There's something I want you to know more than anything else.

You didn't lose it.

The creativity you're looking for didn't leave.

The part of you that used to make things.

The part that felt most like yourself when you had paint on your hands.

Or words on a page.

Or something half-finished on the table.

She didn't go anywhere.

You just got very far from her.

And there's a difference.

Lost means gone.

Far means there's a way back.

I was in Scotland recently.

Standing in the middle of all that green and I mean green like I had never quite seen before, greens I didn't have names for, greens that made me want to reach for every tube of paint I own and still come up short.

A whole new palette just sitting there in the hills, waiting.

And then I saw the stone walls.

Ancient, stacked without mortar held together instead by moss.

Thick, living, luminous moss growing right into the gaps.

A new friend and I've started calling this particular shade of green "moss mortar."

Because that's what it is.

The living thing that holds the old structure together.

I thought: that's what a creative practice is.

Not the stones.

The moss.

And then I found the door.

A small opening in an old castle wall. barely a door at all, really.

A gate, a gap, a passageway.

And on the other side, that impossible green.

Fields rolling out toward the sky like an invitation.

I stood there for a long time.

Because I know what it's like to be on the wrong side of that door.

To see the light coming through but not know how to get to it.

To wonder if you've been away so long that the way back has closed over entirely.

It hasn't.

I want you to hear from someone who has been exactly where you are that the beautiful bookmark of a ribbon is still there.

Exactly where you left it.

You didn't lose it.

You just need a small door back in.

More on that soon.

Lynn