in the painting. The question, of course, is which five strokes?”

– Aster Flores, The Half of It

When I got toward the end of this fan drawing, I started inking it before I realized there were no motion lines. There was no indication the fan was doing what a fan is supposed to do. It just sat there. I didn’t have the confidence to really add another potential five strokes, to take it from a half-baked, decent idea to something more whole. I didn’t even know what the five strokes would be. So I let it be.

The universe has a way of rhyming. At the time I left the drawing alone, my rationale was that your three fans should be there when nothing is going for you. When there’s no real motion worth supporting. When you’re stuck, waiting for another wave to run over you and pull you in. And then as I went through these blog posts, I thought about the number 3 again and the struggle to list things smoothly in ASL.

Perhaps it’s just another reminder that 3 will always be enough.

Note: back in October 2021, I challenged myself to use the Inktober prompts to create one black-and-white piece of art each day. I would then learn how to vectorize them in Adobe Illustrator and make some cool digital art. Two things happened in the meantime: 1) Illustrator’s learning curve proved steeper than I could find time or focus for, and 2) I started writing pieces alongside them as a writing exercise. INKTHINK is a series combining the two for the next 31 days.

Spirit is like butter on toast. Used so often and spread so thin in its use and definition that it often disappears within the bread, only visible in its gleam under certain lights. You could forget its presence until you take a bite. By then, there’s no way to deny it. It’s there, deep within everything.

The ASL sign for ghost looks the same as spirit. Both have the nondominant hand with an index finger and thumb touching while the other hand makes the same shape and draws out a squiggly line.

You could be led to think they’re the same. But the ghost haunts; the spirit reminds us of what’s possible. The attainable absolution. The brewing brain. The creative connection.

When I think about spirit, I think about how it makes our body lighter, almost immaterial. It emanates from within and makes our bodies a silhouette, a shadow behind it all. Suddenly, the aches and pains go away. The worries about money disappear. The stress that wore you down has subsided, if only for a few brief moments. The world feels a little bigger, a little wider. What didn’t seem possible before now flickers within you, a warm, neon sign saying Here I Am, Ready To Go Wherever This May Take Me.

Note: back in October 2021, I challenged myself to use the Inktober prompts to create one black-and-white piece of art each day. I would then learn how to vectorize them in Adobe Illustrator and make some cool digital art. Two things happened in the meantime: 1) Illustrator’s learning curve proved steeper than I could find time or focus for, and 2) I started writing pieces alongside them as a writing exercise. INKTHINK is a series combining the two for the next 31 days.

Among the many disappointments at the end of the Game of Thrones TV series, one of the quirkier ones is how much ground was laid for a three-eyed raven that never quite paid off. Time and time again we were given dark, ominous shots of this raven, urged to believe it was something of great importance, something that would actually shift the narrative ground beneath us. Perhaps they eventually realized three-eyed ravens were not as cool as fire-breathing dragons.

Stepping into the waters of A Wiki of Fire and Ice only confused me further, so I will stick to what I initially took the raven to be: something that could see the past, the present, and the future. Visually, it made sense. But two and a half years after the wet fart of a series conclusion, I think of the three-eyed raven less as a metaphor for the story and far more as a reminder of how dangerous it is to get hung up on dancing in time. Being able to see the past, the present, and the future could lead to some pretty cool stories, maybe even some groundbreaking realizations. But it’s one thing to see something. It’s another to do something about it. It’s another thing entirely to get other people to do something about it, especially when you’ve told them that particular thing came to you from a three-eyed raven. We’ve seen these last two years that many people in our country will stick to their own facts to fit their own narrative, of which serves the community they believe themselves to be part of. There are many three-eyed ravens fluttering about these days. No wonder the horizon can sometimes look so perilous.

What I prefer, instead, is the four-eyed raven. Just a regular old raven with some glasses, admitting to their myopia and recognizing the need for some corrective vision lens to help them see the situation more clearly. And then when someone comes to them with their own observations, they’re willing to look at another vision and interpret it through their own lens again. That’s all meaning-making is. You remain flexible so that different truths may help you better understand the world. It’s a constant, ever-shifting process. And when you get lost in the weeds, you can do that thing birds love to do: zoom out and fly over it all.