As per usual for this time of year, I’m writing from Big Sky (#weddingseason), coming at you with the final Deep Dive for Artifice, Season 13. This season closed with three beautiful conversations featuring fiber artist Cricket Jergens, tattooist/illustrator Makoto Chi, and conductor/educator Chris Ramos (returning for Part II, as promised!).
Of course, I will share my favorite wisdoms from these three episodes, but as this is the final Season 13 chapter, I’d love to simultaneously bundle all of this season’s lessons into a satisfying parcel, something holdable.
So first, some reflection…
I don’t have to re-read the last four Deep Dives to know that a lot of my focus (and the lessons I’ve gathered from this season’s earlier guests) has been on reducing overwork, cultivating balance, making room for flow.
At the top of the calendar year, I was feeling motivated and moved by all of the snake-shed symbolism provided by the zodiac. I was beyond burned out. 2025 absolutely wrecked me. I knew I needed to let go of a lot of my old survival strategies, but I truly couldn’t imagine what that new skin might look like, or what might fill in the gaps left in the wake of my sloughed habits.
And while the snake metaphors were easy for me to grasp, I couldn’t seem to wrap my mind around the equine symbols taking their place. There was no resonance there for me.
Though, I do remember reading something about the upcoming Horse year that caught my attention: The Fire Horse locks in rhythm, not goals.
I wasn’t sure what it meant, but something about it felt interesting, worth considering further. I wrote it down in my journal and have rewritten it several times since, determined to keep it in mind.
I think I couldn’t understand how something full of momentum and strength could move toward anything but a goal.
Can I tell you something wild? Just last week, I realized for the first time in these thirty-eight years that when people talk about the importance of rest, they are not talking about sleep. 🤯
Maybe because I was personally never sleeping (chronic, lifelong insomnia), I fully believed that any talk about rest was literally just a nod to the ideal eight daily hours of unconsciousness.
And maybe because in the past month I have slept deeply—sometimes up to eight hours in a row—for truly, truly, hand-to-god the first time in my life (yes, you read that correctly), this revelation hit me last Sunday like a bolt of lightning.
I have sincerely spent my life believing that the ideal situation was eight hours sleep alternating with sixteen hours of productivity. Ad nauseum. Forever. Until you die. And really, in my private insomniac brain, I frankly expected productivity to be humming just under the surface even during sleep, a little anxiety-fueled, hyper vigilant to-do list demon running right through my manic slumber.
I thought I was really playing with fire when I started considering (circa March of this year) that maybe leaving purposeful time for play and fluidity was an option. So wild. So edgy.
But GUYS. It is brand new news to me that balance means, at minimum, time for a full night’s sleep, work, play…and rest. Guilt-free idling. Actual waking rest.
I didn’t know. I didn’t know! And if this is feeling like news to you in this moment, tell your therapist asap.
Anyway. I see it now. All of the fits and false starts of the past few months (see previous Deep Dives for deets) have been circling around the answer.
I was trying to focus on letting go of overwork. But I was overworking the letting go.
I was trying to loosen up hard enough and fast enough that I could really get this year done right – read: somehow become a super version of myself that’s more productive than ever before but somehow also calmer and more cosmically enlightened??? 👀
Somewhere in the middle of April, in large part thanks to a gnarly sinus infection and a subsequent week of unexplained headaches, I did actually let something go. It felt like a major failure, but I drudged through only the most time-sensitive daily list items, and spent the rest of my time motionless and/or earnestly thinking about my health for the first time in my life.
And wouldn’t you know it, about one month later I am falling asleep quickly, sleeping deeply, and sleeping through the night many nights per week. I’m eating and moving more purposefully, too. My routines are coalescing in myriad symbiotic ways. And get this – it doesn’t feel like work. 😭 It’s gentle.
[deeply resisting the urge to knock on all of the wood in the world]
As pleased as I am about this, as relieved as I am about this, I’m also very, very sad. The whole thing is drenched in grief.
And like so much of the grief I’ve personally experienced, it’s disenfranchised. There aren’t any holidays or social conventions dedicated to the heartbreak of not having slept well (of having believed you weren’t worthy of feeling well), in nearly four decades, just like there aren’t community grief practices for family estrangement or cult deprogramming.
This brings me to Cricket. I so love their episode. It feels like one of the most human episodes to date. Just vulnerable and honest.
When I asked Cricket about disenfranchised grief, they said “we have no tools…maybe that’s why I made my own…because if we are stuck in the fear, if we are stuck in the grief, if we are stuck in the dread, it doesn’t produce anything. It doesn’t allow us to act. It doesn’t allow us to even think clearly.”
They continued, “so creating this practice to help myself be in a more centered place to approach action with more intention…it was tremendously productive even though it wasn’t what I had envisioned. But it was a recognition of allowing myself to receive myself where I was.”
I’m realizing this is the work I’m in, too. I’m learning to receive myself where I am – which is in recovery, knowing I might be here for a while, trying to build myself some tools.
Makoto and I talked about so many fabulous things, but one anecdote struck me with particular salience. He talked about how as a child, he was a little taken with the Sid character from Toy Story, and could often be found operating on his dolls.
I felt such a poignant heart ache when Makoto shared that his much older sibling observed this behavior and designed a bespoke “Barbie dissection kit” for Makoto as a gift. It’s maybe one of the sweetest things I’ve heard.
Makoto spoke about how valuable it was for this tender part of him to be encouraged by a trusted other. Can you imagine how seen and accepted he must have felt?
Naturally, this story hits me as it puts words and simple action to the type of deep witnessing and affirmation I’ve always longed to receive. I’ve spent my whole life waiting for someone to see me well enough to encourage me in this way.
I think one of my homespun recovery tools will be learning to do it for myself.
Can I just say, I’m so pleased that Chris agreed to come back for a Part II. He truly feels like a kindred spirit in this work and I’m admittedly tempted to invite him to help me close every future season of Artifice.
As I’ve mentioned, I closed 2025 in a dark place. I was feeling disillusioned about so many things. And I was feeling very suspicious about optimism – a trait I’d historically glorified, a mindset I’d always embodied naturally.
I had begun to fear that optimism might be leading me into unnecessary heartbreak and disappointment – that I was investing in ideas and relationships with rose colored lenses, gullible, susceptible, naïve.
Chris helped me realize that optimism needs the guardrail of purpose. As in, optimism wielded without direction could easily fall into the wrong hands, so to speak. But optimism exercised in the direction of purpose is…well, purposeful.
I especially love the way Chris talks about the choice to “discipline into optimism” saying, “I’m not always optimistic, but I do practice it.” I appreciate the agency and advocacy implied in these words.
There’s no sense of recklessness here. Rather, there’s a conscientious bravery, a faith-filled courage. As Chris puts it, a “shaking in the face of optimism.”
All of this to say, I’m happy to report that, bolstered by Chris’s sage perspective, optimism is emphatically back in the tool box, as well.
I started this season’s Deep Dives with an exploration of sensitivity and intuition, another discipline I absolutely need for my present work. Beautifully, this month’s guests had wonderful things to say on this subject, as well.
Cricket says intuition is trusting yourself. Leaning into your natural inclinations and rhythms.
They tell me their grandma noticed that little Cricket was always lost in thought during car rides. She said, “you were always staring out the back window like you were pondering god.” Cricket adds that they “deeply believed in magic, often having commune with the fairies.”
I think (and have amassed quite a bit of evidence to suggest) that many artists were like this as children – paying close attention, processing deeply, trying to make sense of things, and oft engrossed in imagination.
Unfortunately (thank you capitalism), we are nearly always taught to snap out of reverie, to prioritize the kind of action that yields tangible, measurable results, leaving many adult artists in a tangled, directionless mess. 🙋♀️
Because the thing is, this kind of interior processing is work. It’s critical work, if invisible. Many of us simply cannot get where we’re going without it.
Cricket talks about reckoning with the fact that their practice was never going to look rigorously disciplined like some of their peers’ work did. They say “I’ve always been more like – think on it, think on it, think it, make something really big. My ideas and my desired expression of them is lot more grand.”
Cricket’s work needs lots of time to come out.
Despite my nearly forty years of results-forward hustling, I think I’m made of the same stuff. I know I am. It takes me a very long time (in very active thought, in very active feeling) to figure out what I’m doing.
And I think I’m finally actually realizing my art is not beholden to the insatiable gluttony of the capitalist machine, nor to any vampiric system. My deliverables are neither late nor owed in the first place.
As I’ve mentioned countless times, I suspect that the big thing I’m working on now is going to take quite a while to birth. I can sense the shape of it, but I still have no idea how the pieces are coming together. I’m building them one at a time. I’m doing a lot of work that doesn’t necessarily look like work. Or, at minimum, it doesn’t look like cohesive work.
I have felt so fragile about this in the past year or so, but I’m encouraged by the way Makoto speaks about the more mysterious aspects of his own work.
He calls it, “Dream Logic,” navigating by intuition. Makoto tells me that making art is “a trust fall with the unknown,” and that he’s “trying to loosely grip the subject matter I’m working with.”
I love all of this. I think I’m loosely gripping my subject matter, too. I’m trusting my intuition and letting my disparate sub-projects meander as they will.
I’m working on honing my rhythm, locking it in. And I’m practicing optimism.
It’s really an intoxicating blend of things. There’s this dizzying surrender into uncharted terrain juxtaposed with genuine omnipotence, godlike in the world of your art, demanding unchecked control of the pace. It doesn’t move without your permission.
The muse may whisper in your ear, but she can’t do the thing for you.
This work is not passive, but neither need it be harried.
I’m intrigued by the implication of some glimmering point between these two extremes.
I think it’s what Makoto calls “libidinousness,” a word I absolutely needed. He says it’s “the life drive, an erotic charge…the expression of a depth of a feeling that has been squashed down for all of these reasons.”
Something powerful, something with momentum, but something that’s immune to the pressure of convention. It’s too wild for that, magnificently feral. This feels just right.
So. I’ll be about my recovery, steadily locking in a rhythm that magnifies vitality, witnessing and encouraging my favorite parts of myself, brightly trusting my instincts about what to do, and when. And…we’ll see!
As Chris says, “We’re always becoming and changing into something new. And so these connections and these little transformations that happen are reassuring us that we’re continuing in that journey.”
Like always, delights and wonders and wee synchronicities will give me peace about the path I’m on.
See you in Season 14!
Love,
Emily
P.S. I’ve added this Makoto print to my personal collection and I’m very happy about it.
