Our Need To Express

And What the Canvas Can Hold

I signed up for the 100 Day Project this year.

If you’re not familiar, it’s an annual event where participants commit to creating something — anything — every single day for 100 consecutive days. Skill level is irrelevant. Perfection is not the point. For me, it’s about carving out the time and space to let something come through me every day, whatever that something needs to be.

And right now, I need that in a big way.

The world feels particularly heavy at the moment. I won’t go into it — you’re living it too, you know what I mean. There’s a kind of cumulative weight that builds when you’re paying attention, when you care, when you can’t quite look away. I’ve been feeling it.

So I go to the canvas.

I have large canvases I’m journeying on — slow, unfolding things — and now this small daily practice running alongside them. Together they’ve become the place where I take it all: the joy, the questions, the frustration, the anger, the grief, the wonder. I tap into whatever is moving inside me and I bring it into form.

A bold stroke of red for the rage.

Soft marks when I need quiet.

The canvas doesn’t flinch. It just receives.

It brings me home to myself. Easily and quickly.

That’s the gift of a practice like this. Not that it makes the heaviness go away, but that it gives it somewhere to go. Somewhere other than my body, my sleep, my relationships. The canvas can hold what I can’t hold alone.

Some days it’s five minutes. Some days much longer.

Some days red and fierce, some days soft and wandering.

Some days make me smile. All of it valid. All of it mine.

In times like these, having a way to express what’s alive inside us — the turbulence, the weight, the unprocessed aliveness — feels like some of the most important work we can do. Not just for ourselves, but for all of us.

But it starts here. With each of us. With a few minutes, a canvas, a walk, a breath.

How are you processing what you’re carrying right now?

You might enjoy Softening the Corners if you’d like to try a simply drawing practice.

Also, I want to give a deeply heartfelt thank you to those who have called, emailed and donated. I didn’t know if my writings would make a difference. I now know they do. Thank you for your support.